Masculinity, Religion, and Modernism:

Masculinity, Religion, and Modernism: A Consideration of Benjamin Elijah Mays and Richard Wright Randal Maurice Jelks Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Volume 2, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 57-78 (Article) Published by University of Illinois Press DOI: 10.1353/wgf.2014.0005 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wgf/summary/v002/2.1.jelks.html Access provided by University of Kansas Libraries (12 May 2014 14:06 GMT) Masculinity, Religion, and Modernism: A Consideration of Benjamin Elijah Mays and Richard Wright Randal Maurice Jelks, University of Kansas Abstract This article is a comparative consideration of Morehouse College president and public theologian Benjamin Elijah Mays (1894–1984) and novelist Richard Wright (1908–60). Their respective views on modernism were developed through a gendered lens of black Southern masculinity and religion that each experienced during his formative childhood. Mays and Wright responded differently to theism and Christianity. They also responded differently to the mothering women in their lives—one with affection, the other with disaffection. Both Mays and Wright viewed modernism as a means of navigating the political hegemony embodied by white males. Yet, they each reproduced the modernist heterosexism, unwittingly supporting the subordination of the women who mothered them. Introduction T his essay explores the lives of Benjamin Mays and Richard Wright through their presentations of their individual lives and their engagement with the black freedom struggle as public intellectuals in the early twentieth-century United States. Mays was a minister, social activist, and president of Morehouse College from 1947 to 1967, as well as the mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. Wright was a novelist whose work both spoke to the white violence and degradation visited upon black people and challenged the status quo of white supremacy. I focus on the masculinist discourse each writer constructed and consider how each man engaged modernism to fashion a way forward for their race. While both were inluenced by their Southern backgrounds, religious upbringings, and time in Chicago, they turned to starkly diferent interpretations of modernism. Mays represented Women, Gender, and Families of Color Spring 2014, Vol. 2, No. 1 ©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois pp. 57–78 58 jelks a masculinist, modern interpretation of Christianity, while Wright relected secular Marxism. Each broke with premodern mores to vindicate the race and provide direction to an ongoing struggle to achieve “full manhood rights.” In their written work, Mays and Wright attempted to resist racialized subordination and address for themselves, and their respective audiences, existential questions about the meaning of life, transcendence, and the purposes of political struggle. heir writings suggest that masculinity served as an unconscious normative cultural practice for black male public intellectuals in the early twentieth century. he way these igures understood and practiced expressed modernism, both religiously and politically, substantially afected the direction of struggles for black liberation in the United States through the 1960s. However, their respective narratives, particularly with regard to the women who mothered them, unwittingly reinforced understandings of patriarchy that circumscribed the lives of black women. his exploration rests primarily on a reading of Mays’s autobiography, Born to Rebel, and Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy, as well as other selected writings. In their narratives, the women signiicant to their upbringing— respectively, Mays’s mother and Wright’s grandmother—were totems against which each deined himself as a cosmopolitan black man in the global battle for democratic rights and freedom. Approaching Modernism, Race, and Maternalism By modernism, I refer to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment project that attempted to rationalize human activity and limit the inluences on thinking and practice based on an otherworldly providence. In this new era, human activities were increasingly understood not exclusively as acts of God but rather as practices guided by human structures and forces within cultural and material historical contexts. Modernism came in varying forms, including theistic, agonistic, and atheistic. Regardless, Enlightenment ideas were informed by long-established social, economic, and political hierarchies that categorized women, children, and the enslaved as irrational nonactors with limited capacity for full citizenship. hus, while the Enlightenment called for universal freedoms, this universality was imagined as the province of men, with women, children, and the property-less excluded from representation and governance. Such norms continued through the late twentieth century. Moreover, to the extent that discourses of universal rights and political agency were countenanced as belonging only to men in the United States, this agency was wholly reserved for white men. Consequently, the modernist project, spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 59 though it appealed to the rights of all persons, was bound to, and guided by, deeply racialized ideologies of maleness. For their part, both Mays and Wright seemed to have accepted the masculine assumptions of modernism. Born, respectively, at the turn of the twentieth century, each was reared and bound by the racial subordination of blacks by whites in the American South. Even as both men gave voice to aspirations of being free of societal racism and racial stigma using modernist discourses, they did so in a gendered voice of male dominance.1 his reading of Mays and Wright suggests that even calls for liberation from societal oppression must be analyzed for its gendered ideologies of familial relationships, especially toward black mothers and grandmothers.2 his reading of two mid-twentiethcentury male shapers of black culture and politics raises questions for further research about how black men sentimentalize or demonize their relationships to the signiicant maternal igures in their lives. Explaining how Mays and Wright viewed religious faith and their respective turns to modernism in deining themselves as men may ofer valuable insight into how black males accept and reproduce discourses about patriarchy, maleness, and intimate/ familial relationships. Additionally, this analysis ofers insight not only into perceptions of black mothers but black fathers as well.3 Hence, the use of a mother/grandmother in these writers’ narratives also speaks to the absences of their fathers or their inability to control the worlds into which Mays and Wright were born. heir narratives about their maternal igures’ religious faith is, perhaps, a critique of their fathers’ faithlessness. Generation, Region, and Religious Outlook Mays, a Morehouse College president, public theologian, and civil rights ideologue, was fourteen years older than the novelist Richard Wright. Mays was born on August 1, 1894, in Epworth, South Carolina, while Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on the Rucker’s Plantation not far from Natchez, Mississippi. Each man was born grasping for his humanity, attempting to free himself from the stranglehold of racial segregation, Jim Crow, which was rigidly adhered to in the American South and culturally accepted throughout the United States. Both Mays and Wright struggled to gain a formalized education in their search for a humane path to individual, social, and political freedoms. Mays would be lucky enough, as well as unrelenting in determination, to leave his life as part of a tenant farming family and navigate his way through elementary school, high school, and college, eventually earning 60 jelks graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. Wright, on the other hand, was never able to sustain formal education; nevertheless, he educated himself through the use of racist dissimulation, library reading, and the intellectual apparatus of the American Communist Party via its periodicals and literary networks. heir lives paralleled by virtue of their generation, regional background, maleness, and respective need for self-respect through the rhetoric of manhood. Each of them fought to defy the logic of racism as whites projected it and as blacks may have internalized it. Mays’s and Wright’s lives also corresponded intellectually, especially in their assessment of black religiosity in the black church. Mays and Wright saw religion through a masculine gaze, and each responded to religion via the signiicant women in his life. In response, each sought a varying kind of modernism. Interestingly, the University of Chicago sociology program heavily inluenced both Mays and Wright, though the university’s Divinity School shaped Mays’s intellectual trajectory equally as much as sociology. While Mays and Wright shared a black Southern maleness and generational ties, they diverged signiicantly in their views on theism. For Mays, his path was discovered through religion, a critical modernist Christianity that was socially engaged in the black freedom struggle. For Wright, in contrast, religion was a hindrance to his personal freedom and a burdensome folly that kept black Americans from fully living. Benjamin Mays Louvenia Carter Mays was formative in Mays’s religious life. Her self-sacriicing for her children, especially her youngest son, Benjamin, was crucial in his religious formation. His mother, born into slavery, was the cultural carrier of the melding of Anglo and African religious folkways, part of the Atlantic world’s Protestant revivalist moment. Her beliefs and religious behavior of shouting, religious ecstasy, and her notions of prayer all were shaped in the cauldron of South Carolina’s black population. Mays, then, grew up in a rich Afro-Baptist tradition that had been generationally passed on throughout South Carolina.4 He admitted never knowing much about his family’s lineage; but, while he did not fully understand his parents’ past as American slaves, he appreciated the culture that nurtured him.5 he black Baptist congregations that dotted the landscape of South Carolina were institutions where women played signiicant roles, not so much as formal leaders but rather as the primary inancial donors and the spiritual guides within these religious communi- spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 61 ties. When Mays made his obligatory acceptance of Christ in his Baptist church, he was doing what his parents, especially his mother, expected. At age twelve, he had a conversion experience that he recalled being moving but not overly dramatic.6 So much of the life journey he fondly recollected seemed to revolve around his mother’s prayer: My mother was very religious. Every night she called the children together for evening prayer before going to bed. She always led in prayer. . . . here was no doubt in Mother’s mind that God answered prayers. She believed this to her dying day. When I made a trip around the world in the latter part of 1936 and the early months of 1937, Mother “knew” that it was her prayers that brought me safe home. (Born to Rebel, 10–11) Her sense of faith and everyday religion was based on her belief in a God that intervened in the lives of ordinary people—protecting them, allowing them to live through tragedy, and at times helping them to succeed, as would be the case for her youngest child. Although Mays would write later in life about his mother’s innocent notions about prayer, it deeply afected him and gave shape to his life in ways he never fully examined. For Mays’s mother, her prayers led her to act on his behalf so that he could achieve his long-sought-ater goal of formal education. Ironically, it was his illiterate mother who prevailed on his resistant father to allow Mays to go to school full time in his late teens. She took over her son’s responsibilities on the family’s tenant farm so that he could attend classes without having to return to harvest or to plow. Mays oten reduced her prayer to a kind of childlike innocence, but, in reality, her deep, abiding faith was concurrent with her actions. his was an intellectual position that Mays, as a public theologian, would oten urge both students and readers of his columns in black newspapers to respect. While he understood the necessity of faith and action cohering, he never saw his mother’s actions on his behalf being at the root of the message he consistently upheld in his public life. When Louvenia Mays died during Mays’s tenure as dean of Howard University’s School of Religion, he wrote, “She came along at a time when Negroes had little or no opportunity to be educated. She never attended school a day in her life. But like most Negroes of the early period, she had great faith in what education might do for one.” As he would repeat in his memoir later in his life, he explained that his mother did not wholly comprehend the restlessness that characterized me as a boy when I kept pleading that I be sent away to school that ran three or four months a year. Nor did she understand thoroughly why I kept going to school 62 jelks so long—to high school, college, and university. But she believed in me and somehow felt that if I wanted to go on, it was the thing to do. At no time in her heart did she discourage me. She was selless and gave him “sympathy, encouragement, and prayer.” Louvenia Mays also physically toiled “in the ield with the hope” that he would be able to attend school.7 Although Mays acknowledged that his mother’s faith was deeply inluential, his writings oten used her faith as a foil for what was wrong with black Protestant religiosity. “Shouting in church was common in my youth, and Mother did her share,” Mays recollected. Observing church life, he noted, “he preaching was usually otherworldly, and the minister oten stirred up and exploited the emotions of the people. his fact, along with her somewhat turbulent home life, accounted for Mother’s outburst in church” (Born to Rebel, 10–11). In retrospect, Mays viewed his mother’s practices as being tied to his father’s alcohol abuse and her living conditions under poverty and brutal segregation. He attributed her pattern of behavior, her “outbursts,” to her domestic struggles. his might have been true to an extent; however, there was also in her behavior cultural retentions that Mays never fully appreciated.8 In he Negroes Church (1933), Mays argued that the primary problem within black churches was people’s ecstatic behavior. He would see this as a holdover from slavery that had outlived its usefulness in modern times. From his observations, however, the main practitioners of ecstatic behavior and those comforted by eschatological theology were black women. Mays’s critique of black religious practices was nothing new. It was current in one form or fashion among nineteenth-century male religious leadership. he AME Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne attempted to eliminate black women’s ecstatic worship to make his denomination appear more respectable among the slowly urbanizing black population within the North.9 Mays joined a long-established coterie of men challenging ritual performance, as well as an opiate theology of hope in an alternative reality known as heaven. He wanted, like so many male religious leaders and thinkers, a more muscular Christianity. As a college student, Mays had been ensconced in the language of the social gospel, a Protestant theological movement that tried to make Christianity a more challenging faith with regard to the social and structural ills of industrial America. his was a malegendered theology that Mays imbibed.10 One can sympathize with Mays’s need for a more powerful and socially forceful version of Christianity. His irst memory, or at least the one he claimed publicly, was of the degradation of his father: spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 63 I remember a crowd of white men who rode up on horseback with riles on their shoulders. I was with my father when they rode up, and I remember starting to cry. hey cursed my father, drew their guns and made him salute, made him take of his hat and bow down to them several times. hen they rode away. I was not yet ive years old, but I have never forgotten them. (Born to Rebel, 1)11 his memory of his father’s humiliation overshadowed his mother’s religious contribution. White men subjugating a black man in front of a young black boy would haunt Mays and serve as the guiding mantra of his thought. Although he adopted his mother’s faith, it was a faith guided by notions of manhood and manliness that connoted power and not submission to the forces of racial violence and racial segregation. His mother’s religion, full of daily love in the domestic sphere, was not strong enough, in his mind, to challenge the social structures of the Jim Crow South. White men controlled the institutions that dictated life under segregation, and, for Mays, only a forceful religious faith, a manly one, could be mobilized to tear down the institutional barriers that forcibly determined the lives of black men like his father. Richard Wright If Mays absorbed his mother’s religion (albeit critically), Richard Wright rejected his grandmother’s religious faith and practice. Although Wright’s mother was central in his rearing, his grandmother dominated his religious imagination. Mays was reared in the tradition of black Baptists and thus grew up in the mainstream of black Southern Protestant culture. Wright’s thought, on the other hand, was shaped by his grandmother’s Protestantism as a Seventh Day Adventist.12Adventism, like the black Baptist tradition, was a part of an American evangelical revivalism that emphasized strict adherence to the Bible. Within these churches, each believer was individually accountable before God. Both Adventist and Baptist theology called for personal conversion and members’ public acknowledgment of their faith. Each believer was expected to attend church faithfully and shun behavior deemed ungodly. Believers were also expected to share their faith and “witness” God’s salvation to others who were perceived as wayward or unredeemed. Annually, believers were subject to conviction for personal sins, but they could ind renewal in annual revival meetings and church or by public confession.13 Both black Baptists and Adventists alike shared the American evangelical tradition. However, there were distinctions. Black Baptists rudimentarily 64 jelks borrowed from the long and complex tradition of the English Baptist tradition and its doctrines of John Calvin and his disciples. his tradition tended to emphasize full-immersion water baptism as a central sign of personal renewal or redemption. his ritual of inclusion drew on the baptism of Jesus found in the text of the Christian New Testament. It was one of the church’s chief rituals that initiated believers into the community of the faithful. he tradition of Adventists, on the other hand, demarcated community through dietary restrictions, the celebration of the Sabbath on Saturdays as opposed to Sundays, and an emphasis on body purity. Black Adventists had a rich history in the South, but they were a minority among black religious adherents.14 For Wright, this meant that he was, in a sense, a double minority—a religious minority among black Southerners and a despised racial minority in America. He vividly described in Black Boy his devoutly Adventist family, which orbited around his grandmother, Margaret Bolton Wilson: Granny was an ardent member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and I was compelled to make pretense of worshipping her God, which was her exaction for my keep. he elders of the church expounded a gospel clogged with images of vast lakes of eternal ire, of seas vanishing, of valley of dry bones, of the sun burning in to ashes, . . . of God riding whirlwinds, of water changing into wine, or the dead rising and living, of the blind seeing, of the lame walking; a salvation that teemed with fantastic beasts having multiple heads and horns and eyes and feet . . . a cosmic tale that began before time and ended with the clouds of the sky rolling away at the Second Coming of Christ.15 Wright’s writing was eloquently descriptive and captivating. But it was by no means an accurate account of what it meant to his grandmother to belong to the Seventh Day Adventist tradition of Protestantism. Rather, as literary scholar Qiana Whitted suggests, religion is here portrayed as a weakened attribute that women use to hinder male characters from understanding “manhood, human dignity, and race pride. As a result, Wright’s literary mediations on the black church act as signposts of his own struggle for transcendence, even as they underscore the material angst and fragmentation of his characters.”16 More importantly, Whitted argues, Wright used his grandmother as his motivation for escaping the South. He found it diicult to deal with her domineering religious views, which he ictionalized in his short story “he Man Who Lived Under Ground” (Whitted, “Using Grandmother’s Life,” 15–16). According to Wright’s friend, critic, and biographer Margaret Walker, he felt that his grandmother’s Adventist beliefs were completely repressive. spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 65 Wright, Walker states, told her that the Seventh Day Adventist was “the church where you burn in hell forever” and described the Sabbatarian rituals of his family negatively. Her assessment relected her own sympathies and afections for Wright, as well as her own religious biases as a child of a black Methodist clergyman. Walker wrote: On the Sabbath Day in Grandma Wilson’s house no work-a-day activities could be done. . . . hey ate no pork nor did they cook with pork lard, fatback, bacon, or ham grease; any cooking vessel in which these had been used was unclean. Moving pictures were strictly forbidden, although Wright loved ilms and somehow found his way to the theater week ater week. Once when Wright had built a radio, his grandmother destroyed it. Dancing and card playing were strictly forbidden, and Wright never learned to dance. Bible reading and praying were daily occupations. . . . he Bible was constantly quoted, and Wright was told early that nothing good would ever come of him, that he was consigned and damned to hell and the devil.17 Walker’s depiction of Wright’s Sabbatarian home life was not atypical anywhere in the United States, especially the South. Religious restrictions on personal behavior were normative for all black Southern children, and black religious people generally tried to abate the inluences of popular culture, especially on their male children, and save them from the violence perpetuated against black men in the South.18 Black Baptists and Presbyterians enforced Sabbath rules on Sundays in the same way that Adventists did on Saturday; what was diferent about the Sabbath in the Wright household was its Friday-to-Saturday ritual and the family’s dietary restrictions. Walker adopted Wright’s viewpoint that his family life was iercely led by his grandmother’s strict beliefs. Wright interpreted this restrictive religious practice in a racialized context, as though his grandmother’s faith kept him away from seeing the world as it was. his faith, in his view, also attempted to discourage him from changing it. Wright’s description of his grandmother’s ardent faith collapses anything that distinguished her Adventism from the general revivalist culture of southern black Protestantism. As Whitted argues, Margaret Bolton Wilson’s faith “becomes the symbolic emasculating prototype of surrender in both secular and religious forms” (“Using Grandmother’s Life,” 7). As much as Wright was angry at the harsh patterns of the Jim Crow South, his rationale for leaving Jackson and then Memphis, Tennessee, equally involved his desire to escape the religious domination of his grandmother, something he never quite accomplished. 66 jelks The Meaning of Manhood In Wright’s writings, black religiosity and Christianity were everywhere in one form or another. For Wright, like Mays, black Christianity was not muscular (Whitted, “Using Grandmother’s Life,” 25); it was efeminate, submissive and “otherworldly.” Whitted commented that, while assessing “abuses [Wright] sufered as a youth within [his grandmother’s] southern church community, he does not expand the same critical energy mining the historical processes that shaped her [nor for that of his mother’s] pattern of behavior.” Her spiritual hopes or aspirations are never quite grasped by Wright, Instead, she is used as a scapegoat for his inability to be free as a black man (ibid., 27). If Mays’s Christianity, though favorable toward his mother, was gendered by masculinity, it was equally true of Wright’s secularism and skepticism.19 His unbelief, his search for individual freedom, and his hope for a humanistic vision, were all grounded in a search for a positive notion of what it meant to be a Southern black man in an oppressive society. Both Mays and Wright grew up in an era when nineteenth-century Victorian notions of manhood were still prevalent in American culture. hese notions centered on agrarian property ownership, economic thrit, male sufrage, and Protestant Christianity. Historian Martin Summers has argued that black men refashioned these ideals to relect their own realities as part of a subordinated population. Summers observed that black men, though circumscribed by racial segregation, reconstructed manliness in response to rapid urbanization, industrial technological, the advancement of consumer culture, and the development of new forms of leisure and entertainment. Historian Robert Wiebe described this historical period of wide demographic shits from agrarian to urban life as the “Search for Order.” It was a reorientation of masculinity away from these antecedents.20 Summers described not only the broad shit to urbanization but also the developing middle-class attitudes that grew among black men. It may be true that black males developed their own self-styled manliness in urban America. Yet, it was also the case that, for many, gendered values and attitudes were regionally and culturally deined within the American South. Further, masculinity, whether it was understood as manhood broadly or urban manliness more speciically, developed alongside of, and in likely deiance of, white Southern masculinity. In the American South, racial segregation chiely concerned white male cultural and political hegemony.21 Even though black men were political subordinates in the South, they nevertheless shared with their white counterparts many of the same recreational activi- spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 67 ties, including gambling, drinking, cock and dog ighting, and hunting. Both Mays and Wright, as Southern black males, understood the shared culture they had with white males and appreciated aspects of it. However, in their respective autobiographical accounts, they focused their intellectual energies on breaking the stranglehold that white male political dominance had over their lives. Historian Ted Ownby aptly surmises how slavery shaped white Southern culture: Slavery showed all Southerners the signiicance of physical force in human relations. he opportunities for cruelty and the need for readiness in the case of slave violence afected the consciousness of almost all Southern whites, and the most extreme forms of violence in the postbellum period— lynching, night riding, and Klan violence—were directed almost exclusively against blacks.22 Ownby’s analysis shows prominently that white Southern life and its male prerogatives of power were violently directed toward black males to keep slaves from revolting and, following the end of slavery, to keep them subjugated through state-enforced racial legalities. White males counteracted black males’ claims on “manhood” by denying them full participation in civil society. Speciically, black men were denied the right to vote and endured varied attempts, through law and violence, to limit their property ownership.23 Male violence in the South aimed to subdue black people, though, given the patriarchal practices of the region, it was particularly directed at humiliating black males, who were viewed as potential rivals for political power. Historian Glenda Gilmore argues in Gender and Jim Crow that racial segregation was ideologically gendered and that it shaped and reshaped the coniguration of Southern life for both women and men, blacks and whites, in a myriad of ways, especially as white women struggled to gain citizenship rights in the public sphere as voters.24 In the context of the Jim Crow South, white males persistently exercised their dominance in civic afairs and domestic relationships. Both Mays and Wright described the violent trauma and humiliation they personally experienced at the hands of white men. In Black Boy, Wright dramatically wrote of the disappearance and murder of his Uncle Hoskins: Each day Uncle Hoskins went to his saloon in the evening and did not return home until the early hours of the morning. . . . Oten I crept into his room while he slept and stared at the big shining revolver that lay near his head, 68 jelks within quick reach of his hand. I asked Aunt Maggie why he kept the gun so close to him and she told me that men had threatened to kill him, white men. When Hoskins does not return, his distraught Aunt Maggie attempts to ind him, only to realize that he had let his gun at home. As she attempts to run to the saloon, Wright tells us that a nondescript black man warns her that she, too, might be killed if she goes to his saloon. he situation was horrid for Wright and his family: My mother pulled Aunt Maggie back to the house. Fear drowned out grief and that night we packed clothes and dishes and loaded them into a farmer’s wagon. Before dawn we were rolling away, leeing for our lives. I learned aterwards that Uncle Hoskins had been killed by whites who had long coveted his lourishing liquor business. . . . here was no funeral. here was no music. here was no period of mourning. here were no lowers. here were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers and fear. . . . his was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had he not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence. (Black Boy, 53, 55) Like Mays’s earliest memory of his father’s humiliating confrontation with white political terrorists, Wright’s fear is a product of Jim Crow and the act of living in the region as a black man. Additionally, white and black men participated in a masculine culture that emphasized hunting, gambling, womanizing, and drinking. Wright, in fact, used Southern male culture as the backdrop for two of his important short stories, “Big Boy Leaves Home” and “Almos’ a Man.” In his autobiography, Mays also described the frequency of drinking and gun violence, including the murder of his older brother. In both of their narratives, their fathers are representative of the Southern male pastime of recreational drinking.25 heir respective fathers are victims of the excesses, and pitfalls, of white Southern patriarchy. As a result, each man sufered not only from Jim Crow’s systematic exclusions but also from his father’s broken self-esteem and self-denigration. In Mays’s case, he was deeply disappointed that his father never became a landowner, a mark of manhood, but instead remained a tenant farmer.26 Not only was Mays disappointed about Hezekiah Mays’s inability to acquire property, but he was also disheartened by his father’s repeated attempts to block him from his pursuit of formal education. he elder Mays saw education as futile in light of the role that black men played in the Southern agrarian economy. As a result, Mays consciously decided to live his own life in counterdistinction to that of his father, including avoiding alcohol because of his father’s abusive behavior when drunk (Mays, Born to Rebel, 9–10). spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 69 Wright similarly noted how his father humiliated him and his mother in a saloon, where she had to beg for money and food ater her husband abandoned the family. Both men admitted that they hated and later pitied their fathers because of these men’s inability to escape racial inscription. Black Southern women then, as has already been discussed, were relegated to domesticating their partners through evangelical religious culture, as Ownby discusses (Subduing Satan, chs. 6, 7, 8). What is most important to both Mays and Wright is how the Jim Crow system was inscribed on the physical bodies of black men. Subjugation in their writings is embodied in the way black men must physically carry themselves in front of other white men. In Wright’s most famous novel, Native Son, the protagonist Bigger homas is characterized as one with considerable fear of whites. To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one’s feet in the dark. As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force. But whether they feared it or not, each and every day of their lives they lived with it; even when words did not sound its name, they acknowledged its reality. As long as they lived here in this prescribed corner of the city, they paid tribute to it.27 Of course, the laws of Jim Crow profoundly afected black women, as well as men. But the writings of Mays and Wright place black maleness at the center of the struggle to overthrow Jim Crow. In Wright’s novels and novellas, his main protagonists are men trying to escape constraints. Mays, on the other hand, recognized women, though he nonetheless saw the problem of race as a masculine one. For Mays, much of the tension that lay below the surface of black-white relationships was sexual. In a discussion with the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, he explained that interracial cohabitation was key to understanding American race relations. White men were “bitterly opposed to desegregation because” they have had their way “with colored women, and now [fear] that colored men will begin to have the same way with white women. Miscegenous co-habitation has always been a way of life for white [men].”28 Mays went further, observing that the internecine violence that existed among black Southern men was at its root about the inability to protect their communities, especially women. Black men, he asserted, were angry for not being able to act more aggressively toward white men: “It was diicult, virtually impossible, to combine manhood and blackness under one skin in the 70 jelks days of my youth. To exercise manhood, as white men displayed it, was to invite disaster” (Mays, Born to Rebel, 25–26). In a sense, all black men were impotent like Bigger homas. In fact, both Mays and Wright reported being physically harmed by white men for the simplest acts, such as being articulate, well dressed, and intellectually serious. he physical violence visited on young black men to keep them in their racial place is perhaps most vividly captured in Wright’s essay “he Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” Most of this essay describes the interaction of white men as they overpower black men.29 Freedom, in the minds of both men, was irst about the physical protection of their bodies from white men who imagined and feared their potency as sexual competitors. Both men rebelled against the conscripted lives that they are forced to embody. Both Mays’s and Wright’s memoirs were written in the narrative tradition of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of a Slave, in that each attempted to ind a freedom similar to Douglass and so improved themselves with the acquisition of literacy, intellectual and analytical skills, and writing ability. Mays and Wright claimed that their own respective ideas and practice of modernism gave them the capacity to overcome obstacles and gain greater freedoms. In Mays’s case, it was theological modernism, which emphasized the ethical dimensions of Protestant Christianity and not its miraculous elements. his form of Christianity allowed him to challenge what he perceived as the religious passivity of his rural upbringing in South Carolina. Mays equated the “otherworldliness” of his rural congregation with femininity, and, in his mind, this feminized faith provided black male clergy the cover they needed for collaborative politics. Wright, too, would explore a similar theme in his short story “Fire and Cloud.” In this narrative, protagonist Reverend Taylor must act manly and move his community away from collaboration with the racist order and toward revolutionary action. By the end of the story, Taylor utters, “Freedom belongs t’ the strong.” he sentence captures the growing consciousness of the character and his recognition that faith must be revolutionary.30 hroughout his autobiography, Mays consistently indicted his childhood pastor, James Marshall, for collaboration with whites. Speciically, he claimed that the pastor remained silent about the injustices of Jim Crow. Marshall, he asserted, was unwilling to challenge white supremacy. his served to justify the shit toward modernism that Mays chose as his path. He determined that theological modernism spoke to social realities more ethically and honestly. Faith, in his mind, had to be consistent with one’s actions, and one needed faith to guide one’s life in the modern world. spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 71 For Mays, the university ofered him something more than an opportunity to rise above the status of his birth. It was a space to meet and make interracial friendships. Its environment permitted students to organize dialogues on racial inequities. In this space, for example, he had a chance encounter with W. O. Brown, a white Texan, who openly acknowledged white supremacy. Mays noted of this encounter that he was “really startled and amazed to hear such words from a Southern white man—and in public!” He and Brown eventually became friends and, as a result, “my horizon began to expand. I stopped generalizing about Southern white people” (Mays, Born to Rebel, 100). In this space, relative to that of his mother’s church, he airmed his manhood. Wright found in literary modernism, a method for the liberation of black men independent of God and the church.31 Whereas for Mays theological modernism embodied the search for a more socially assertive faith, for Wright faith was itself the problem. he philosophical naturalism found in social realist authors heodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, and his introduction to Marxism, buttressed his nontheistic position on the state of black men. Speciically, Wright insisted that they must free themselves from the constraints of religion because it served only to create passivity and efeminate responses to persistent physical violence and harm committed against black people: So our bent backs continued to give design and order to the fertile plantations. Stately governmental structures and vast palatial homes were reared by our black hands and to relect the genteel glory of the new age. And the Lords of the Land created and administered laws in the belief that God ruled in Heaven, that He sanctioned this new day. Ater they had amassed mountains of wealth, they compared the wretchedness of our lives with the calm gentility of theirs and felt that they were truly favored of God. he lyrical mantle of prayer and hymn, accordingly, justiied and abetted our slavery; and whenever we murmured against degradation of the plantation, the Lords of the Land acted against us with whips and hate to protect their God-sanctioned civilization.32 For both Mays and Wright, their inal transformation into urbane and accomplished black men took place in Chicago, particularly at the University of Chicago. Mays was a formal student within the university’s Divinity School, and Wright was an informal student of the Chicago School of Sociology. Each was inluenced by the sociological thought of Robert Park, then one of Chicago’s eminent urban sociologists. For Mays, Chicago was the capstone in his long quest to be recognized formally as an educated black man. It was 72 jelks the institution where he earned his MA in the New Testament and a PhD. in theology. For him, this proved, once and for all, that he was not an inferior: Regardless of one’s previous academic record, he takes a risk when he announces his intention to earn a Ph.D., especially at an institution like the University of Chicago. It was the prevailing opinion that the university made it diicult for those who sought the degree, and it was rumored that approximately half of those who started out in the department in which I was enrolled failed to accomplish their goal. [Self-assured, Mays added] I had no diiculty with the inal two-day written examination, and I passed the three-hour oral examination on my thesis in a manner that satisied me and won the praise of my examiners. (Born to Rebel, 137) Mays used the theological modernism taught at Chicago to write a suggestively rich dissertation, later published as he Negro’s God as Relected in His Literature. he work explored the relevancy of black faith for political struggle.33 A faith that mattered for Mays was not one of ecstatic moments of release or sensual pleasure, but rather one that was manly and was able to deify the psychic and physical violations of Jim Crow’s ethics. Although Mays couched his own male persona in the Victorian and scholarly rectitude beitting a college president and a Baptist clergyman of the time, his modernist theology was a radical break with a ixed, never-changing God that had been proclaimed in his oppressive childhood. Mays’s God had to meet the needs of history, including black people’s sufering under segregation and the horror of racial violence. For Wright, the city of Chicago itself was a laboratory of research. It provided him opportunities to engage with young writers, like himself, who sought to learn the crat of imaginative written expression. For the irst time in his life, he became part of a small interracial cadre. his intellectual and physical interaction fundamentally afected his Southern worldview and radicalized his thinking. His circles were many—the Communist-based John Reed Club, the Southside Chicago writers group, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). His friends included nationally known black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, aspiring writers like the young Margaret Walker, and budding University of Chicago-trained black scholars Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake. he city, for all its dispiriting elements surrounding race and poverty, was nevertheless abundant with ideas and possibilities for an ambitious writer.34 What is interesting about both Mays and Wright during their respective and overlapping Chicago years is the way they grated their particular modernist perspectives onto their Southern and masculine predilections. spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 73 Both men attempted to make radical breaks with their past, but they were not nearly as self-relexive about their gender ideology. Each man received signiicant exposure to the intellectual currency of his era, which profoundly inluenced how he thought about the complexities of race, social class, and world politics. However, nothing they studied seemed to undermine fully their initial gender formulations developed in their formative years in response to their concerns about women and religion. In point of fact, both men narrated current events concerning black churches, political freedoms, and racial struggles with assumptions of male power. In 1933, Mays coauthored he Negro’s Church with Joseph Nicholson. he Negro’s Church painted a portrait of Protestant churches as the paramount institution in the lives of black people. Mays and Nicholson surveyed Census data, made statistical analysis, and provided oral interviews with clergy and others about the state of these institutions. he main point from the study was that these churches were not fully attuned to modern contexts. he book criticized black Protestant churches for failing to creatively meet contemporary circumstances, leaving its believers at times mired in an irrelevant institution. However, the coauthors’ surveys did not report the concerns of women who, as Mays knew intimately, were the institutional guardians and stalwarts of black Christianity.35 he structures that concerned him were the ones dominated by men. he failure and the strengths of the black Church were a failure of black male leadership. What is historically ironic about Mays’s assessment of black churches was that they were actually more adaptable to forces of modernization, culturally and socially, than he gave them credit for. As historians Wallace Best and Anthea Bulter have respectively argued, black women played far more complex roles both as formal leaders and believers within churches. he particulars of their religious faith were institutionalized and addressed contemporary circumstances in ways not relected by Mays and Nicholson.36 Mays’s modernist faith resulted in God’s immanence being a force for social change, a force for ending racial apartheid in human afairs. here were, of course, many women who shared Mays’s faith that belief in God had to lead to ethical actions.37 However, for many more women, like Mays’s mother, worship was more. It was a spiritual means for confronting the daily pains of struggle and communal space where both existential joys and woes could be shared.38 Within that community, black women, depending on their social class status, denominational ailiation, and regional context, oten embodied worship in emotional and ecstatic ritual. In Mays’s theology, this was “otherworldliness.” Unwittingly, in his efort to make black churches more robust 74 jelks in terms of social actions against racial segregation, he attacked the faith that women expressed as being insuicient to the task of creating social change. In he Negro’s Church, as well as he Negro’s God, Mays imagined a church and a God that must respond to the white male’s prerogatives of power. Richard Wright imbibed a similar critique as did Mays. Wright’s is most evident in his review of Zora Neale Hurston’s heir Eyes Were Watching God, which appeared in the let-wing New Masses magazine in 1937. For Wright, the South is not a place of loving relationships between black men and women. Rather, it is a place of black male lynching, castration, and impotency. From this perspective, to emphasize loving relationships is to forget the structural forces that shatter and stiles men’s lives. he world that black men and women inhabit is one, to quote Karl Marx, where “all solid melts into air.” Black religion, the sphere where women interact and ind a soothing balm, serves only as an opiate not a solution or an adequate description of the complexity of black lives: heir Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie who, at sixteen, married a grubbing farmer at the anxious instigation of her slaveborn grandmother. he romantic Janie, in the highly-charged language of Miss Hurston, longed to be a pear tree in blossom and have a “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace.” Restless, she led from her former husband and married Jody, an up-and-coming Negro business man who, in the end, proved to be no better than her irst husband. Ater twenty years of clerking for her self-made Jody, Janie found herself a frustrated widow of forty with a small fortune on her hands. Tea Cake, “from in and through Georgia,” drited along and, despite his youth, Janie took him. For more than two years they lived happily; but Tea Cake was bitten by a mad dog and was infected with rabies. One night in a canine rage Tea Cake tried to murder Janie, thereby forcing her to shoot the only man she had ever loved. Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folkmind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes.39 Wright’s chief critique of Hurston’s novel centers on what he says is her “facile sensuality.” Hurston’s novel embodies black struggle through the ties of a woman’s communal love, but this was not enough to depict and tell the modernist “Negro” story as Wright saw it. he forces that Wright viewed himself as facing were those wielded by men—not humanity, but men. Black love stories, like the other ictions that black people told themselves, did not spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 75 change their actual social conditions. Black life is overwhelmed by the challenges of being the underclass, as historian Adam Green presciently observes in regard to Wright’s views about black Chicago.40 Hurston does not ignore the social indices of black life; she simply places the emphasis in her novel on the internal conditions of black life, not on its structural deicits. For Wright, this was “facile sensuality,” or, in the words of Benjamin Mays, “otherworldly.” Mays’s and Wright’s respective views on modernism, and what it was to be a modern man, were guided through the gendered lens of being socially oppressed black men.41 hough Mays and Wright responded diferently to theism and Christianity in the black South, they both understood how important it was in black life. heir responses to religious impulses formed amid black Southern communities are signiicant because they grew in relationship to the signiicant women and maternal igures in their lives. hese relationships deined how one man viewed religion with deep afection and the other with disafection. Both men saw modern intellectual theory as necessary to the survival of black Americans, and they viewed the various modernist intellectual theorizations—whether biblical criticism or Marxism—as the only ways to respond to a white patriarchal society. hey believed, like in the case of many modernizing intellectual projects, that their particular masculinity spoke for all black people. Although they both fell short of their universalizing goal in their intellectual assertions, both were part of a larger African American intellectual tradition of thought and contestation that tried to articulate and make sense of what it meant to be human beings while living in a frenetic and fragmented world deined by race, religion, gender, and social class. hey were part and parcel of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the dilemma of “double consciousness,” though their way of deining black struggle at times missed the mark of being fully descriptive of the totality of black freedoms. Nonetheless, they are to be credited for their writings, which gave rise to mobilization and the search for more political and social freedoms. Finally, thinking back to the ways these important men described the maternal igures in their lives reminds us how bound they were in their attempts to deine themselves as males. heir narratives and writings exposed the accepted norms of family, sexuality, and gender, which they explored with little sense of self-relection. hey reproduced patriarchy, even though they were marginalized, by stereotyping black women’s religiosity and the meanings of black maternity through either sentimentality or demonization. In the end, modernism in their writings hid a masculine discourse that diminished the inner lives of black women who nurtured them. 76 jelks Endnotes The author would like to thank the anonymous readers, Clarence Lang, and the Gender Seminar of the University of Kansas Hall Humanities Center for assistance clarifying my argument and being collaborative partners in scholarship. 1. J. Edward Sumerau, “‘That’s What a Man Is Supposed to Do’: Compensatory Manhood Acts in an LBBT Christian Church,” Gender & Society 26, no. 3 (2012): 461–87. 2. This essay builds on Sumerau’s “‘That’s What Man Is Supposed to Do.’” Sumerau demonstrates through ethnographic interviews how a group of gay men, though subordinated, reproduced the subordination of women and other sexual minorities. Though Mays and Wright were heterosexual political subordinates in the white South, they too, like Sumerau’s subjects, reproduced masculine hierarchy in the ways in which they described the maternal figures who reared them. 3. I am indebted to Elizabeth Yukin’s excellent insight on fatherhood. See “The Business of Patriarchy: Black Paternity and Illegitimate Economies in Richard Wright’s The Long Dream,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 4 (2003): 746–79. 4. Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 235–36. 5. Benjamin Mays, Born to Rebel (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 1–2 (henceforth referred to as Rebel and cited directly in the text). 6. Benjamin Mays, “I Have Been a Baptist All My Life,” in A Way Home: The Baptists Tell Their Story, ed. James Saxon Childers, 165–66 (Atlanta: Tupper and Love, 1964). 7. Mays, “A Mother Passes,” Howard University School of Religion News 14, no.4, May 1938, 6. 8. On black women’s religiosity, see Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Politics of ‘Silence’: Dual-Sex Political Systems and Women’s Traditions of Conflict in African American Religion,” in African American Christianity: Essays in History, ed. Paul Johnson, 80–110 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994); Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “If it Wasn’t for the Women” . . . : Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Book, 2001); Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003). 9. David Wills, “Womanhood and Domesticity in the AME Tradition: The Influence of Daniel Alexander Payne,” in Black Apostles at Home and Abroad: Afro-Americans and the Christian Mission From the Revolution to Reconstruction, ed. David W. Wills and Richard Newman, 133–46 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982). 10. Susan Curtis, “The Son of Man and God the Father,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, 67–78 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 74. 11. For more on the Phoenix riot from another African American, see Raymond Gavins, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977), 6–7. 12. On data on black Churches and the predominance of black Baptist tradition, see Benjamin Mays and Joseph Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969); C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). spring 2014 / women, gender, and families of color 77 13. For a very good overview of the broad tenets of evangelicalism, see Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdman, 1994), ch. 2. 14. Delbert W. Baker, “Black Seventh-Day Adventists and the Influence of Ellen G. White,” in Perspectives: Black Seventh-Day Adventist Face the Twenty-First Century, ed. Calvin B. Rock, 21–27 (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1996). 15. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 101. All subsequent quotations from this work will be cited in the text. 16. Qiana Whitted, “‘Using Grandmother’s Life as a Model’: Richard Wright and the Gendered Politics of Religious Representation,” The Southern Literary Journal 36, no. 2 (2004): 14. All subsequent quotations from this work will be cited in the text. 17. Margaret Walker Alexander, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1988), 33. 18. On this topic of black churches and entertainment and black boys, see Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 1900–1930, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009). 19. On Wright’s unbelief, see Robert Butler, “Seeking Salvation in a Naturalistic Universe: Richard Wright’s Use of His Southern Religious Background in Black Boy (American Hunger),” Southern Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2009): 47. 20. Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1–16 Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966). 21. Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), especially chapter 5. 22. Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 16. 23. Craig Thompson Friend, ed., Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), x-xii. 24. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1996). 25. Ownby writes, “Despite the popularity of swearing, shooting, and animal fighting, it is clear that drinking and drunkenness were the most popular recreation in Southern towns. Men drank while enjoying other recreations or drank as their sole recreation, drank at large gatherings or in small groups” (Subduing Satan, 50). 26. For examination of property ownership among black families and men, see Manning Marable, “The Politics of Land Tenure, 1877–1915,” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity: Volume 2, The Nineteenth Century from Emancipation to 1917, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, chap. 7 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 27. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005), 114. 28. Mays quote cited in Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 372. 29. Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” in Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: Harper & Row, 2008), 1–15. 78 jelks 30. Wright, “Fire and Cloud,” in Uncle Tom’s Children, 157–220. 31. On Wright’s naturalism, see Butler, “Seeking Salvation in a Naturalistic Universe,” as well as Mary Hricko, The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance: Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell (New York: Routledge, 2009). 32. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), 25. 33. Thomas J. Mikelson, “The Negro’s God in the Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr: Social Community and Theological Discourse,” Th.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988, 51–92; Mikelson offers an excellent analysis of Mays’s The Negro’s God as it influenced the work of Martin Luther King Jr. Mikelson’s chapter is very good as theological analysis of Mays’s book. However, the historical context of Mays’s study in Mikelson’s analysis leaves a lot to be desired. Also see Barbara Dianne Savage’s trenchant analysis of the gender politics in The Negro’s God in Your Spirits Walk beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 62. 34. Besides Wright’s account of his Chicago years in Black Boy, Margaret Walker offers invaluable insight into Wright’s Chicago years in Daemonic Genius, chaps. 12–13. Also see Robert Bone, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance,” Callaloo 9, no. 3 (1986): 446–68. 35. On black women’s religion, see Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice. 36. Wallace Best, Passionate Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 37. Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 38. Marla F. Frederick, Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 39. Richard Wright, review of Their Eyes Were Watching God in New Masses, October 5, 1937, 22–23. This selection taken from http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam358/ wrightrev.html (accessed January 11, 2013). 40. Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5–6, 213. 41. Mays, who would live to be just months short of the age of ninety, would see in the 1970s the women’s movement progress toward women’s greater equality in ways he ignored earlier in his formal scholarship. Wright, unfortunately, died young at fifty-two and could not see that the universal claims of modernism, that he drew upon, were exclusive of women. We can only wonder about how Wright’s sense of self-reflection on gender ideology might have changed had he lived as long as Mays.