American Fictions

WALKING THE TIGHTROPES

                The fame and infamy surrounding Kathryn Stockett’s The Help as novel and film has deflected the interest that should be taken in Minrose Gwin’s The Queen of Palmyra.  These first novels were written by women from Mississippi.  Stockett comes from Jackson; Gwin, from Tupelo.  The authors are white females.  The novels deal in varying degrees with race, identity, and summer in the sovereign State of Mississippi during the 1960s.  What has been missed by American readers and film spectators is an opportunity to make ethical judgments about the forking paths of contemporary American fiction.  Perhaps in time The Queen of Palmyra will be subjected to sensitive, critical readings; perhaps in time readers will discover the value of a narrative that demythologizes the nostalgia-haunted reconstruction of whiteness.  There is a grain of hope in knowing that two white female Southern novelists can occupy oppositional poles in attempting to say how black and white women have negotiated the combat zones of the South.

                The novels are thoroughly anchored in the white female imaginary, the psyche that yearns to confess itself.  That territory was plowed rather successfully by Ellen Douglas in her 1988 novel Can’t Quit You, Baby, which used clues from Willie Dixon’s blues song and from Douglas’s penchant for a kind of nude “truth” that is rare in Southern fiction.  That novel helps us to understand, to some degree, why The Help cavorts in the spotlight as The Queen of Palmyra stands in the shadows.

                The Help and The Queen of Palmyra expose as much about the culture-bound tastes of American readers and the bottom-line priorities of the American publishing industry (literary politics) as they do about aesthetics and ethics.  It is reasonable to believe that the power of hype attached to Stockett’s novel has pushed the work to the foreground of consciousness, while the small voice of discrimination that would speak of the enlightenment in Gwin’s novel can be but faintly heard.  Anyone who knows the history of Mississippi, who knows the kind of history one finds in John Dittmer’s Local People and Clyde Woods’s Development Arrested, will sense that Gwin’s use of history is more principled and sophisticated than Stockett’s.  In the realm of fiction, ruthless responsibility does not yield up great profits.  The real thing never does.  Fiction readers wish to be  entertained out of reality.  Rare is the reader who can find pleasure in the unvarnished “truth,” in Gwin’s deconstructive gestures that expose the fatality of invoking the myth of the universal.  The much touted “universal” is a code for affirming that “we” rather than “they” are the guardians of “the truth.”  The Queen of Palmyra refuses to displace a fine specificity with the artifice of universals.  Like Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Gwin’s novel bravely walks the tightrope of risk; unlike Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960) and The Help, The Queen of Palmyra walks the tightropes without the Southern safety nets of the orthodox. It would come as no surprise to hear a certain class of Southern white reader say that Gwin is guilty of racial treason.

                Perhaps in time I shall perform a sensitive, critical reading of The Queen of Palmyra.  For the moment, it is refreshing to know that a white novelist has liberated herself from the ignorance of thinking that black domestics actually “loved” those who knowingly or unwittingly dehumanized them. Stupid “love” has never found a reason to exist in Mississippi.

Introduction for Lance Jeffers's Novel

Jeffers, Lance.  Witherspoon. Atlanta: The George A. Flippin Press, 1983.

INTRODUCTION

Such Agonies Suffer Our Men of War

                Reading Witherspoon, one is moved by its aesthetic and its morality.  Lance Jeffers does not depend on mutilation of language, allusion to the arcane, or puzzles in logic to achieve effects.  He is too good and too honest an artist to engage in easy tricks.  He knows, as wordsmiths have known since the pre-history of Africa, that a good story told in language the community can understand is not to be surpassed.  The grace and strength of fiction are located in its ability to show us our lives with more order, insight, and clarity than we can normally obtain.   Good fiction pushes us toward recognition, toward a profound, relentless honesty about ourselves and others.  It forces us to make moral decisions while satisfying our penchant for narratives about man’s endless contest with the fate of being human.  Because it fulfills these criteria superbly, Witherspoon is a fine, important novel.

                In the poem “When I Know the Power of My Black Hand,” Jeffers wrote:

I see my children stunted,

my young men slaughtered,

I do not know the mighty power of my hand.

I see the power over my life and death in

another man’s hands, and sometimes

I shake my wooly head and wonder:

                Lord have mercy! What would it be like…to be free?

                Lucius Witherspoon, James Corwul, and Willie Armstrong are characters who, in varying degrees, come to know the power of their black hands, their interrelated life-stories being metonymic: the essence of Black life and the complexity of Black male psychology in the South are compressed in their ability or inability to assert power.  Through these characters, Jeffers examines what it means to be unempowered and how Black men and women do possess the inner strength (and latent social power) to be great and human without ambivalence.  Witherspoon does not seek to tell what it would be like to be Black, free, and Southern.  It shows what the unsung heroes among ordinary Black folk must do to achieve individual and collective freedom.  And what they must do involves tragedy and love, the willingness to push one’s humanity to irreversible extremes, and determination to stare death straight in the eye.  Black people, especially Black men, will know the power of their hands when they know themselves totally.

                Witherspoon does not validate how we are now, nor does it evade the Black man’s critical problem of confronting, in the words of Robert Staples, “the contradiction between the normative expectations attached to being male in this society and the proscriptions on [his] behavior and achievement of goals.”  With the skill of a surgeon, Jeffers performs an operation in the underexplored depths of Black male psychology.  Therefore, he enables us to discover the agonies suffered by our men of war and the long journey they and we must take to find psychological freedom.  The great achievement of Witherspoon is the destruction of the historical and social myths behind which men try to mask.

                Evoking the wisdom of the spirituals (a fact apparent in the novel’s original title The Lord is a Man of War), Lance Jeffers has given us fiction that is convertive and blacktrocuting.  In its affirmation that descent into the inferno of racism leads to rising like a phoenix, Witherspoon offers to us the grandeur that is ours.  Witherspoon is the sorrow song of our new day, the martial song for Black men who would know the power of their hands.  It is an ode to the invisible men and women whose authentic humanity must become the model of our lives.

                                                                                                                                Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

                                                                                                                                Tougaloo College

                                                                                                                                May 3, 1982