Tag Archives: black literature

Free to Be Bound

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Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color LineFree to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s undeniable that we have a history of racial oppression in the United States. But in the context of personal salvation and personal responsibility, so it goes in the mind of many, we need to just let this go, move beyond it, maybe even stop dwelling on it and discussing it so much. Blacks and whites, the argument is sometimes made (usually among whites), have opportunities that are theoretically equal and cultures that are different. The fact that we worship differently, in different places, is simply historical and cultural contingency and doesn’t reflect on the nature of the Christian church itself.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove doesn’t agree. Wilson-Hartgrove is part of a growing voice in evangelical circles calling for the Church to address systemic sins, institutional injustices, things that we’ve inherited and for which we’d like to continue telling ourselves we bear no responsibility. He’s certainly not alone in this. If I had to pick one thing that’s changed or is changing on the evangelical landscape in America it would probably be this: a growing awareness that salvation isn’t a personal issue, that there are a host of things we simply can’t shrug off with an attitude of “Oh that’s too bad but don’t make me feel personally guilty about it because it’s not my responsibility.”

That approach– the understanding of salvation as being this entirely personal thing between me and Jesus– doesn’t work anymore (if it ever did). It doesn’t work for the environment. It doesn’t work for the context and the consequences of consumerism. It doesn’t work for rampant militarization. And it doesn’t work for race. We’ve inherited structures not of our own devising, it’s true, but by accepting them as inevitable or as too overwhelming or entrenched to address– be that environmental degradation, a disposable economy, a self-perpetuating War on Terror, or the racial injustices that continue to create a stratified society– we add our culpability to their perpetuation.

This is a book about one of those systemic sins, racial prejudice and segregation, but it’s also a book about how to understand Christianity. As Wilson-Hartgrove argues, there are two strands in Christianity relevant in talking about race: one that says to live quietly doing good works, and another, revolutionary strand that says the Kingdom of God exists in opposition to racial injustice now, not in some apocalyptic hereafter. The battle against principalities and powers, according to this second strand, is the battle against systems in which lives are devalued, exploited, and destroyed because of skin color.

Of course Wilson-Hartgrove’s position (in as much as he takes a position in this work, which is largely a narrative of his own experience in a black community and congregation in Durham, North Carolina) is a bit more nuanced than simply a call to arms or a condemnation of the Church’s implicit acceptance of these power structures in our history. Indeed, he talks about the danger of believing that we as privileged white Christians can rush in and fix things with programs and good intentions, especially things as thorny as racial injustice. Usually our best intentions find us simply making the problems worse or perpetuating the hierarchy of power.

What then is to be done? This is where the author’s position becomes truly radical and hard to swallow– not so much because of its enactment as its implications. The book is Wilson-Hartgrove’s story of becoming a part of a black church, of a white boy from the south living, worshipping, and serving in a black community not in an attempt to fix anything apart from his own view of Christianity. He is there (with his wife) simply to learn. The idea, he would say, of successful racial reconciliation, of “crossing the color line,” is to do so in a spirit of submission, to be powerless and humble, to simply live in community and learn.

I think he’s right, and It’s clear he’s done this, both through his own scholarly work at Duke (though this book is an entirely accessible popular account) and his experiences. The text is filled with episodes from his life in Walltown and with history and literature from the black experience in America. It’s not a “how to” book, as the author admits, on anything. It’s simply an account of one person’s attempt to understand race and what it’s meant for the Church.

What’s harder to accept though are some of his conclusions from his experience, namely that Christianity in America has been defined by the question of color, that there is truly a black Christianity and a white Christianity, and that the most genuine Christian experience in America– the experience that has been closest to persecution, abuse, and brokenness– is the black experience. White Christianity, Wilson-Hartgrove maintains, lost its credibility by participating, perpetuating, and even justifying first slavery, then segregation, and now enduring prejudice and systematic injustice. The true miracle of Christianity in the New World is that blacks took from their oppressors the genuine parts of Christianity while rejecting the hypocrisy. If you want to know real Christianity in America, the place where Christ has been and remains with the despised, outcast, and down-trodden, you have to go to the black church.

This book makes me sad like the rich young ruler who wanted to follow Jesus but went away because he was very rich. I’m the young ruler, and I’m very white. And though I can see the truth in what Wilson-Hartgrove is saying, I resist an exclusionary interpretation of his claims. He seems to be saying that it’s all about black and white, that in the American church this is the problem, and that in America this particular instantiation of Christianity (the black church) is most genuine. That seems dangerously reductionistic. What about the Christianity of the reservation? What about the Old World liturgy of the immigrant– be it Greek, Armenian, or Hispanic? An uncharitable reading of this book might be that you have to be black to genuinely know Christ in America, or at least be bound to a black community and congregation.

I hope this isn’t true. If it is, it’s something I’m going to have to wrestle with for a while. For now though, it’s enough to accept a weaker version: that at the very least we need to know the black experience, that we need to learn it– ideally through relationship with people who have lived it– to understand a very large and an enduring piece of the puzzle of Christianity in America today.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Their Eyes Were Watching GodTheir Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One (completely inappropriate) way to read this book is as a zombie book. It’s a book about Patient Zero and the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. In fairness to this theory, it has several of the expected elements: the cataclysmic ending and the struggle for survival, the setting in the hot, thick swamps of south Florida, in the midst of the drama the fateful but at the time apparently minor bite, the strange symptoms, the descent into rage, and the possible spread of the infection. In this (absolutely incorrect) interpretation, Janie does not survive the fate of her husband Tea Cake; she carries the infection back with her to the village they left behind and the true horror begins after the book’s conclusion.

But that’s of course absolutely not what this book is about. I don’t think Zora Neale Hurston had zombies in mind when she wrote in the late 1930s. And even though rabies makes a brief and horrific appearance, Hurston isn’t that interested in exploring the terror of this infection (likely the inspiration for lots of zombie and zombie spin-off stories). Instead it’s simply the melancholy end of what for the novel’s main character has been a life of deferred hopes and frustrated imaginings.

Janie is a black girl living in Florida in the early days of the twentieth century. Her grandmother still remembers when the slaves were freed. But the book isn’t about the relationship between races as much as it is the relationship between blacks. The longest discussion on race that takes place in the book is a dialogue Janie has with a black woman who is prejudice against the more “negroid” members of their own people “holding them back” from integration with white society.

Janie’s world is a world on the periphery though, and that periphery is defined by race. Her childhood begins with being raised with white children and only learning to her surprise that she was black, at which point society dictates separation. Her second husband rises to power as the mayor of an all-black community and spends his life trying to create a society that mirrors white society, a separate community in the Florida wastes on the fringes but with all the trappings of a commercial white city: a thriving store and a large house, street lights, industry. To do so though he must constantly clamp down on the traditional black culture that keeps cropping up like a weed, to his frustration and Janie’s growing alienation.

Finally, Janie finds herself and her third husband on the absolute fringes, working cane fields at the edges of the Everglades, the “Muck,” staying over seasons while migrant workers come and go. It’s in this society though, a melting pot of ethnicities and cultures only an anthropologist could sort out (and this is exactly what Hurston was), that Janie finds the joy and freedom she never had before. Ultimately though, the racial lines are drawn most sharply in the final scenes, when Janie stands trial for her third husband’s fate.

The thread that weaves this all together is Janie herself: a woman who is searching for freedom. She wakes to herself beneath a pear tree (the cover of this edition and perhaps the most iconic scene of the book). She’s married off by her grandmother to a gruff old farmer and then runs away with a man who evolves into a small-town dictator. She finally finds the freedom she’s looking for in Tea Cake, with whom she shares years at the dizzy edge of existence before it’s turned upside down by a hurricane and a bite from a rabid dog.

It was an easy book to read, but it felt dated. I felt that Hurston went a bit too easy on me. That is, I was set up for the difficult twists and turns Janie would experience, and she does, but it’s all told in a sedate, matter-of-fact way. Even the eventual fate of Tea Cake, which in a modern book it seems would be full of riveting, harrowing detail, seems softened, like we’re with Janie remembering back on this years later now that the details have been blurred by time.

The language was stunning throughout. This was especially effective juxtaposed with Hurston’s dialogue. Her characters speak in thick Floridian accents (or what I have to imagine are Floridian accents), and she writes this out phonetically so that it actually takes a bit of getting used to to read what her characters are saying. But it means you know how they’re saying it. And her narration throughout is luminous. There are expressions that catch you with their beauty in the same way that Janie wakened to life beneath the pear tree.

Invisible Man

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Invisible ManInvisible Man by Ralph Ellison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was the first significant accomplishment of my “affirmative action” fiction reading plan for the year. I would have eventually gotten around to reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist-fight in Heaven, but I probably would never have read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had I not made a conscious effort this year to read fiction written by minorities. I poled several literary friends on suggestions via Facebook, and this one was at the top of multiple lists.

It was a difficult read, and part of that was probably the point. Ellison’s prose is vivid, almost too vivid, and at times I was overwhelmed with the shear volume of description. He makes you see everything with a cinematographic vision, focusing in on color, sound, texture, and description until the tableau snaps into focus in your mind as though you’re staring a screen. This is especially effective in his description of crowds in the city or of tumultuous scenes of action or disorder. Ellison can describe a march, a mass meeting, and a riot with an almost painful slow-motion exactitude.

It was this slow-motion exactitude that made the book an grueling read in places. Because the plot itself was rather slow and meandering, the places where it slowed down, heavy-laden with description, were sometimes a painfully vivid slog. The story on one level quite simple: a black man whose name is never given (similar somewhat to Swanwick’s bureaucrat in Stations of the Tide) trying to find his place in the world. Yet the point of the book, and Ellison’s genius in describing it, also contributed to making the book a difficult read. I kept trying to put the narrator into my own framework of a clear and upward narrative or personal progression. For an “effective novel,” my mind seemed to keep telling me– or at least my expectations kept waiting for– we’d see the hero conquer personal and exterior difficulties and arrive at a new position of status and success.

But this was frustrated over and over again throughout the novel. From the narrator’s original fall from grace at the southern black college where the book begins to his ultimate disillusionment with the socialist Brotherhood in which he has gained a position in Harlem in the novel’s second half, he– and my narrative sensibilities– are continually stymied. Throughout, I found myself frustrated more with the narrator himself than the situations in which he found himself: he was constantly second-guessing what people thought or expected of him, constantly trying to make himself the person he felt particular social groups or situations expected of him. And then it hit me that this was exactly Ellison’s point and the reason this novel was so significant: this was the story of so many black men in the decades after the Second World War.

It gets a bit at the concept of awkwardness Adam Kotsko discussed in his monograph by the same name. Ellison’s character is constantly awkward: he doesn’t know what is expected of him, he’s constantly stepping into situations– between different social classes in the south, between union and management in the north, between the people and those who represent them in Harlem, between white women and their sexual perceptions of black men– where there simply aren’t social rules for governing interactions. Or where, he keeps believing until his revelation at the novel’s conclusion, he simply doesn’t know them. But that’s the point: this is a world in which a black man has to completely invent himself or forever be at the mercy of other’s expectations. It’s a world in which he doesn’t have a place.

This is a novel about looking through the eyes of others. And it’s uncomfortable, because it makes me realize how my own assumptions about progress, about what works and what doesn’t both dramatically and socially, simply don’t map onto other situations, other experiences, other social and ethnic and cultural groups. The narrator’s experiences portray life for a black man in both the south and the north, portray its frustration, disjoint, and in some respects its sheer randomness.

The narrator first buys into the mode of progress and education represented by his southern black college and the inspired example of its president; when he realizes the futility of this, he attempts to make it in the industrialized north. Eventually he finds a place as an orator and community organizer, but even here he comes to realize that people are less interested in him than how they can use him. Maybe that’s a realization ultimately true for people everywhere, but in the awkwardness and social chaos the narrator has moved through– a constantly shifting landscape in which the default social relationship has been exploitation– it’s a shattering one. No one truly sees him. He is invisible.