Paul Goodman is bewildered by the analytic approach of the characters and by the stark portrayal of racial prejudice. Goodman expects a sentimental novel that will reassure him, that will conform to the understanding he has of black American literature. Where this critic searches for something more surprising and poetic, you offer the raw reality of male-female relations, even relations where ambiguity and sexual confusion are deliberately displayed.
The first part of the book brings together a black male musician at the brink of total destruction, and Leona, a white woman he is supposed to humiliate by making love to her: “Here the act of sex is nothing more than the realization of a fantasy in which the black man has been implicated by the white man. Rufus falls psychologically and ends up committing suicide because he agrees to play the role that the white man had assigned to him in his imagination.”83
Behind the sexual act you describe, the history of America is at stake.
“And [Leona] carried him, as the sea will carry a boat. . They murmured and sobbed on this journey [. .] Each labored to reach a harbor [. .] He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived. And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs.”84
With virtuosic skill, you distill in this heartbreaking sexual act all of the expected elements of the African-American experience: a crossing by boat, the predictable lynching of a black man for having approached a white woman, the revenge of a black man exacted on a white woman who has strayed from her area of control.
But when Rufus asks Leona what she is doing in the middle of Harlem, in a nightclub teeming with people of color, she responds most naturally:
“[Black people] didn’t never worry me none. People’s just people as far as I’m concerned.”
How do you hold on to a love like that when you have to endure the glances of others? Can a sexual act that occurs in the darkness and intimacy of a shabby room in Harlem bond together two beings, unite them the following day, when they are faced with gossip?
There are no easy battles: “They encountered the big world when they went out into the Sunday streets. [. .] and Rufus realized that he had not thought at all about this world and its power to hate and destroy.”85
For Goodman, there is nothing surprising or poetic in this, nothing, despite the disorder and the internal conflict of the characters who are haunted by this sexual experience, no — all of that passes unnoticed by our critic.
6. between the black American and the African: misunderstanding
In France, you hope to make progress on your quest for self-discovery, far away from the limitations imposed on you by your own country. Such a search proves to be more complicated than you imagined. The experience of migration places you face to face with other cultures, other people, and leads you to reconsider your ideas. Leeming writes that, ironically, once settled in Europe, you are forced to admit that the “old” continent had not in any way changed your heritage, and that the transformation would never occur: you would remain a black man as you had been in New York. Europe helps you, at best, understand what it means to be a black man. The Harlem ghetto had aroused in you a “. . sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut.”87
Does an end to this confinement affect not only your body, but also your soul? Does Europe provide you with enough room to breathe?
After systematic rejection in your own country, you have to brave at present another reality — withdrawing into yourself, even watching yourself disappear: “The American Negro in Paris is forced at last to exercise an undemocratic discrimination rarely practiced by Americans, that of judging his people, duck by duck, and distinguishing them one from another. Through this deliberate isolation, through lack of numbers, and above all through his own overwhelming need to be, as it were, forgotten, the American Negro in Paris is very nearly the invisible man.”88
Such invisibility allows you initially to be just a “man among others,” no longer someone to be pointed at. This attempt to disappear is almost instinctive, as if you had to distrust the sudden freedom in a world that was yours to discover. However, and you learn this quickly, too, men of color are not all in the same boat in Europe: you are not treated the same as a black American as you would be if you were a black man from Africa, especially from the former colonies. History, you insist, disrupts countries and continents. And what greater site of disruption is there than Europe? Of course you need only to walk a few steps in Paris to assess the wealth and prestige of the French culture through its architecture, museums and the thoroughfares throbbing with tourists. Still, behind the thoroughfare, there is always a dark alleyway, a dead end, a cul-de-sac. And at the end of this alley, a man is seated on a bench, a can of beer in his hand — the other face of France is now forming: “alien” France, the France of refugees, exiles, and the formerly colonized. The pariahs of the Republic, in some sense. Among them are some who fought for France in the war and who wait in vain for their pension, or those whose relatives were killed at the front and hope to one day see the names of their family members in French history textbooks.
Their presence? Very visible. Like flies in a bowl of milk. And in their voices, a whisper of desperation.
Paris in this way becomes for you a true laboratory, playing “. . a defining role in the elaboration of the ‘African experience,’ in the formulation and reformulation of a global blackness.”89 However the serious error regarding the perception of black communities in France, as Dominic Thomas points out in his essay, Black France, is to underestimate the different forces behind their emergence. One must be warned, he insists, against perceiving them as a homogenous community. This is how, in a novel like The Black Docker, from Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembène, the author can describe a black community in which the West Indian ranks higher than the Senegalese, a term referring to all Africans, regardless of their country of origin, with everything that it implies about France’s attitude toward people of color from the black continent. .90
How many times during my long stay in France do you think, Jimmy, I was asked if I was Senegalese? The collective imagination crafted a stock character that we inherited from our participation in World Wars One and Two, fighting for the French. Answering these inquiries with the response that I was Congolese required the patience and precision of a school-teacher, to explain that there were two Congos, even though the borders between the former Zaire (today called the Democratic Republic of Congo) and my country (the Republic of Congo) were carved out by Europeans! Did I also need to inform them that my capital, Brazzaville, had been the capital of Free France during the Occupation? Infuriated, I often gave up and accepted whatever had been decided about me, a “Senegalese” man. With some perspective, I realize that I was unwittingly reenacting the experience of my relatives who, in the French army and in the minds of everyone, were known as “Senegalese Tirailleurs” and accepted it.