Queering The Souls of Black Folk

Charles I. Nero

In 1890, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered “Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization” as his Harvard commencement address. According to David Levering Lewis, a biographer of Du Bois, the young scholar was greeted by an avalanche of positive reactions from the national press for a “brilliant and eloquent address.”1 It was ironic that the African American Du Bois speaking before a New England audience selected Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, as his representative of civilization. “In choosing Davis,” Shamoon Zamir writes, Du Bois selected “the leader of the defeated and racist South, a figure heavy with symbolic resonance and the memory of national division, as the logical telos of an unself-conscious New England idealism, and that at a time of rising nationalism.” 2Yet this irony allowed Du Bois to intervene in the public culture of white supremacy after Reconstruction with a message that was calibrated “to flatter as carefully as any address ever given by Booker T. Washington before a white audience.” 3Du Bois proposed a new, post-Reconstruction America formed through a patriarchal union of white and black men. A decade later, in the face of seemingly intractable racism, Du Bois announced his retreat from his earlier idealism in “Of the Coming of John,” the lone short story in his 1903 classic, Souls of Black Folk. Originally, the story was to be the final chapter of Souls; however, at the suggestion of his publishers, Du Bois added a chapter about Negro spirituals at the end of the book.4 This new chapter emphasized African cultural retentions among black Americans, their spirituality and their endurance. In effect, this new chapter blunted Du Bois’s political message by deflecting attention away from “Of the Coming of John” ’s significant revision of the idealism he had expressed in “Jefferson Davis.”

This essay examines the revision of the Harvard speech in “Of the Coming of John.” It pays particular attention to violence as the expression of Du Bois’s disillusionment with an America redeemed through biracial male partnership. I argue that the biracial male union Du Bois represented in his Harvard address is impossible because of the rigid policing of sexual identity categories at the turn of the century. This argument does not deny that the hardening of racism would have produced disillusionment from Du Bois; rather, it follows Siobhan Somerville’s observation that at the end of the nineteenth century, “as racialized boundaries were increasingly policed, so too were emerging categories of sexual identity.” Especially relevant is Somerville’s argument that “negotiations of the color line . . .shaped and were shaped by the emergence of notions of sexual identity and the corresponding epistemological uncertainties surrounding them.”5 “Of the Coming of John” is a text bloated with epistemological uncertainties as Du Bois charts his central character’s movement from a peasant to what Houston Baker calls “a tragic black man of culture who is not accepted by whites and who is too elevated to communicate with his own people—‘the ignorant and turbulent’ black proletariat.”6

My readings of both the short story and the earlier speech call attention to queer meanings that I believe are inherent in these texts. Here, I am not using queer in the sense used by middle-class men in the 1910s and 1920s to identify “themselves as different from other men primarily on the basis of their homosexual interest.”7 Instead, I follow Anne Herrmann’s suggestion that for modernists, “queerness is less about object choice than about the recognition on the part of others that one is not like others, a subject out of order, not in sequence, not working.” Herrmann sees in the term queer a “resistance to regimes of the normal” by “not changing identities to justify desire, but desiring in ways that make strange the relations between identities.”8 Although I am developing a queer analysis in this essay, I should also make it clear that my approach is complementary—rather than oppositional—to analyses, in particular feminist ones, that contest masculinity as natural. I am thinking in particular of Hazel Carby’s discovery in Souls of “an anxiety of masculinity . . . embedded in the landscape of a crisis in the social order.” The queer reading in this essay pays attention to what Carby identifies as the “process of gendering” in Souls that allows Du Bois to make “distinctions within his definition of masculinity itself.”9

I contend that in “Of the Coming of John,” Du Bois is troubled by the meaning of a union between black and white men that was structurally impossible in the early-twentieth-century United States. The authority of men to exchange women among one another is crucial to the argument I make here about equality. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick follows the classical anthropological work of Claude Lévi- Strauss, who defines culture in terms of a “total relationship of exchange . . . not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, [in which] the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners.”10 This transaction of women forms a homosocial contract between men which is culture. What troubles Du Bois in “Of the Coming of John” is that miscegenation laws make the legitimate exchange of women across racial borders impossible.

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Notes

The author gratefully acknowledges the support and helpful comments from audience members at Northwestern University’s “100 Years of The Souls of Black Folk” conference, Dwight McBride, Robert Gooding-Williams, Sue E. Houchins, Paul Outlaw, and especially Baltasar Fra-Molinero.

1. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois—Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Holt, 1993), 101.
2. Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 63.
3. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois—Biography of a Race, 102.
4. A. S. McClurg and Company to W. E. B. Du Bois, Chicago, January 21, 1903, in The Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1803 (1877–1963) 1965 (Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1981), reel 2, frame 433.
5. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 2, 3.
6. Houston A. Baker Jr., Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972), 102.
7. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 101.
8. Anne Herrmann, Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 6–7.
9. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 28, 30.
10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 184.