Birmingham Voice of the People

Cedar Bluff, Miss., March 31--Jeff Brown was lynched by a mob here
late Saturday afternoon. Brown was walking down the street near the
car tracks and saw a moving freight going in the direction in which he
wanted to go. He started on the run to board the moving train. On the
sidewalk was the daughter of a white farmer. Brown accidentally
brushed against her and she screamed. A gang quickly formed and ran
after him, jerking him off the moving train. He was beaten into insensi-
bility and then hung to a tree. The sheriff has made no attempt to find
out who the members of the mob were. Picture cards of the body are be
ing sold on the street at five cents apiece.

-- Ralph Ginzburg, One Hundred Years of Lynchings ( 1988)

"Murder, just murder, would make us all sane."

--Clay, a black man, to Lula, a white woman, in LeRoi Jones Dutchman ( 1964)

One of the most intriguing aspects of the white image in the black mind is the representation of white women in fiction. Responding to the idealization--however sexist--of white women by the media and by those defending racism, black writers have clearly wanted to smash this ideal. While white feminists have been cognizant of how ironically imprisoning it is to be chained to a pedestal that serves the interests of white men, many blacks have responded to the fact that this idealized white female image has been used--both by white men and, at times, by white women (e.g., the Scottsboro case)--against blacks, with the stakes often being the very lives of blacks. The murder of Emmett Till, which crystallized this destructive complex, leads to numerous logical questions: Is the white woman worth such psychosexual idealization? What lies beneath the myth of the purity of white womanhood and the myth of the desirability of white women to black men? Can countermyths be created to counteract the oppressive myths of whites about white women? Is the demystification by black writers of white women an attempt to create a liberating myth for blacks? Do these myths arise at the expense of white women and, if so, is this a necessary condition for a liberating mythology for blacks concerning black male-white female relations? Moreover, if the image of white women has been used as a line drawn in the dust in the defense of racism, is the effect on white women of a black liberating mythology at their expense finally irrelevant to blacks, whose creation of such a mythology is part of a quest for psychological and physical freedom from racism? Each reader will no doubt answer these questions differently after reading the black liberating mythology that acts as an exposé of white women in Langston Hughes Little Dog from The Ways of White Folks ( 1933) and Richard Wright novels The Long Dream ( 1958), Native Son ( 1940), The Outsider ( 1953), and Savage Holiday ( 1954).

The most volatile aspect of blacks' liberating mythology vis-à-vis the image of white women is the fact that, in some works, psychological liberation equals violence against white women. According to Robert Felgar, "James Baldwin charges that, where sex should be in Richard Wright's fiction, there is only violence; but Eldridge Cleaver's rejoinder is convincing: he explains that because of America's brutalization of blacks, violence does indeed reign on the holy throne of sex." These ideas are very important in understanding Wright's use of violence in his fictional representations of white women. Indeed, the physical annihilation of a white woman occurs not only in Native Son but in two of Wright's other novels as well; both in The Outsider and Savage Holiday, the protagonist is responsible for the death of a white woman with whom he has a romantic relationship. In The Outsider, the relationship is between a black man and a white woman; in Savage Holiday, all of the significant characters are white. This may seem to suggest that Savage Holiday entails violence against white women. Nevertheless, to be sure, the fact that the work is a product of the imagination of a black writer indicates that it is a racial commentary on whites--an attempt to create a liberating mythology for blacks concerning white women.