|
The good-hearted weakling identity type is best represented by Parnell in James Baldwin play Blues for Mister Charlie. This play illustrates what Baldwin meant when he said, I've had very hard things to say about liberals. . . . I was thinking of that vast army of people whose convictions are mere quotations and whose good will costs them nothing, who are always presuming to lecture the Negro on his table manners and who are hurt, to the point of vindictiveness, whenever their utterly useless good will is questioned. Baldwin's hatred for many self-proclaimed progressive whites is evident in that it is Parnell, not the racist murderer Lyle, who is the Mister Charlie of the title. (Meridian, the black preacher whose son Richard was murdered by Lyle, says that while "All white men are Mister Charlie,""You're Mister Charlie," in answer to Parnell's question about what the term means, 59). As Baldwin makes evident in the course of the play, Parnell is a metaphor for whites who, while they may pat themselves on the back for not being prejudiced, fail to take truly significant actions to disrupt bigotry, even when these actions are well within their power. The examination of whites in this play underscores the truth in the words of the great African writer Chinua Achebe in Postscript: James Baldwin (1924-1987)": As long as white people who constitute a mere fraction of the human race consider it natural and even righteous to dominate the rainbow majority whenever and wherever they are thrown together . . . the words of James Baldwin will be there to bear witness and to inspire and elevate the struggle for human freedom. As Baldwin's drama underlines, this struggle includes freedom from white ignorance, arrogance, and inauthenticity. One of the main points of Baldwin's portrayal of Parnell is that he represents the ideas that good-hearted whites who are mostly talk and little action may have a knowledge of what they can do to counter bigotry, but they do these things halfheartedly (if at all), all the while believing that they are truly progressive people of conscience. Hence, Parnell is a symbol of a white person whose idealized self-image causes him or her to be, in fact, worse-more neurotic--than the hypocrite. While the hypocrite often chooses consciously to maintain a duality between his or her self-presentation and actions, the good-hearted weakling truly believes that he or she is a friend to blacks, even while failing to act on this belief. Thus, while the hypocrite may be a liar, the good-hearted weakling is a ball of confusion and a moral washout. Perhaps the chief question concerning the good-hearted weakling is whether he or she will be what the outright bigot (e.g., Lyle) is charged with being: "an honorable tribesman . . . defend[ing] . . . the honor and purity of his tribe" (19). Indeed, Baldwin shows the distrust that many blacks have for so-called progressive whites by emphasizing the skepticism of the black students toward Parnell, in contrast to Meridian's faith in the beginning of the play that Parnell will help to convict Lyle. Countering Meridian's statement that blacks should believe in Parnell because he not only helped to bring about a trial for Lyle's murder of Richard but also since he is "a pretty good friend to us all," Lorenzo, a student who clearly symbolizes the growing militancy of many students in the 1960s, says, "We can't afford to be too trusting . . . when a white man's a good white man he's good because he wants you to be good" (17-18). This idea conveys the notion that the sort of whites embodied in Parnell exhibit the liberal qualities of guardianship of blacks, and what Baldwin indicates is that such whites want to be guardians of blacks' very identity. Moreover, this attitude is characteristic, Baldwin seems to say, of an "honorable tribesman": as long as blacks' identities stay "in their place," such whites as Parnell will help them--but inadequately and disingenuously. The deep divisions within the good-hearted weakling are indicative of a fundamental confusion (in contrast to the honest hatred of blacks seen in the outright bigot). These divisions again show the "personal incoherence" of which Baldwin writes in White Man's Guilt. The extremity of Parnell's personal incoherence is Baldwin's way of dramatizing that Parnell is a microcosm of a much larger neurosis in the psychology of many whites concerning race relations. Examples of these psychological and behavioral divisions abound. For example, although Parnell helps bring about Lyle's arrest, he tells Meridian, "I think I should go to Lyle's house and warn him. After all, I brought it about and he is a friend of mine" (18). These are astonishing words in light of to whom he is saying them. Still, Parnell's loyalty to his black friends may seem evident during his visit to Lyle as he tells him, "You may think a colored boy who gets ruined in the North then comes home to try to pull himself together deserves to die--I don't" (27). This statement, however, is prefaced by Parnell's use of the word "nigger," and he pledges to Lyle, "I'll never turn against you" (28). This passage in White Man's Guilt says that whites may pretend to be friends to blacks in one setting, But, on the same day, in another gathering," such whites are "proud of that history for which [they] do not wish to pay" ( Baldwin 1985, 411). Indeed, in addition to never objecting to anyone's use of the word "nigger," Parnell's weak status as a progressive white is shown in a more extreme way. Again speaking to the father of the man Lyle murdered, Parnell utters these words: "[F]rom another point of view Lyle hasn't got anything against colored people. . . . he's not mean, he's not cruel. He's a poor white man. He's not a wicked man" (61). That Parnell knows of Lyle's hatred of blacks and strongly suspects him of murder make these words pathetically illogical. Moreover, the fact that Parnell represents whites who are fence-sitters to the point of being morally and ethically castrated even as they think of themselves as blacks' allies is evident in his refusal of Meridian's plea that he get Lyle to admit to the murder: "I can't do it. I'm his friend. I can't betray him" (62). Nevertheless, Parnell seems to claim an equal friendship with Meridian. The question that Baldwin seems to be posing is to whom is such a white person loyal? Is he loyal to the buddy--the racist murderer to whom he shows his male bonding and his tribesmanship as he listens warmly to Lyle say, "Hell, Parnell, you're smarter than me. . . . [But] hell, you ain't so different from me in other ways--in spite of all your ideas. Two things we always had in common--liquor and poon-tang. We couldn't get enough of neither one" (103)? Or is he loyal to the grieving black man who he claims is his friend and whose approval he values? The answer becomes exceedingly clear as the plot develops. On these themes, Leeming's statements are relevant: [W]hen we see Lyle and Parnell together as old friends in Whitetown, juxtaposed with the events across the gulf in Blacktown and the friendly patronizing attitude of Parnell there, we see what Baldwin had discerned from William Faulkner's remarks on race relations in Oxford, Mississippi [that in a hypothetical race war he would join with other whites in shooting blacks in the streets]--the fact that liberal Whitetown and bigoted Whitetown are much closer to each other than either could be to Blacktown. ( Leeming 1994, 236)
The issue of Parnell's divided loyalty is the strongest example of Baldwin's theory of whites' personal incoherence. According to Baldwin, whites ultimately cannot be loyal to blacks because they can only accept deracialized blacks. In fact, the climactic scene that conveys Parnell's moral and ethical collapse occurs when Parnell begs Meridian, in essence, not to be a black person. When Meridian refers to the hardships faced by blacks, for example, Parnell states, "I was talking about you--not your history" (57). He also dismisses Meridian's references to the unjust treatment of blacks by whites by saying, "We have to start from scratch, or do our best to start from scratch" (61). Implicit in this statement again is the dismissal of history-and the role that history plays in current race relations. "We have come too far together, there is too much at stake, for you to become black now, for me to become white," Parnell explains to Meridian (58). Baldwin illustrates in this aspect of the play another key critique of whites found in White Man's Guilt." [For] history, as no one seems to know . . . does not refer merely, or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe . . . our identities and our aspirations. ( 1985, 410) Baldwin says further that when people realize that individuals themselves are "that great historical creation," the realization comes with "great pain and terror" for they must face the truth about how their actions either uphold or challenge bigotry and face their complicity in the state of race relations today (410). These ideas are threatening to whites such as those symbolized by Parnell because they force whites to challenge and change the aspects of their identity that are part of the continuum of racism in America rather than expect blacks to accept their inadequate self-representation as allies. Other intriguing issues are raised by the exchange between Parnell and Meridian in the scene under discussion. For a white person who is comfortable with the word "nigger" and devoted to "poon-tang" (indicating Parnell's sexualized racism toward black women) to ask for nonracial relations--and identities--for himself and blacks and to ask a black man not to "go black" on him is the height of hypocrisy and irrationality. This issue is discussed in Dialogue in Black and White (1964-1965) between Baldwin and white writer Budd Schulberg. When Schulberg asks, "[W]hich side are you on, Elijah Muhammad's side or what you call my sloppy liberal-interracial side?" Baldwin answers, "Baby, don't lay that on me. It's not for me to decide, it's for you to decide. . . . I mean you and all my well meaning white friends" ( Troupe 1988, 136). This topic raises a key aspect of white denial: blacks' anger and skepticism toward whites is a response, not some innate free-floating black bitterness--a response to them and their actions (and inaction). One of Baldwin's main messages in Blues for Mister Charlie seems to be that such self-proclaimed progressives as Parnell are completely self-deluded, and, as Baldwin and Margaret Mead discuss in Rap on Race, they can only accept blacks as they reject their race and any attitudes that differ from theirs. Thus, at the heart of such self-deluded whites is a bigot--one who would scoff at the charge even while shrinking under it. Hence, Parnell and what he represents earn Baldwin's stern condemnation. This condemnation is perhaps strongest when Baldwin indicates that both Lyle and Parnell are defending their identities as whites in the way they deal with blacks. Similar to Baldwin's indication that Lyle's murder of Richard was a defense of whiteness as an identity when he exclaims, "I had to kill him. I'm a white man!" (157), Meridian concludes in the climactic scene with Parnell, "You are a white man, aren't you? Just another white man--after all" (62). Obviously, a huge question remains: What does this condemnation mean? What does whiteness mean as a form of identity rather than as a mere biological fact? What Parnell clearly symbolizes is the friend who fails blacks; the crux of this failure is both the cowardice manifested in the personal incoherence of which Baldwin writes and in what South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer has called the "sense of whiteness"--a sense of privilege and a devotion to maintaining an illusion of invulnerability regarding the consequences of white racism. Such white persons, Baldwin conveys in his play, are, unlike the outright bigot, traitors to blacks; they encourage trust and meet that trust with betrayal. That is why many blacks hold good-hearted weaklings in greater contempt than outright bigots: one is the enemy you see; the other is the enemy whose failure you do not see until it is too late. The defensiveness with which many whites respond to this feeling among many blacks is illustrated in responses to Blues for Mister Charlie. According to Leeming, reviews of the play were "for the most part defensive. . . . Many whites seemed to feel that Baldwin was somehow turning against them, that he was ungrateful for the white liberals' contributions to the struggle" ( 1994, 238). Clearly, such whites miss what they could learn about themselves by facing how they appear to blacks--and why they appear this way. This cowardice attests to the power of Baldwin's play, as illustrated by Amiri Baraka's comments about Baldwin in "Jimmy!" "Jimmy's voice, as much as Dr. King's or Malcolm X's, helped shepherd and guide us toward black liberation. . . . The celebrated James Baldwin of earlier times could not be used [by whites] to cover the undaunted freedom chants of the Jimmy who walked with King or SNCC or the evil little nigger who wrote Blues for Mister Charlie!" ( Troupe 1988, 132). Baraka's last characterization of Baldwin's image to whites as a result of the play helps to explain why some educators who consider themselves Americanists may teach regularly the Baldwin of "earlier times" (e.g., Giovanni's Room, 1956) but not Baldwin's more confrontational works which try to destroy many whites' images of themselves regarding racism. |