African-Americans in The Works of Joyce Carol Oates

Considering the enormity of Joyce Carol Oates’ literary output, it is curious how, until recently, non-white characters have figured so peripherally in her works. This is especially interesting when one considers that she has said that she has always wanted, especially in her most ambitious novels, to capture the essence of the American experience — and the condition of African-Americans is surely one of the major themes of the American story.

Oates may have obliquely defended this aspect of her work when she wrote of Ernest Hemingway that “since he rarely wrote of women with sympathy, and virtually never with subtlety and understanding, feminist charges of misogyny are surely justified” then added that, “in the context of American literature this is simply to accuse Hemingway of being a male writer.”

So to accuse Oates of failing to write of people of color frequently or “with sympathy . . . subtlety and understanding” may be simply to accuse her of being a white writer.

One of her rare early stories written from the viewpoint of an African-American, “Up From Slavery” was featured in her 1974 collection of short stories about academia, Hungry Ghosts. Here, racism and sexism intersect in a curious manner and the story prefigures her later explorations of the particular tension between black men and white women that exists in American culture.

“Up From Slavery” is set in an era when no one used the term “African-American.” “Black” was just coming into vogue. However, it is not a term our protagonist, a proud college professor named Franklin Ambrose, cares for. He “preferred the more sanitary and middle-class ‘Negro.’” Ambrose feels a comfortable sense of superiority, both to other members of his own race and to whites, whom he can rather patronizingly “put at their ease.”

A man of extremely high intelligence, he graduated from Harvard and, as our story opens, cherishes his special position as “the only Negro in the English Department [of a small Canadian college] and the only Harvard man.”

He has married a white woman against the extreme but expected, even to some extent welcomed, opposition of her family. He cherishes his wife Eunice because she is submissive and easy to bend to his will, a trophy of his success as a Negro man in a white-dominated culture.

Success comes easily to him but he finds himself beset by a vague sense of unease as he approaches middle age. He begins a series of affairs with white female students of his, all as interchangeable in his mind as they are in his arms. He feels alienated from the whites who he fears see him as a “nigger” in some radical hip sense for the word represents a deep fear of persecution and oppression in Ambrose.

While interviewing applicants for the position of “lecturer in English” Ambrose meets and is favorably impressed by a young woman named Molly Holt. Both he and the committee he represents believe she might be right for the job.

She comes to the school where Ambrose appoints himself her mentor and often sees her and is seen around with her. However, he makes a fatal mistake about the reason for her interest in him, assuming that, like so many young lovelies before her, she wants a romantic, or at least a sexual, relationship. When she draws a parallel between job discrimination based on race and that based on gender, Ambrose is taken aback and affronted. He loses the “cool” that usually distinguishes his manner and unconsciously slips into what is often stereotyped as male, and to some extent stereotyped as “Negro” male, behavior.

He sputters: “ . . . there’s anything I hate it’s a woman who talks too much — . . . Look, you been givin’ me the eye now for four months an’ I been tailin’ around after you as if I got nothin’ better to do, when Jesus Christ there are little girls waiting in line – I mean waiting in line, sister –- so don’t hand me none of this crap – “

Infuriated by her rejection of his advances, Ambrose sabotages her chances for the job. This is easy for him to do. He is a respected and tenured faculty member. No one wants to oppose him and risk the charge of racial prejudice.

Franklin Ambrose has come very, very far “Up From Slavery.” However, he has his own set of prejudices. White women are acquisitions for him, proving that he has “arrived” despite the presumed handicap of his race, not individuals in their own right. His experience with Molly Holt leaves him saddened but not humbled and his arrogance remains firmly intact at the end of the story.

As noted in my essay “From Masochistic Provocation to Violent Retaliation: The Role of the Rape Victim,” African American men often appear in Oates’ work as avatars of violence (albeit victim-precipitated), and that violence is, in Oates’ fiction, usually against young white women.

Her collection of short stories called The Goddess and Other Women, contains a short story entitled “Assault” that I discuss at length in the aforementioned essay. “Assault” centers on a particularly brutal and dramatically victim-precipitated rape of a white teenaged girl by a black man.

The Goddess and Other Women also includes “Concerning the Case of Bobby T.,” another short story also about a young black male provoked to violence by a white girl. However, the story differs in important particulars. The violence is not specifically sexual in nature, although the genders of the protagonist and antagonist respectively plays a role in each character’s actions, the story is closer to realism than to a realistic allegory, and part of the story is told from the African American male’s viewpoint.

The year is 1952, before the Civil Rights movement. Twelve-year-old white Frances Berardi is exchanging playful, teasing insults with a black teenager named Bobby T. Cheatham. Berardi slaps his face, throwing him into a fury in which he badly beats her up.

Slammed into jail, Cheatham is outraged by what he perceives as an injustice. He resolves to feign insanity to avoid trial and naïvely congratulates himself on his act because of his perception that he is going to get away with something: “Mentally unfit to stand trial! He was fooling them all.”

However, he ends up getting stuck in a mental hospital for nineteen years. His personality as a youth was that of “a nice kid – kind of daring.” After only four years in that hospital, he has become “listless” and “slack.” When finally released, he is a shadow of his former self, a childlike adult fearful of crossing the street.

Oates nowhere explicitly states that the disproportionate punishment for his youthful crime is connected to his race and that of his victim. She does not even have a character make this point. Rather, she leaves it up to discerning readers to make it for themselves.

In Oates’s semi-autobiographical novel Marya, the title character suffers – or believes that she suffers — a strange campaign of harassment by a black male.

Twenty-five-years-old and at the beginning of a very promising career, Marya Knauer has her own college office and is now “Professor Knauer.” This part of the story is, like the entire novel, told entirely from Marya’s viewpoint. The reader is never one hundred per cent certain as to whether Marya is being persecuted, as she believes, by a black custodian, or whether she may be imagining his antagonism based on her own racial expectations combined with her class and gender-based fears.

That black janitor’s name is Sylvester. Marya becomes convinced that he is trying to subtly degrade her by deliberately leaving a dirty “calling card” in the office he has supposedly cleaned. “It might be a cigarette butt mashed out in one of Marya’s potted ivy plants on the windowsill,” Oates writes, “it might be a Kleenex stiffened with a yellow stain, crumpled and left on the very seat of her chair, it might be a cigarette dropped in the toilet bowl in her lavatory, sodden, unraveling, striking the eye, for an instant, like a tiny piece of feces.”

What is Sylvester’s motivation? This is never explained. However, it seems likely that he shares a certain “she’s getting too big for her britches” resentment that working-class and poor men are sometimes alleged to harbor when confronted with a woman in a position superior to their own. The reader believes that Sylvester may suspect Marya’s “white trash” origins and carry a grudge against her for her ability leave it behind and blend into the dominant culture as a black could never do.

Then again, the reader may also see it as possible that Sylvester is just absent-mindedly leaving cigarette’s butts, etc., in Marya’s office. She may imagine his antagonism because of the defensiveness that a woman may feels who finds herself in a “superior” position to a man or because of her own self-consciousness about her origins and/or the notorious “white guilt” about racism.

Marya becomes convinced that even the way he pronounces her title and name “Professor Knauer” is a wry sarcastic put-down. She believes herself slow to catch this, however, because “unconsciously she had assumed that irony was a prerogative of the learned segment of the white race.”

Sylvester never makes a direct threat of any kind toward Marya. However, like any man, he has to be aware of the biologically-based fear women have of men based on male strength and the ability of men to, in Susan Brownmiller’s famous – or perhaps infamous — words, “use their genitals as a weapon.” In the novel, Sylvester appears to exploit this awareness. Marya finds him nonchalantly sitting behind her desk. She is automatically afraid. After all, “the building had emptied out, they were alone on the floor together, it was past five-thirty and quite dark. . . . “

Then again, perhaps he does not mean to inspire her fear. There is never the slightest suggestion on Oates’s part that Marya has any secret or unconscious attraction to Sylvester or that she harbors, like so many Oates heroines, any masochistic desire for male violence. However, she could be the victim of her own fears, a white woman expecting to arouse the anger of a black man, perhaps a black man who sincerely and innocently wonders, as Sylvester asks, “Professor, how come you always at me?”

Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart is Oates’s first full-length novel in which she enters into the consciousness of African-American characters. It is set in the segregated 1950s, Jinx Fairchild is an athletic black teenager. His family seems representative without being stereotypical of “Negro” families of the time period.

The mother, Minnie, works as a nurse in a white doctor’s office. Minnie “isn’t religious, or even superstitious. . . . She has a weakness for gospel singing on the radio, Mahalia Jackson and the Caravans her favorites, but all the rest of it, Jesus Christ and that crew, it’s white folks’ foolishness or outright trickery. The only earth the ‘meek” ever inherited was earth nobody else gave a damn for . . . says Minnie.”

She also opposes the emerging Civil Rights movement but not because she is a Gone With The Wind-style Aunt Tom. Rather, to Minnie, the message of nonviolence rings false: “seems to me he’s doing more harm than good, preaching ‘nonviolence’ and ‘passive resistance’ and ‘hate will be returned with love’ — making it hot for the rest of us . . . I ain’t returning any hate with love ’cause I ain’t got any love to spare.” Her experience with white people has made her skeptical of the idea that they would peacefully give up their privileges. She often observes, “Jesus God, how do white folks get so mean!

Like Minnie, her son is a fully realized character: neither a “just-happens-to-be-Negro” for whom his color is a trifle nor a symbol of ethnicity. The teenaged boy is called “Jinx” by his family but known as “Iceman” for his cool concentration on the basketball court.

Both author and reader become deeply involved with Jinx when he kills a white boy who has been harassing a white girl, Iris Courtney. Iris flees Red Garlock, a delinquent “hillbilly” who is chasing her. She takes refuge in Cheney’s, a store in which Jinx is working. He is alone and about to close up when Iris, “white as death,” runs in.

Jinx does not really defend Iris, who is a stranger to him and someone of whom he is wary simply because of her color and what that distinction means in the America of their era. Rather, he is drawn into the fight accidentally but feels compelled not to shrink from it. Like his antagonist, Jinx has certain feelings about masculinity and the need to shore it up through displays of physical courage. Although they taunt each other in racist terms, the color difference is almost incidental here.

Soon Jinx and Red are locked in a confrontation and neither can back down because their shared masculine identification is at stake. “I’m not afraid of that redneck bastard,” Jinx shouts. “I ain’t no helpless girl!”

Although the killing is arguably justifiable, afterward Jinx thinks of himself as a murderer. He is “grateful for something to do with his big skinny bony-knuckled murderer’s hands.”

Haunted by the life he has taken and the possibility that he might be arrested for it, Jinx makes a floundering attempt to unburden himself of his secret and seek his mother’s guidance. Minnie, who has no idea that Jinx has killed someone, responds in a dismissive manner to talk of the “white trash” boy’s death and reminds her son of the foolish and unfair distinctions a white racist culture makes. At the same time, she shows the reader that African Americans like herself are not immune to their own arbitrary discriminations. His mother snorts: “Lowest of the low! It’s enough to make you sick to your stomach, all the fuss in the newspaper . . . worst kind of white folks exceptin’ actual Nazis. And if it’d been a Negro boy instead, nobody’d give a good goddamn!”

Jinx Fairchild feels lost. His secret gnaws away at him, the awesome fact of his being a man who has killed another man aggravated by the additional, peculiar burden of being a black who has killed a white – a distinction that ought to be meaningless yet carries so much weight.

Like so many African Americans in the era of segregation, Jinx knows that a submissive manner is the key to effectively dealing with white authorities and his mastery of this game aids him in deflecting suspicion when he is questioned by police officers investigating the “murder” of Little Red Garlock. Jinx tells them that, yes, he was working at Cheney’s that night but no, he doesn’t know anything about the killing. Speaking to them “with an air of racial deference,” he easily fools them and is gratified by his ability to do so: “Smooth as honey, Jinx Fairchild is swallowed down by the white police.” Again like other blacks, he is contemptuous of whites even as he appears to submit to them.

Jinx would like to make a clean breast of things but he knows he dare not do so. The cards would be stacked against him because of his color.

Carrying his dreadful secret, weighed down by it, Jinx feels an increasing bitterness toward whites who are, after all, both the purveyors and beneficiaries of traditional racial prejudice in this country. However, he does not experience a healthy sense of solidarity and identification with other blacks. Looking at an antique photograph of African American soldiers who fought for the Union during the Civil War, he thinks, “A black man in uniform trouble his soul, for you got to figure, in North America at least, it’s the Man’s uniform he’s wearing; just one other way for the Man to exploit. . . No connection between the long-dead soldiers and . . . Jinx Fairchild. . . . No connection between Jinx Fairchild and anybody, whatever the color of their goddamn skin.”

As the constant fear of being found out gnaws at him, it occurs to Jinx that if Iris were dead, there would be no witnesses against him. A decent person, Jinx goes no further than the thought of murdering her and even that frightens him. However, he is constantly aware of her as she is of him. They are the only ones who share the terrible secret.

Like the characters in Oates’s short story “Did You Ever Slip On Red Blood?” Jinx and Iris are erotically drawn to each other after their mutual involvement in a violent death: “No one is so close to me as you. No one is so close to us as we are to each other.”

The color difference is felt strongly as titillating and yet as a deterrent to a consummation. Jinx thinks with astonishment, “Breasts that fit completely in his curved, cupped hands . . . astonishingly soft, so white . . . the skin seems too pale and thin to protect her.”

Reminded always of his white victim by this white girl who was complicit in the killing with him, the very skin of white people seems strangely fragile to him. He wonders about “the lethal-looking thinness of that etiolated skin . . . how can it protect her, or anyone, adequately?”

Jinx never undergoes the catharsis that would follow if he “told” his secret. How could he in a society so prejudiced against him, a culture for whom “he isn’t ‘Jinx Fairchild’ in anyone’s eyes but a black man, a man defined by his skin and by his facial features and by his voice and by that look in his eyes . . . defines [him] without knowing or in actual resistance to knowing or caring.”

Rather, Jinx lives with the burden, never forgetting the trauma but trying not to be consumed by it. Like Oates’s characters who are survivors, Jinx makes the necessary compromises with the environment in which he lives. Oates shows Jinx entering an Army Recruiting Office. The uniform of the US military is no longer foreign to him. Rather, he connects with the black man he is surprised to see behind the desk, a man who surprises him a second time by greeting him as, “Iceman!”

The nickname, “Iceman,” Oates suggests, may represent the stance needed by Jinx in particular – and perhaps by African Americans in general – to function in a country made for a majority of European descent.

A coldness, a freezing of feeling, is an inevitable reaction to the suffering caused by racial prejudice and discrimination. Perhaps this is why so many African-American famous rappers in our era adopt names like Ice-T and Ice Cube, denoting that they have somehow “risen above” compassion into a selfishness that allows them to cope in an alien and frequently hostile white environment. Oates demonstrates compassion even as she documents how racism squeezes that precious quality out of her African-American characters.

Her concentration on tense, often violent, interactions between African-American males and white females reflects the unfortunate history that the safety or “purity” of white women was often the excuse given for the racist oppression of black men. This fact, in turn, has led to a tainted erotic attraction between these two groups since, for each, the other has been made a Forbidden Fruit. Finally, there is an inevitable, tragic hostility on the part of some African-American men toward white women because of that history and a resulting fear of the black male by some Caucasian females. Oates has explored all of these conflicts to create fascinating dramatic narratives and to zero in on our society’s most painful confusions.

Oates, Joyce Carol, (Woman) Writer, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1989, p. 303.
Oates, Joyce Carol, The Hungry Ghosts, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, CA, 1974, p. 63.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid., p. 72.
Oates, Joyce Carol, The Goddess and Other Women, The Vanguard Press, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1974.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 19.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Marya: A Life, Berkley Books, New York, N. Y., 1998.
Ibid., p. 209.
Ibid., p. 208.
Ibid., p. 215.
Ibid.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Penguin Books, New York, New York (1991), p. 134.
Ibid., p.180.
Ibid., p. 244
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 131.
Ibid., p. 136.
Ibid., p. 138.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 190.
Ibid.., p. 182.
Ibid., p. 242.
Ibid., p. 243.
Ibid., p. 358
Ibid., p. 367.

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