Race-ing Masculinity by John Christopher Cunningham

Author:John Christopher Cunningham [Cunningham, John Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Men's Studies, Reference, Sociology
ISBN: 9781317794325
Google: THt0DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-24T03:42:21+00:00

When Evelyn tries to remind Rudolph of his background, her reminder is presented as an attempt to racially restrict Rudolph’s expanding sense of Being:

“You grew up in Hodges, South Carolina, same as me, in a right and proper colored church. If you’d been to China, maybe I’d understand.” “I can only be what I’ve been?” This he asked softly, but his voice trembled. “Only what I was in Hodges?” “You can’t be Chinese.” “I don’t want to be Chinese!…I only want to be what I can be, which isn’t the greatest fighter in the world, only the fighter I can be.” (90–1)

The story rightly interrogates Evelyn’s either/or logic of cultural identification; it does not, however, examine Rudolph’s assertion that being “what he can be” entails the virtual repudiation of his native African American culture. In the end, Rudolph’s wholehearted embrace of Asian martial arts culture is presented as nothing short of salvational. On the final page, Evelyn, who had earlier “known in her bones” that “he would die before her,” now realizes that “he would outlive her.”

It is in the collection’s first story, “The Education of Mingo,” however, that Johnson creates his scariest scenario of race-blind male bonding—here, literally, over a dead female body. In this story, an “amiable” slaveowner, Moses Green, buys a male slave and raises him as if he were a son. Green instructs Mingo so well, in fact, that he becomes something of Moses’ doppelganger. One of “The Education of Mingo’”s central arguments is that an identity doubling effect occurs when one person owns another. This idea is a provocative one and Johnson explores it in a fascinating manner. Moses’ relationship with Mingo, however, cannot fully be grasped as one simply of ownership; it must be considered both in its racial character and as it is defined against Moses’ relationship with a woman, Harriet Bridgewater.

Moses is drawn to “his lady friend,” Harriet, in spite of her lack of conventional beauty:

She wasn’t exactly pretty, what with her gull’s nose, great heaps of red-gold hair, and frizzy down on her arms, but she had a certain silvery beauty intangible, elusive, inside…She knew things, that shrewd Harriet Bridgewater. (8)

For all this elusive attraction, however, Moses’ considerably stronger bond with his male slave quickly becomes apparent:

strange to say, [Moses] felt closer to the black African than to Harriet. So close, in fact, that when he pulled the rig up to Isaiah’s house, he considered giving Mingo his farm when he died, God willing, as well as his knowledge, beliefs, and prejudices. Then again, maybe that was overdoing things. The boy was all Moses wanted him to be, his own emanation, but still, he thought, himself. Different enough from Moses so that he could step back and admire him. (11)

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