Man of All Work? Richard Wright & the Performance of Black Female Subjectivity

…In the field of Black Studies, Wright is widely revered as an intellectual and an icon of black masculinity; for many, his genius obscures or simply outweighs his questionable allegiance to black women. Indeed, I suspect most scholars would reject outright the idea that Richard Wright “owed” anything to the women of his race. And so as I grappled with the persistent, unpleasant possibility that one of my literary heroes had betrayed me, I also struggled to find an appropriate response. I was not the first to detect misogyny in Wright’s work; bell hooks and Trudier Harris (among other feminist scholars) have adroitly assessed his blatant gender bias. I continue to teach Wright’s work; he is a remarkable storyteller, and a brilliant analyst of race and class dynamics in the US. Yet it is difficult to reconcile Wright’s usefulness in the classroom with my feminist politics, and my own attempts as an artist to represent and resist the historical and ongoing victimization of black women.

In my course on Gender, Terror, and Trauma in African American Culture, I ask my students to consider not only the representation of violence, but also the “violence of representation.” I teach Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children in that class for few African American writers more expertly express the terror inflicted upon blacks living in the Jim Crow South. Yet Richard Wright’s expertise in representing black men as the ultimate victims of racial violence does its own violence to black women, setting a disastrous precedent the effects of which are still being felt today. I concur with Shirley Anne Williams’ assertion that Wright “fathered a bastard line” of “racist misogyny” and “male narcissism…that was to flower in the fiction of black writers in the late sixties and early seventies.” Yet when it comes to the representation of black women by black men, what is Wright’s legacy today? Can the current proliferation of films like Norbit and Big Momma’s House be laid at Wright’s feet? With this paper I will attempt to formulate a response to these questions. I will begin by examining two instances of inversion which may be found in Uncle Tom’s Children (first published in 1938) and Eight Men (published posthumously in 1961). My aim is to better understand the literary strategies by which Wright supplants the black female victim with the black male, rendering the suffering of black women not only negligible but directly responsible for the greater victimization of black men. I will begin with a consideration of “Long Black Song,” and will then offer a brief commentary on the current popularity and profitability of black male actors performing in drag, before concluding with an examination of “Man of All Work”…

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In 2007 I responded to a women’s theatre company seeking plays on the theme of “faking it.” My one-act play, Men of All Work, exposes four black male celebrities who have adopted false identities in order to get ahead in the entertainment industry. “Freddie” is a black comedian portraying an obese black woman in a fat suit; “Ross” is a middle-aged hip hop mogul running a sweatshop in Guatemala; “Tye” is a rapper turned actor with a penchant for making porn featuring underage girls; and “Rev” is an elderly minister and civil rights leader with repressed homosexual desires. All four men see themselves as victims, and therefore feel justified in exploiting others; when they are invited to be on “The Opal Show,” they arrive fully expecting to be feted and adored but instead are exposed by the show’s psychologist, “Dr. Bill.” The play is meant to be satirical, but clearly reveals my anger and frustration with certain black men in the entertainment industry. More than twenty years ago, in an essay on Richard Wright, Shirley Anne Williams asked: “What does one do with a brother who don’t love you?” My answer as of late has been to write plays. I rarely bother to write scholarly essays any more because it seems there’s no space in academic discourse for me to say, “I’m hurt.” And that is the simple truth. Beneath the rage and indignation is a deepening well of pain. Why do they do us this way?

In part, my play responds to Richard Wright’s short story, “Man of All Work,” in which a desperate black man secures employment by posing as a black female domestic. Since I stopped reading Wright’s work years ago, I was unfamiliar with the story and learned of it only through my research on James Baldwin (he referred to it as some of Wright’s “best work”). Baldwin found the premise of the story brilliant: a black man easily stands in for a black woman because in the eyes of indifferent whites, “we all look the same.” I found the premise to be absurd; Hortense Spillers and Angela Davis have expertly explored the process of “ungendering” whereby slaveholders recognized gender difference only when it was “expedient” and enhanced their ability to exploit enslaved women; rape, certainly, was one moment when a black woman’s femaleness could not be denied. Already distrusting Wright’s representation of women, I fully expected to be offended by yet another representation of the black woman as repulsive, mannish, domineering, and oversexed. Our experiences inform our expectations, and I admit that the recent proliferation of films featuring black men in fat suits performing grotesque caricatures of black women has taken its toll on me. Are these performances reincarnations and/or amplifications of the misogyny I detect in Wright’s short fiction?

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i. Sherley Anne Williams, “Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the fiction of Richard Wright.” In American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982) 397.

ii. Williams, 414.

iii. In Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis argues that although there was a kind of “deformed equality” between black men and women under slavery, “violent sexual assaults” actually served to remind black women “of their essential and inalterable femaleness” (24).  In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers further suggests that within the context of captivity, enslaved Africans “lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”  Spillers concludes that, “the captive body reduces to a thing,” embodying “sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general ‘powerlessness’” (67).

© 2008 Zetta Elliott. All Rights Reserved.