“A Myth of Success:” Rethinking Ellison

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter VII

“Tell Nannan I Walked”

Reconstructing Manhood in Ernest J. Gaines’

A Lesson Before Dying

“A Myth of Success:” Rethinking Ellison

Searching for new pedagogical means of reconstructing black identity, Gaines undermines the white institutionalized educational standards. In his Lesson, he highlights two types of fallacies that have led to an erroneous idea of freedom: first, the error of negating the black community’s values, and, second, the mistake of unselectively adopting the white educational models. The representation of the African American identity therefore forks in two directions: in the first instance the black person turns into a run away criminal who moves away from his/her community, while in the second instance he/she is converted into a mere imitator who lives according to white standards.

A famous critique of these two stereotypes—the runaway and the imitator—can be found in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison’s masterpiece stresses the same point as A Lesson Before Dying, i. e. negative images of black identity are proliferated in order to consolidate the myth of white domination. As I shall further discuss, both Ellison and Gaines highlight the necessity of subverting hegemonic norms by challenging the image of the black fugitive and that of the black imitator, whose false representations are skillfully deconstructed.

At the beginning of Invisible Man, the narrator’s grandfather urges us to become accomplice to his haunting message: “To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” (26). As the nameless narrator obeys his grandfather’s advice, his existence proves to be a continuous flight. We follow his convoluted trajectory from the rural South to the urban North, from the Edenic college to the paint factory, from the Brotherhood to his hibernating hole. While “the boomerangs of history are ever whirling down on the protagonist’s naïve head” (O’Meally 1994, 245), two more decades will pass before he can acknowledge the uselessness of his running, the illusion of his progress.³⁴ In order to do that, he will have to get rid of his dream of equality, of his “unquestioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a myth of success” (Ellison 1972, 177). His innocence manifests on various occasions: when he is expelled from college for revealing too much about his black people to Mr. Norton, a white man; when he is unable to obtain a job as a result of the accusatory letters he receives from Mr. Bledsoe; when he misinterprets the Brotherhood’s manipulation of phony social slogans.³⁵ Ultimately, his descent into his well-lit hole conveys the pointlessness of his existential flight and the revelation of his emblematic invisibility.³⁶

The grandfather’s message in Invisible Man adumbrates Matthew Antoine’s ideas in A Lesson Before Dying. A former teacher, Matthew Antoine stresses the importance of escaping a choking environment, by prompting his students to run away from Bayonne, despite the violent death that might await them in the future. Putting into practice Antoine’s advice of breaking the vicious circle of their existence, a great number of young men have been mesmerized by the Eldorado of a better life. Away from their community, labeled as criminals, they could never transcend the poverty and violence of their condition. Consequently, Antoine’s pedagogy perpetuates the myth of black illiteracy, going back to the time of slavery. Referring to the inability to surpass the determinism of social forces, Antoine chastises Grant for his increased efforts to educate his pupils, to “scrape away” their ignorance:

When you see that those five and a half months you spend in that church each year are just a waste of your time, you will. You will. You’ll see that it’ll take more than five and a half months to wipe away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years (64).

Antoine and Wiggins therefore personify two contrasting educational views. While the first advocates the uselessness of any didactic effort, the latter strives to find a solution for guiding his students in their attempt to overcome the oppressive conditions of their circumscribed existence.³⁷

At the same time, via Grant, Gaines does not only criticize the image of the black fugitive, but also that of the black imitator. In order to accomplish his liberating mission, Grant must prove the falsity of the learning that he has received from university, the place where one is told “how to succeed in the South as a colored man” (65). While in college he has been taught mere numbers and letters, Grant realizes that he needs to grasp the real situation of his people. Gaines presently emphasizes the black students’ manipulation by means of the mirage of a successful career—an idea to be found in Invisible Man, too.

In the famous college episode in Invisible Man, Ellison ironically depicts two heroic black men whose intellectual efforts have lifted their black people: the Founder and Dr. Bledsoe.³⁸ Their legendary biographies document poor men who rose to important positions, leaders who strove to inspire tender minds. A dangerous Janus-faced personality, Bledsoe models his existence upon the white men’s standards, while he stands as an example to emulate for black students.³⁹ As his voice modulates into humbleness and his face assumes the mask of meekness, he is a master of appearance, whose power manipulates the white millionaires who financially “support” the college, but cannot really control it.⁴⁰ Conscious that all institutions are run by white people, Bledsoe has to be subversive and “act the nigger” in order to maintain and consolidate his position. Under his fa�ade of humility, his tactic is doubly aimed at controlling influential white men and deceiving innocent black students—those to be transformed into future teachers.⁴¹

Searching for a solution to the white-faced education presented in Invisible Man, Gaines creates another type of black teacher, essentially different from Bledsoe. Grant Wiggins does not have Dr. Bledsoe’s material possessions, his influence and power, and he is not the leader of a prosperous Southern college. Yet, at his modest school level, Grant dares to search for various educational methods that can reconstruct a liberated image of the African American identity. His confession to Jefferson encompasses his open dissatisfaction with the normative system:

I have always done what they wanted me to do, teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. Nothing else—nothing about dignity, nothing about identity, noting about loving and caring. They never thought we were capable of learning these things. ‘Teach those niggers how to print their names and how to figure on their fingers.’ And I went along, but hating myself all the time for doing so (192).

As the scene takes place in the day room of the prison, where Jefferson is brought with chains around his ankles, the teacher’s words attain a profound significance. Jefferson is one of those misled children who have wrongly internalized the whites’ belief in their superiority, one who has been turned into a victim by their need to consolidate their authority by scapegoating the others.

In order to help Jefferson gain back his self-esteem and develop his personality, Grant asks him to become a hero, in his own words, to be one who does something for the others. Grant’s demand of sacrificial heroism is essential not just for Jefferson’s redemption, but also for educating the others.⁴² In this respect, the black children need someone who can stand as a genuine model of higher conduct. Jefferson’s godmother also needs his courage in order to die peacefully, while Reverend Ambrose considers Jefferson’s conversion a religious example for his community. Last but not least, Grant himself acknowledges Jefferson’s importance in his own process of self-discovery as a true teacher.

At a deeper level, Jefferson’s heroism represents a means of destabilizing the white supremacy, the “old lie that people believe in” (192). Grant explains to Jefferson that the black people need someone who is able to embody the “common humanity that is in us all” (192). Through Jefferson’s example, the meaning of a whole history of slavery has to be overturned, left without a justification. By demonstrating his humanity, Jefferson has to prove the falsity of the white myth, as shown by Grant: “I want you—yes, you—to call them liars. I want you to show them that you are as much a man—more a man than they can ever be… You—you can be bigger than anyone you have ever met” (192-93).

In this light, Gaines undertakes a thorough reconsideration of Ellison’s pedagogic view. While in essence both authors strive to undermine the white supremacy that propagates degrading images of black people, the two authors employ different techniques in order to find educational solutions. Ellison acknowledges pretension as a subversive weapon, whereas Gaines ascribes to heroism a redeeming role.

On the one hand, Ellison advocates invisibility and camouflaged fight through the use of masks and ambivalence as means of overcoming white power. For that reason, the invisible man’s grandfather utters oracular words on his deathbed, advising the narrator to be “a spy in the enemy’s country,” to “overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction” (13). In this sense, the narrator’s emblematic invisibility is nothing else that “covert preparation for a more overt action” (Invisible Man 11).

On the other hand, Gaines stresses the significance of Jefferson’s visibility and exemplary posture as a means of undermining white rules: “You have the chance of being bigger than anyone who has ever lived on that plantation or come from this little town. You can do it if you try” (193). Above all, the author conflates a strong message of racial uplift in Jefferson’s transfiguration. It is the aim of the next part to demonstrate how Jefferson’s identity comes to symbolize that “piece of drifting wood” that can be polished through the increased efforts of communal support.

NOTES

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