“Vito Russo pointed out in cinema . . . that historically, the gay character always had to end up with his head in the oven or in some similar state,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explained in a 1991 interview. “It was like a Hays rule that you had to come to a bad end. Giovanni’s Room isn’t really an exception to this; and in Randall Kenan’s book you get a brilliant tormented homosexual, Horace, who commits suicide” (in Rowell, 454).1 Gates praised Kenan’s novel A Visitation of Spirits but was nonetheless wary of the suicidal ending: “There’s another way of reading this [suicide]: which is just as a way of registering some pretty tragic facts of history. . . . But I want Randall Kenan to, as it were, take Horace to the big city in his next novel” (in Rowell, 454).
Gates’s prescription for Kenan is in many ways predictable; the “migration to the big city” is a widely available trope in contemporary lesbian and gay literature, with a long and illustrious history2 And yet I find the need to transport characters like Horace off to “the big city” symptomatic of a regional elision in queer theory generally. What Gates elides in his suggestion to Kenan is the fact that taking Horace to anywhere also entails taking him from somewhere. In this case, the unmentioned “somewhere” is the fictional Fundamentalist Christian, rural, African American community of Tims Creek, North Carolina. Not the most conducive atmosphere for the expression of queer desire, certainly; but as liberal lesbian and gay thought likes to remind us, “we are everywhere,” and rather than concede that “everywhere” actually means New York and San Francisco, I am interested in the (perhaps more radical) implications of recognizing that “everywhere” includes such an apparently marginal and inhospitable place.
Gates’s vision of Horace in the big city is understandable given the tragic suicide that ends the novel, yet the desire to fix Horace’s situation is not exactly true to Gates’s own theories of signification. In The Signifying Monkey (and elsewhere), Gates examines the rhetorical process of “Signifyin(g)” as it has evolved in diverse African Caribbean and African American communities.3 “The Afro-American concept of Signifying),” Gates writes, involves “formal revision that is at all points double-voiced” (22). Gates sees this double-voiced rhetorical principle at play in the Signifying Monkey tales, which have been passed on and revised by African American speakers in “barrooms, pool halls, and [on] street corners” (54). The Signifying Monkey tales present listeners with a master of trickery: the Signifying Monkey bests his opponent, the Lion, by skillfully opening up a play of meaning. Through a series of insults directed at the Lion and attributed to the Elephant, the Signifying Monkey tricks the Lion into sparring with the Elephant, who—in turn—always physically defeats this supposed “king of the jungle.” The Signifying Monkey succeeds because the Lion, who always equates the figurative with the literal, is unable to see through the Monkey’s linguistic games. “Another way of reading” A Visitation of Spirits could position the text within the tradition of Signifyin(g), considering how the novel shapes a queer trickster identity that rewrites both the “pretty tragic facts of history” that Gates acknowledges and the “corrective” he offers: the migration to the big city.
Contemporary gay fiction that deals with “family” or “community” often exposes the ways those concepts cover over difference: the group achieves a cohesive identity through disavowal of “aberrant” individual identities. Thus, as Gates suggests, “One thing that a good deal of contemporary fiction that deals realistically with gay themes achieves, which I think is very important, is to desentimentalize the notion of ‘community’ as an unadulterated good” (in Rowell, 454). In my mind, this is precisely what Kenan does with the story of Horace in A Visitation of Spirits; yet Gates is uncomfortable enough with Horace’s suicide to envision another community for Horace in “the big city.” Certainly, the narrative in which Gates places Horace allows for the possibility of an alternative community, perhaps one more akin to the sustaining community envisioned in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Difference, however, is again suppressed by transporting Horace off to a community of others “like him,” and away from the community he threatens. Locating Horace in an urban area where, presumably, a “black gay identity” is more developed and secure4 effaces the possibility of transforming the community in which Horace is already located and—more important—undermines Kenan’s critique of the “regime of sameness” embodied by the people of Tims Creek.
The term regime of sameness is Marcos Becquer’s, and before I proceed with my reading of Horace and “transformation” in Tims Creek, North Carolina, I want to use Becquer’s analysis to center my own. Becquer analyzes “snapping” and “vogueing,” two of the black gay discursive practices celebrated in and by Marlon Riggs’s critically acclaimed film Tongues Untied.5 Since the discursive practices in Riggs’s film “emerge both from within and against the cultural and historical discourses operating around them” (8), Becquer argues that “Tongues Untied can confront and condemn the regime of sameness which alienates black gays from the black community, the white gay community, and discourse/representation in general” (14). In other words, black gays, confronted by black heterosexual or white gay communities with the compulsion to be “the same,” can, in turn, use the discourses made available by those very communities to contest such a compulsion.6 Becquer’s analysis thus foregrounds “difference” while nonetheless arguing for the connective, political importance of a subverted and subversive “sameness”:
It is, then, however ironically or heroically, just that differentiated voice within sameness which Tongues Untied attempts to distill, so as to ensure not only that black gays speak up, but that they remain audible in discourse. It proceeds, then, not by nullifying the value of sameness within difference . . . but by acknowledging its political importance and admitting, within the logic of “constructed identity,” that sameness is always already a part of difference, as well as vice versa. (15)
Becquer’s theory, with its focus on snapping and vogueing, is particularly relevant when discussing the tremendous outpouring of urban and secular black gay cultural production represented in films such as Riggs’s Tongues Untied and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning. Indeed, Becquer explicitly elaborates on “black gays’ secular use of snapping as a means by which to metaphorically awaken one out of the codes of (discursive) domination” and on vogueing’s “reconstitut[ion of] the literal urban battlefield of bloody violence . . . into a figurative arena upon which these confrontations between images are played out” (9, 12; my emphasis). In this urban and secular context, snapping and vogueing address the exclusionary practices of black heterosexual and white gay communities: Becquer concludes, for instance, that the segment on snapping in Tongues Untied “depicts the snap precisely in its ability to overcome the discursive mechanisms which position black gays beneath both black heterosexuals and white gays” (9). Through the snap, black gays reposition themselves as apart from and yet a part of, on the one hand, white gays, and on the other hand, black heterosexuals, and “the very binarism of sameness/difference” (15) is thereby deconstructed. In other words, snapping (and elsewhere in Becquer’s article, vogueing) works as an empowering and signifying difference for black gays, but this signifying difference nonetheless forges connections with the groups it critiques. With this revised idea of sameness in mind, Becquer concludes, “Tongues Untied is not a separatist film” (15).
Becquer’s analysis is fueled by “recent revisions of identity politics,” which understand identity as a construction and thus allow for “the hope of deconstructing the binarism of otherness which marks discursive alienation and domination by acknowledging that the other is always already a part of ourselves and vice-versa” (7). Yet, although putting sameness back into difference forges connections and hence undermines, as Becquer argues, black homophobia and white gay racism, this queer theoretical move should not overshadow the ongoing need for a queer theory that challenges the “regime of sameness,” even when that regime is reproduced inside the cultural category “black gay.” Despite Becquer’s best efforts, indeed, his article concludes with the inscription of a fairly monolithic, snapping and vogueing “black gay identity” singular (16). Although he begins the article decrying “the essentialism inherent in notions of the black subject or the gay sensibility” (7), Becquer himself subtly moves from plurality to singularity in his discussion of black gay identities: Tongues Untied is, at the beginning, “a condensed version of black gay (collective) experiences” (8) but has become, by the end, a celebration of “the emergence of a black gay difference that is unique” (15).
This slippage does not invalidate Becquer’s argument; it simply demonstrates, as Ed Cohen suggests, that “no matter how sensitively we go about it, ‘identity politics’ has great difficulty in affirming difference(s)” (“Who Are ‘We’?” 76). Becquer’s article, with its critique of white gay and black heterosexual hegemony, recognizes the difficulty of affirming difference but simultaneously affirms the “sameness” that is always already present within “difference.” Cohen argues, however, with a nod to Diana Fuss, that “identity politics is predicated on denying the difference that is already there in ‘the same’” (”Who Are ‘We’?” 76). This predication ensures that difference can be denied or repressed even when identity politics is grounded in sophisticated poststructuralist attempts, such as Becquer’s, to move beyond the sameness/difference binarism.
While black gays are undeniably marginalized by black heterosexuals and by both heterosexual and gay whites, and hence are strategically positioned to disrupt and decenter heterosexual and white hegemony, a focus on urban black gays will always, in turn, produce other margins. Still, I want to extend rather than disarm Becquer’s analysis. By pushing his ideas further, I hope to create a space in which to consider black gay cultural production (and perhaps queer cultural production generally) outside an urban, secular arena.7 It was no accident that I used Becquer’s analysis to “center” my own. Until quite recently, queer theory has predominantly “centered” on urban areas. Such a focus is in some ways inevitable: after all, as John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman explain, it was initially in American cities that a gay subculture flourished in the middle of the twentieth century (288). The urban “center” that D’Emilio, Freedman, and other queer theorists and historians have analyzed, though, might be productively understood as part of a complex array of “centers” and “margins,” since both concepts emerge relationally. Moreover, in the Queer Renaissance, critical interrogation of the processes of marginaliza-tion might proceed hand in hand with the establishment of unexpected, even unlikely, new centers. Thus we would do well to consider—before placing Kenan’s Horace “safely” (or more “appropriately”?) in an urban “center”—just what black queer desire is doing in, or does to, rural North Carolina. Essex Hemphill’s words, with their subtle promise/threat that black gays will transform whatever community they are in, seem appropriate to me here: “I ask you brother: Does your mama really know about you? Does she really know what I am?... I hope so, because I am coming home” (Ceremonies, 42).8
A Visitation of Spirits concerns itself with several members of the Cross-Greene clan, an African American family living in Tims Creek, North Carolina, in the mid-1980s.9 The novel focuses particularly on Horace, the youngest member of the Cross family, and on Jimmy Greene, Horace’s cousin, the young minister at the First Baptist Church of Tims Creek and the first black principal of Tims Creek Elementary School. A Visitation of Spirits is organized around two days in the life of the Cross-Greene family: December 8, 1985, and April 29–30, 1984. The text moves back and forth between these two days, and each section heading further specifies the exact placement of events in time: for instance, “December 8, 1985 / 8:45 A.M. . .. April 30, 1984 / 1:15 A.M. (3, 66). This temporal precision gives each section of the novel the appearance of measurable, scientific “fact”; the events of A Visitation of Spirits, however, belie any easy distinction between “fact” and “fiction.” Unable to live up to the (heterosexual) expectations of the community and consequently dissatisfied with his life, Horace Cross attempts to use a magic spell to transform himself into a bird. When the transformation fails, “spirits” and “demons” reveal themselves to Horace in order to lead him on a whirlwind journey through his own life. Past, present, and future blur together as freely as fact and fantasy as Horace’s journey progresses. Even Horace himself is confused as to whether what he is seeing is “real” or not. One of the demons attempts to explain: “Ghosts? Yeah, you might call them ghosts. Ghosts of the past. The presence of the present. The very stuff of which the future is made. This is the effluvium of souls that surround men daily” (73).
The echoes here are of the humanistic, transformative experience of Ebenezer Scrooge, and in fact, Kenan begins his novel with an epigraph from A Christmas Carol. In A Visitation of Spirits, however, Horace is not in a position to experience the same sort of happy ending as Scrooge does in A Christmas Carol. In contrast to the miserly gentleman of Charles Dickens’s tale, Horace, after observing the constraint and confusion he has endured throughout his young life, does not undergo some humanistic “redemption”; instead, he commits suicide. In the end, it is not Horace the individual but the position and the place in which he finds himself that are in need of transformation.
After spending weeks preparing the spell, Horace decides that his transformation into a bird will occur at midnight on April 29, 1984. Horace performs the necessary incantation, and a few minutes after midnight, someone or something begins to call: “The voice said: Come” (27). The remainder of Horace’s story, like Ebenezer Scrooge’s, is told in three episodes, roughly corresponding to Horace’s past, present, and future. In the first episode, the voice/demon shows Horace the “ghosts” of his own past. Horace finds himself in front of the First Baptist Church of Tims Creek, where a service is in progress. His entire family (including a five-year-old version of Horace himself) is present in the congregation. This community, to Horace, is the embodiment of what he is attempting to escape:
They were fat and thin, light and dark, tall and short, farmers, salesmen, mechanics, barbers, nurses, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, lovers, friends. Here was community, not a word but a being. Horace felt it as though for the first time. Here, amid these singing, fanning, breathing beings were his folk, his kin. Did he know them? Had they known him? It was from them he was running. Why? (73)
Clearly, “community” in this episode signifies much differently than it did in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. In my previous chapter, I used Zami to argue for “other” identities; that is, for identities defined in and through others. The community re-presented to Horace by the demon, however, is a far cry from Lorde’s sustaining vision of women working together as friends and lovers. The enumeration of various identities here suggests that this is another “house of difference,” but—pace Zami—Horace at this point wants to define himself only against, not through, this group.
In this chapter, consequently, I look more critically at the idea of community. I explore the ways in which this community incites the “transformation” of Horace the individual, but I also consider, conversely, how the location of Horace and his queer story in rural North Carolina puts into play a critique that has the potential to transform this community, and others like it, on the supposed margins of the queer world. After examining the importance of North Carolina to Horace’s story, I look specifically at the institution in Tims Creek most in need of transformation: the church. I then expand my argument, looking to the community more generally, to consider some strategies (à la Becquer and Gates) that Horace might use to begin the queer work of transforming this community and its institutions. Although this section concludes with some of the ways in which Horace apparently fails to effect change, the next section insists that failure is always only apparent or temporary. Through a reading of Horace’s cousin Jimmy Greene, I argue that A Visitation of Spirits ultimately succeeds in establishing a queer trickster identity intent on exposing the queerness at the center of identification and desire, disrupting the exclusionary logic on which “community” is often founded, and sustaining a transformative critique of this community.
Horace himself underscores the urgency of transformation occurring in rural North Carolina: “Cats had a physical freedom he loved to watch, the svelte, smooth, sliding motion of the great cats of Africa, but he could not see transforming himself into anything that would not fit the swampy woodlands of Southeastern North Carolina. He had to stay here” (11). Horace is imagining his own transformation, not the community’s, but his thoughts here nonetheless provide a point of departure for an interrogation of this queer location. For some reason, Horace feels compelled to stay in Tims Creek; something about the location proscribes the possibility that his story take place elsewhere.
Horace never solves the riddle of why he feels this compulsion to stay, but near the end of the story there is an allusion to a text that could provide some clues. Horace
wrote his autobiography, without stopping, one long suspended effort, words upon words flowing out of him, expressing his grief. But he never read what he had written, hoping rather to exorcise his confusion. So strong was his belief in words—perhaps they would lead him out of this strange world in which he had suddenly found himself. In the end, after reams and reams of paper and thousands of lines of scribble, he had found no answers. In frustration he burned it. (239)
In frustration he burned it; the text that could facilitate an understanding of Horace’s position in “this strange world” is apparently lost. Nothing in this magical realist novel mandates that this “autobiography” remain destroyed, however, and near the end, readers are presented with a short section narrated in Horace’s own voice. This section, “Horace Thomas Cross: Confessions” (245–51), is the only part of the novel in which Horace speaks in the first person. Although it is not “reams and reams of paper,” it does read like the autobiography described above. Almost every sentence of this section in which Horace meditates on his life in Tims Creek begins with the phrase “I remember”: “I remember the first time I saw Granddaddy kill a chicken. I remember it, dirty-white and squawking, and Granddaddy putting it down on a stump” (245). Similar vignettes fill out this representation of life in rural North Carolina as Horace’s “confessions” continue.
Horace himself “never read what he had written,” but it quickly becomes clear to those who do that, despite the hardships Horace endured, this rural setting is not simply the site of “backwardness” or “repression.” Like other communities in which black gay men find themselves, Tims Creek, North Carolina, is a site of struggle and possible transformation. And like the snapping and vogueing black gay men of Becquer’s analysis, Horace’s own queer sense of self emerges both from within and against the community around him:
I remember my Aunt Ruthester’s chocolate-chip cookies and how she would make an extra batch for me. ... I remember the way it made my mouth happy, dissolving almost as soon as I ate it, buttery and hot.
I remember finally touching a man, finally kissing him. I remember the surprise and shock of someone else’s tongue in my mouth. I remember the taste of someone else’s saliva. I remember actually feeling someone else’s flesh, warm, smooth. ... I remember being happy that I was taking a chance with my immortal soul, thinking that I would somehow win in the end and live still, feeling immortal in a mortal’s arms. I remember then regretting that it was such a sin. I remember the feeling I got after we climaxed, feeling hollow and undone, wishing I were some kind of animal, a wolf or a bird or a dolphin, so I would not have to worry about wanting to do it again; I remember worrying how the other person felt.
I remember church and praying. I remember revival meetings and the testifying of women who began to cry before the congregation and ended their plea of hardships and sorrow and faithfulness to the Lord with the request for those who knew the word of prayer to pray much for me. I remember taking Communion and wondering how the bread was the body and the grape juice was the blood and thinking how that made us all cannibals. . . . Then I remember the day I realized that I was probably not going to go home to heaven, cause the rules were too hard for me to keep. That I was too weak.
I remember me. (250–51)
I quote at length from this passage because, as I suggested, this autobiography might provide clues as to what queer desire is doing in, and does to, this community. Clearly, Horace’s desire arises in opposition to the mores of this community; as far as they are concerned, queer desire is simply “sinful.” Because of their stringent moral codes, Horace feels like an outcast and wants to escape by transforming himself into an animal. At the same time, however, Horace’s desire emerges from within this community. The very language of the fire-and-brimstone sermons he has endured (”I remember being happy that I was taking a chance with my immortal soul”) heightens the eroticism of his encounters and helps solidify his developing queer identity. Moreover, despite the fact that Horace ultimately feels weak in the face of such a powerful religious institution, his confessions highlight his attempts to appropriate and re-signify the language of that institution (e.g., “feeling immortal in a mortal’s arms”). In short, this may be a sin, but it is also, nonetheless, a contestation—however temporary—of the community’s ideas about “sin” and “mortality.” As Lisa Duggan writes, the “project of constructing identities” is “a historical process in which contrasting ‘stories’ of the self and others—stories of difference—are told, appropriated, and retold as stories of location in the social world of structured inequalities” (“Trials,” 793). In the fictional social world that is the First Baptist Church of Tims Creek, North Carolina (a “social world of structured inequalities,” certainly), Horace must learn, somehow, to make sense of his identity, and he does so by appropriating the language of this institution for his own queer uses.
Other elements of this autobiography underscore the extent to which Horace uses this particular location to construct and make sense of his own identity. A description of the sumptuous tastes and smells of a country home, for example (the batch of cookies “made my mouth happy .. . buttery and hot”), immediately precedes and influences Horace’s attempt to find a language for making sense of his erotic encounters with men (”I remember the surprise and shock of someone else’s tongue in my mouth. I remember the taste of someone else’s saliva”). And if this sharp juxtaposition were not enough to demonstrate how intertwined the various elements of Horace’s life are, food and flesh come together yet once more in the Communion, as Horace muses on the “cannibalism” of that familiar ritual.
Immediately before the final sentence of these confessions, Horace asserts, “I was too weak.” And yet his “I remember me,” with its placement in a paragraph of its own at the very end of his “Confessions,” overrides such an assertion of weakness and implies that he will not relinquish any part of his identity. The sentence “I remember me” solidifies the confessions that have preceded it as indelible parts of who Horace is. Despite his difference(s), Horace’s identity has been shaped not simply against but also within the community of Tims Creek, North Carolina. Duggan writes that “identity” can be understood “as a narrative of a subject’s location within social structure. . .. Never created out of whole cloth, never uniquely individual, each narrative is a retelling, an act of social interaction, a positioned intervention in the shared, contested narratives of a given culture” (“Trials,” 793–94). Horace concludes that he has lost this “contest”; he feels he must transform himself, since he is “too weak” to live up to the community’s expectations. Yet Horace’s “positioned intervention” might be read differently, in a way that is less “uniquely individual.” Since Horace’s story is an act of social interaction, we might ask ourselves what significance that story and its violent conclusion have for this particular North Carolina community. I contend that Kenan makes the “margins” central to his vision of a transformed community: through and against the tragic trajectory of A Visitation of Spirits, a queer trickster identity materializes. Although such an identity is seemingly deferred during Horace’s brief life, it nonetheless survives after Horace’s death to begin the work of transforming the social structure in which his story is located.
The foundation of the social structure of Tims Creek is the church, and not surprising, the church is the institution sending Horace the loudest message that he, as an individual, is in need of transformation. I have already mentioned Horace’s discomfort at the vision of the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Tims Creek. His discomfort is compounded by the sermon he hears during that vision. The Reverend Hezekiah Barden, minister of the church in the days before Horace’s cousin Jimmy, informs the congregation that he is “gone step on some toes this morning” (77) and proceeds to read from the first chapter of Romans:
They are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful ... for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. (77)
As the sermon continues, the opposition between Horace and this religious community is spelled out in stark terms: “Now you can say, ‘Well, Brother Barden, you ain’t liberated. You ain’t up with the times’. . . Liberated? Behind the times? Brothers and sisters, there is no time but now, and now I am telling you: It’s unclean. You heard what Paul wrote to the Romans: Unclean” (78–79). The voice of the congregation serves as a chorus behind Barden’s sermon, giving its approval to everything he says: “Unclean. . . . Go head, Reverend, and preach, now. ... Go on ahead. Tell it. . . .” (79–80). The community/chorus positions the Reverend Barden as its voice or representative, and as far as he is concerned, homosexuality and Christianity are mutually exclusive; being “clean” means not being gay.10 Hence, when the queer individual confronts this religious institution, something clearly has to give.
That religion, and not Horace, should be what gives is corroborated by Kenan’s signification on other texts. I have already mentioned how A Visitation of Spirits reverses the individualistic equation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Beyond this, however, Kenan’s novel is a complex signification on James Baldwin’s 1953 Go Tell It on the Mountain.11 The story of a young boy torn between sin and the church, after all, has been told before. Through A Visitation of Spirits, Kenan rewrites Baldwin’s story of John Grimes, bringing it—if you will—out of the closet. Even the epigraphs to the various sections of Kenan’s novel occasionally repeat, with a difference, the epigraphs in Baldwin’s; for example, both authors employ, in some way, Revelation 22:17: “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” As an epigraph to the first section of his novel, Baldwin simply repeats verbatim the King James Version of this text. As an epigraph to the second section of his novel, Kenan reworks and shortens the passage: “Whosoever will, let him come . . .” (29). This epigraph not only echoes Baldwin; it also echoes the voice Horace hears after his attempt to turn himself into a bird fails. In this context, Kenan’s epigraph repeats with a difference: “let him come” takes on a queer new meaning. In A Visitation of Spirits, which openly details one young boy’s confrontation with his homosexuality and in which a deep voice repeatedly tells him to “come,” the homoerotic pun on the word is difficult to miss. Kenan’s signification, in turn, makes it well-nigh impossible to read Baldwin’s epigraph “straight.” Beginning with the epigraphs, then, the two texts come together, and Baldwin’s “closeted” text is, in effect, “outed” by Kenan’s.
Kenan’s signification on Baldwin is much more complex than a simple reworking of epigraphs, however. A Visitation of Spirits in general reads like an openly gay version of Go Tell It on the Mountain, and it is Kenan’s more general signification on Baldwin that suggests the church and community in A Visitation of Spirits, not Horace, are in need of transformation. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, John—like Horace—struggles against sin: “all the pressures of church and home [were] uniting to drive him to the altar” (13). Moreover, just as it does for Horace and the community of Tims Creek, North Carolina, “sin” for John and the others in Go Tell It on the Mountain particularly connotes “sins of the flesh.” John watches the pastor’s nephew Elisha and his girlfriend, Ella Mae, for instance, when they are brought before the church for a “public warning” designed to keep them from having sex, which would be the “ultimate” transgression: “Sin was not in their minds—not yet; yet sin was in the flesh; and should they continue with their walking out alone together, their secrets and laughter, and touching of hands, they would surely sin a sin beyond all forgiveness” (17). In his own life, likewise, John’s fear of sin and damnation is always connected to the “flesh”:
He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive. In the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver, who made bets with each other as to whose urine could arch higher, he had watched in himself a transformation of which he would never dare to speak. (18–19)
As this passage makes clear, however, even though both young men struggle against the “flesh,” there is a significant difference between the “temptations” Elisha faces and those facing John. Although it is not as explicitly gay as Horace’s story in A Visitation of Spirits, John’s struggle against “sin” has an implicit homoerotic dimension. In fact, the “un-speakability” of John’s desires here only confirms this particular dimension of his struggle. As Eve Sedgwick makes clear, there is a “centuries-long historical chain of substantive uses of space-clearing negatives to void and at the same time to underline the possibility of male same-sex genitality” (Epistemology, 202). According to Sedgwick, “the speakable nonmedical terms, in Christian tradition, for the homosexual possibility for men” were (and are), paradoxically, such terms as unspeakable, unmentionable, things fearful to name, and the love that dare not speak its name (202–3). Hence John’s attempt to shield himself here is ironically his undoing; he speaks (queer) volumes in his very efforts to remain silent.12
In addition to the masturbatory fantasies growing out of his observation of the genital play of the “older, bigger, braver” boys, John is virtually obsessed with Elisha, and that obsession is almost always detailed in physical terms: “John stared at Elisha all during the [Sunday school] lesson, admiring the timbre of Elisha’s voice, much deeper and manlier than his own, admiring the leanness, and grace, and strength, and darkness of Elisha in his Sunday suit, wondering if he would ever be holy as Elisha was holy” (13). Baldwin goes no further with John’s obsession than this, but in his signification on Go Tell It on the Mountain, Kenan does. Horace in A Visitation of Spirits is much more specific about the ways in which such homoerotic preoccupations bring discomfort to a young boy in the church: “He would be lying to himself if he said he had not been attracted to Gideon. . . . Why couldn’t the Lord take this bit of torture, this careful trap away? Give him larceny to fight instead. Let his piety be questioned. Try to force him to lie, to worship false gods, to dishonor his mother and father, to covet his neighbor’s home . . . but why Gideon?” (146).
The differences between the two texts are not reducible to their relative openness or secrecy about homoerotic desire, however. Horace’s story diverges from John’s at key points, and it is ultimately in the two texts’ divergence, more than in their convergence, that Kenan’s sharp indictment of the church comes out. Like Horace throughout A Visitation of Spirits, John goes through a harrowing, “supernatural” experience in the last section of Go Tell It on the Mountain. John falls to the floor of the church in some sort of ecstatic, spiritual trance, and like Horace, begins to hear voices calling to him. Eventually, one voice in particular pulls John out of this trance: “‘Rise up, Johnny,’ said Elisha. .. . ‘Are you saved, boy?’ ‘Yes,’ said John, ‘oh, yes!’” (206). Like Horace, John is “transformed” by his supernatural experience; unlike Horace, John is “saved.” Of course, there is a fair amount of irony in Baldwin’s novel; Baldwin is by no means uncritical of the church, and consequently, exactly how or whether John’s life will be different remains unclear in the last line of the novel: “‘I’m ready,’ John said, ‘I’m coming. I’m on my way’” (221). Still, John himself claims to be positively transformed by his experience. He ultimately submits to the church’s authority, even though that submission is channeled through his homoerotic obsession for Elisha: “Elisha ... no matter what happens to me, where I go, what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you remember—please remember—I was saved. I was there” (220).
In Kenan’s re-vision of the confrontation between a young boy and the church, however, accommodation to this religious institution, as it is, is no longer possible. Through Horace’s suicide, A Visitation of Spirits suggests, in contrast to Go Tell It on the Mountain, that the gay individual cannot and does not survive such attempts at accommodation with the church. In the end, the religious institution, and not John/Horace, needs to be “saved.” Salvation, certainly, is a seemingly difficult concept to queer, but A Visitation of Spirits nonetheless sets just such a queering into motion. If the straight definition of the term fixes the meaning of actions (as, for instance, “sin”) or individuals (as “redeemed” or “damned”), then the queer concept opens up a play of meaning that disrupts these fixations and establishes another sort of church altogether.13
Religion is just one facet—the most prominent and oppressive facet—of community life in Tims Creek. The church is not the only place, however, where Horace feels he does not belong, and the church is hence not the only part of the community in need of transformation. Indeed, Horace confronts the “regime of sameness” almost everywhere he goes in Tims Creek. None of the subcommunities of which Horace is a part is comfortable with “difference” within its ranks; thus, in none of the locations in which Horace finds himself is he able to be comfortable with “sameness.” The compulsion to be “the same,” even as it is reproduced within the cultural category “black gay,” invalidates any of Horace’s attempts to come to terms with his own identity. “You black, ain’t you?” Horace’s aunt asks him (186). One of Horace’s lovers from the community theater where he works taunts him, “Faggot.... What’s the matter? Don’t like to be called what you are?” (225). Even Gideon, another black gay character who is Horace’s first affair, says to Horace in the heat of an argument, “But remember, black boy, you heard it here first: You’re a faggot, Horace. . . . At least I know what I am” (164).
In each confrontation, it is not that the labels are wholly inappropriate for Horace; it is just that every question of identity in A Visitation of Spirits needs to be followed by a “yes, but. . .” Judith Butler’s comments are particularly relevant to Horace’s situation here: “The prospect of being anything . . . seems to be more than a simple injunction to become who or what I already am” (“Imitation,” 13). Throughout A Visitation of Spirits, the discordant and demanding chorus of voices surrounding Horace immobilizes him, apparently preventing any strategic resistance of the compulsion to be the same.
As a black gay teenager in Tims Creek, Horace always finds himself embodying what are—at least, to the other members of the groups of which he is a part—contradictory identities: in his own family, as in the church, he is “black,” but not “gay”; at the community theater where he works, he (along with many of the other actors) is openly “gay,” but his “blackness” is rendered invisible (particularly by the production itself, which is about the history of the Cross family—the white Cross family—in North Carolina); with his “alternative” and white high school friends, he is “smart and black” (237), but he is not “gay,” and he feels his “blackness” is tokenized. Only with Gideon does Horace find a “niche,” where he should “fit” exactly. But, although their relationship is consummated, Horace and Gideon do not embrace a “black gay identity” together, an identity with which they subvert and expose the contradictions of the various communities of which they are constituents. Instead, the pressure from each of these communities precludes the possibility of Gideon and Horace coming together. Horace, caught up in the belief that he is in need of transformation, is ultimately unable to imagine that he and Gideon might work together to transform others. Gideon comes to signify, for Horace, everything about himself that must be obliterated. In his final scene with Gideon, Horace literalizes this belief by attacking Gideon: “Horace hit Gideon. Full square in the mouth, so quickly he himself did not realize what he had done, so hard he could not doubt he meant to do it. But had he wanted to hit Gideon, or himself for not wanting to hit him?” (163).
The reflection of himself that Horace sees in Gideon is, in an earlier scene, even more explicit: “Gideon turned around and looked at Horace. He paid no attention to the snickering boys who stood about Horace; he just fixed Horace with a gaze whose intensity frightened him. Now, looking at the phantoms, Horace realized how it had seemed to be more than an angry glare. It was more of a curse. A prophecy” (100). This defiant gaze links Gideon, and the potential for a black gay identity that Gideon embodies, to Horace. Horace (mis)recognizes himself in Gideon, and this event—in a world where every community appears to legislate against the very possibility of such an identity—propels Horace forward onto a path fraught with anxiety. Throughout A Visitation of Spirits, Horace is caught in a cycle of recognition and disavowal, which his confrontation with Gideon instigates. Horace does not see his identification with Gideon as a locus of possibility; he cannot comprehend “black gay identity” as a multivalent sign that has the potential to open up or disrupt the meanings of “community” that debilitate him. Instead, believing he has seen the final “truth” about himself in Gideon, Horace feels compelled to repudiate such a truth, due to the prohibitions he feels from various communities against embracing such an identity.
In a pivotal scene near the end of the novel (in a section where, a la Dickens, the voice of the ghost has disappeared, even though a presence remains behind to show Horace visions of things yet to come), although Gideon is no longer present, there is a final repetition of what has become for Horace the terrifying cycle of recognition and disavowal. On entering a room at the theater, Horace sees a black man, dressed as a clown, applying white makeup. As Horace comes closer to the figure, he realizes that it is himself: “The double stood up. He was exactly the same height as Horace, the same build. In his sparkling color, he turned to look at both their reflections in the mirror: Horace in his brown nakedness, covered with dirt and ash and grass in his hair, a gun in his hand, and the other Horace, white-faced, dressed as a clown” (220). Horace (mis)recognizes himself and himself and himself, but like his encounters with Gideon, this recognition is not ultimately reassuring but rather the sign of some terrible inadequacy: “Of all the things he had seen this night, all the memories he had confronted, all the ghouls and ghosts and specters, this shook him the most. Stunned, confused, bewildered, he could only stare at his reflection, seeing him and him and him” (219).
Horace’s reaction here is, not surprisingly, a far cry from the strategic, subversive use to which some (urban) black gay men put mirrors. Becquer writes that
the voguer creates a scenario in which s/he first carefully arranges him/herself before a mirror. . . . Once satisfied with his/her own constructed image, the voguer then turns the mirror onto his/her opponent. This is done in the hopes of making evident how badly the opponent is in need of a dramatic make-up job, that is, of a drastic reconstruction and reconceptual-ization of his/her own identity. . . . While the Lacanian subject razsrecognizes him/herself as a whole before the mirror, the voguer recognizes him/herself as a construction. In this sense the voguer can be seen to make use of the very simulacrum by which the Lacanian subject is duped. (13)
In A Visitation of Spirits, exactly the opposite happens to Horace. Turning to the mirror, he can see only how badly he himself is in need of reconstruction/reconceptualization. The terror for Horace in all of this doubling and redoubling lies in the recognition of what he believes is the “truth” about himself, which he can no longer escape: he is a clown, he wears a mask, he only plays a role, he betrays the communities of which he is a part.
In The Signifying Monkey, Gates suggests, “Thinking about the black concept of Signifyin(g) is a bit like stumbling unaware into a hall of mirrors: the sign itself appears to be doubled, at the very least, and (re)doubled upon ever closer examination” (44). But although Becquer’s voguers—like, indeed, the Signifying Monkey himself, who might be understood as their analogue—would be able to “work” the indeterminacy of the signifier that such a stumbling into a hall of mirrors would entail (Becquer writes, “The voguer ‘reads’ the simulacrum” [13]), Horace, even as he literally stumbles into just such a hall, is not. Despite the literal proliferation of meanings and identities in this scene, Horace believes he is stuck with one wholly inadequate identity, which is always and only “disgusting,” “unclean,” an “abomination” (100). Equating the figurative with the literal (or the reflection/representation with the essence) and reading the literal as inescapable, Horace is unable to recognize and deploy the constructedness of identity against the multiple communities that surround him.
The Signifying Monkey of Gates’s analysis succeeds precisely because of his ability to luxuriate in the indeterminacy of meaning. Horace, however, explicitly rejects such a potentially liberating strategy. In the end, like the lion who is always signified on in the Signifying Monkey tales, Horace is undone by the indeterminacy of meaning:
Then ... he saw what he had led himself to see, the reason, the logic, the point. It was round and square. It was hard and soft, black and white, cold and hot, smooth and rough, young and old. It had depth and was shallow, was bright and dull, took light and gave light, was generous and greedy. Holy and profane. Ignorant and wise. Horace saw it and it saw Horace, like the moon, like the sea, like the mountain—so large he could not miss it, so small he could barely see it. The most simple, the most complex, the most wrong, the most right. . . . Horace saw clearly through a glass darkly and understood where he fit. Understood what was asked of him.
Horace shook his head. No. He turned away. No. He turned his heart away. No.
This had been Horace’s redemption, and Horace said no. (232, 234)
Exactly what “it” is that might have been Horace’s redemption is unclear in this list of oxymorons, although Horace’s rejection of this redemption is clear. The “meaning,” or signified, of this vision, however, may be beside the point. What Horace refuses by turning away from this list of oxymorons is not the signified but—as Gates might put it—the “sheer materiality, and the willful play, of the signifier itself” (Signifying Monkey, 59). Horace is apparently unable to deploy the instability of the signifier to his advantage, in contrast to secular and urban black gays who “read” the inadequacies of the communities in which they are positioned by snapping and vogueing, and in contrast to that exemplary trickster figure, the Signifying Monkey. Instead, Horace turns away from such strategies and maintains until the end that he himself, and not his location, needs transformation.
A Visitation of Spirits is, after all, a tragedy, and from this point in the text Horace’s story moves with apocalyptic rapidity toward its suicidal conclusion. In my placement of voguers and the Signifying Monkey alongside Horace’s final vision, however, I mean to suggest that the text points to another possibility: a queer trickster identity might make evident to the communities of Tims Creek how badly they are in need of a “dramatic make-up job.” In the Signifying Monkey tales, the Monkey repeatedly trounces his opponents by luxuriating in the indeterminacy of meaning. Gates writes, “Motivated Signifyin(g) is the sort in which the Monkey delights; it functions to redress an imbalance of power, to clear a space, rhetorically. To achieve occupancy in this desired space, the Monkey rewrites the received order by exploiting the Lion’s hubris and his inability to read the figurative other than as the literal” (Signifying Monkey, 124). Horace’s vision likewise affords him the opportunity to rewrite the received order; the string of oxymorons directs attention away from the signified and toward the sheer materiality of the signifier, providing Horace with a glimpse of a world where what is profane is holy, and what is most wrong is most right. Gates explains, “The Signifying Monkey tales .. . can be thought of as versions of daydreams, the Daydream of the Black Other, chiastic fantasies of reversal of power relationships” (Signifying Monkey, 85). Horace’s final vision is a textbook example of such a daydream in which power relationships are reversed, and although he refuses to embrace and deploy what had been his “redemption,” his vision at the very least suggests that these fantasies are always already in circulation, even within a community as apparently “marginal” and “stable” as Tims Creek, North Carolina.
The Signifying Monkey’s strategy depends on repetition, with a difference, of the signifier; in other words, the Monkey understands and exploits the impossibility of attaching the signifier to one fixed signified. This “repetition with a difference” might be productively linked to Judith Butler’s idea of “subversive repetition” (in fact, Butler’s subversive repetition can be said to depend on repetition with a difference). Particularly in light of Horace’s “inevitable” tragedy, Butler’s comments seem appropriate:
Heterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals heterosexuality itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy. Indeed, I would offer this insight into heterosexuality as both a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself, as an alternative gay/lesbian perspective. (Gender Trouble, 122)
To Butler, identity is constituted through a series of attempts to embody normative gender and sexual identities. She argues that the compulsive repetition these normative positions engender exposes the “truth” of identity as a fiction: “The injunction to be a. given gender produces necessary failures, a variety of incoherent configurations that in their multiplicity exceed and defy the injunction by which they are generated” (Gender Trouble, 145). Butch/femme and drag performances are among the “subversive bodily acts” that particularly foreground this defiance. Such practices parody the idea of an original gender identity and in the process “reveal . . . the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (Gender Trouble, 137). The attention to style over substance suggests an affinity between the cultural practice of drag or butch/femme and the practice of Signifyin(g), which similarly turns on an awareness of the distinction between manner and matter (Gates, Signifying Monkey, 70). Horace refuses to admit such a distinction and is thus unable to claim an “alternative gay/lesbian perspective,” such as the perspective Butler envisions. Instead, the compulsion to be the same has engendered in Horace the belief that his identity must be fixed, once and for all. Neither a single individual nor the regime of sameness with which he contends, however, can entirely contain the gender trouble Horace’s story spotlights. As the next section argues, gender trouble keeps in play not only the meaning of Horace’s identity but even the meaning, or the supposed certainty, of his inevitable “tragedy” and “death.”
At this point in the novel, however, it would seem that Horace’s journey—in contrast to Ebenezer Scrooge’s—does indeed end in death.14 The neo-Dickensian specter finally leads Horace to a cemetery: “Convincing himself he knew the outcome of this story, he fully expected to see his own grave. Though he did not understand the point of this transparent charade, he was convinced that would be the best end” (231). Prior to his suicide, and standing before the grave, Horace confronts his double one last time. Following Gates and Butler, I propose that this double, because of the “redemptive” vision he provokes, embodies the “sheer materiality” and “willful play” of the signifier. Face-to-face with the slipperiness of signification, however, Horace determines to end it once and for all:
His reflection stood there, his hand extended. I’m your way, he said. . . . You can follow the demon if you want. It’s your choice.
Horace looked at his hand. His hand. Never had he felt such self-loathing, and by and by, his depression became anger as he glared at the spirit. . . .
In such a rage he could barely see, Horace raised his gun and fired. The report was not as loud as he had expected. But there on the ground he lay, himself, a gory red gash through his chest. His face caught in a grimace, moaning and speaking incoherently. Please. No. No. He looked at his hand, covered in blood, and Horace looked up at Horace, his eyes full of horror, but in recognition too, as if to say: You meant it, didn’t you? You actually hate me? (234–35)
Gates writes that “the Signifying Monkey is often called the Signifier, he who wreaks havoc upon the Signified” (Signifying Monkey, 52). In stark contrast, Horace in the end wreaks havoc on the Signifier, his “redemption,” and consequently, it is he himself who is undone.
Even as it questions it (”Why? Why. You didn’t have to”), the text itself thus graphically stages Horace’s rejection of the Signifyin(g) alternative. In some ways, then, neither Gates’s nor my vision of and for Horace is realized: Horace is not transported “safely” off to the big city, and neither is he able to begin a much-needed transformation of the place where he is already located. Indeed, as early as the scene in which he hits Gideon, Horace—confirmed in the belief that he, and not his surroundings, must change—dismisses the idea of “another world, another place”: “He imagined another world, another place, in which he could gladly have complied with Gideon’s wish and fallen into lusty, steamy, lascivious abandon—but no” (164).
His inability to imagine such a place, along with his subsequent suicide, demonstrates what the compulsion to be the same has done to Horace. In the context of all the demands put on him by various communities, Horace’s suicide can be seen as an apt re-presentation of the violence involved in the attempt to “alienate conclusively, definitionally, from anyone on any theoretical ground the authority to describe and name their own sexual desire” (Sedgwick, Epistemology, 26), or indeed, any component of their own identity. That A Visitation of Spirits appeared in the same year (1989) that right-wing religious and political leaders attempted to suppress the findings of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Youth Suicide, which claimed that gay teenagers account for 30 percent of all teenage suicides (Ruta, 12), only underscores the validity of representing the compulsion toward sameness as violence.15 Horace’s suicide is detailed in stark, scientific (and hence “real”) prose and is juxtaposed to the “fantastic” events in this postmodern, magical realist text. The realness of the suicide moves the theoretical opposition “Is It Real?”/”Is It Fantasy?” to a more urgent level and, in the process, starkly confronts and condemns the community where Horace is located: What if it is real? How is the community implicated in such violence?
In spite of Horace’s violent rejection of the Signifyin(g) possibilities embodied in his double, then, the text itself provokes a critique of the community. Immediately after the suicide, the question of what queer desire (and its violent extermination) is doing in and to rural North Carolina is foregrounded. As the novel concludes, the narration shifts to the second person in a nostalgic section called “Requiem for Tobacco”:
You remember, though perhaps you don’t, that once upon a time men harvested tobacco by hand. There was a time when folk were bound together in a community, as one, and helped one person this day and that day another, and another the next, to see that everyone got his tobacco crop in the barn each week, and that it was fired and cured and taken to a packhouse to be graded and eventually sent to market. But this was once upon a time. (254)
The section continues, lamenting the tragic loss of this idyllic way of life. But this section is already and inescapably in dialogue with the suicide that immediately precedes it. Because of this dialogue, the “time when folk were bound together in a community, as one,” is exposed even as it is being constructed. The mythical, pastoral wholeness of this “community” is ripped apart as surely as “the bullet did break the skin of his forehead, pierce the cranium, slice through the cortex and cerebellum, irreparably bruising the cerebrum and medulla oblongata, and emerge from the back of the skull, all with a wet and lightning crack. This did happen” (253). Mikhail Bakhtin argues that “sexuality is almost always incorporated into the idyll only in sublimated form,” since the idyllic form in literature demands a unity of time and place that smooths over differences and avoids the “naked realistic aspect” of life (226). Kenan’s juxtaposition here of idyll and suicide foregrounds the murderous consequences of such a sublimation. Kenan himself insists, in a recent interview, “It seemed, and it seems . .. that for that community to change they have to understand the devastation that they’re wreaking on certain people” (in Hunt, 416). In the end, Horace’s story highlights the need for transformation of this community on the margins of the queer world. Kenan’s shift to second-person narration in the conclusion further emphasizes this need: although “you remember” what this community was like, you should not, after A Visitation of Spirits, be able to consider this or any community without a queer sense that something is amiss.
The “Requiem for Tobacco” section that concludes A Visitation of Spirits is not the first time in the text that the narrator addresses the reader directly. The very first section of the novel—”December 8, 1985 / 8:45 A.M. (3)—concludes with a similar account of a “time when folk were bound together in a community as one.” This section, “ADVENT (or The Beginning of the End)” (6), describes a community coming together for a hog killing and, like “Requiem for Tobacco,” includes direct appeals to the reader:
You’Ve been to a hog killing before, haven’t you? They don’t happen as often as they once did. People simply don’t raise hogs like they used to.
Once, in this very North Carolina town, practically everyone with a piece of land kept a hog or two, at least. And come the cold months of December and January folk would begin to butcher and salt and smoke and pickle. In those days a hog was a mighty good thing to have, to see you through the winter. But you know all this, don’t you? (6)
Nostalgia for “those days” permeates the section, yet the jeering tone of the second-person appeals undercuts any sense of security that the nostalgia might have brought. As in “Requiem for Tobacco,” the second-person narration taunts “you,” instilling a queer sense of uneasiness, suggesting that something is wrong with this idyllic communal picture and that “you” are somehow complicit in the problem.
Everyone in the community has an expected role to play in the hog killing, as they do at the end of the text, in “Requiem for Tobacco.” Women and men alike know their place, and each group entrusts to the other the socialization of girls and boys, respectively. “Advent” is associated with the beginning of a new cycle, and this Advent is no exception. Through shared and recurrent rituals such as this hog killing, the socialization of the community’s youth into fixed gender roles commences:
Beneath the shed, the women would be busy, with knives, with grinders, with spoons and forks; the greasy tables littered with salts and peppers and spices, hunks of meat, bloody and in pans to be made into sausages, pans of cooked liver to be made into liver pudding. Remember the odor of cooking meats and spices, so thick, so heady?. . . Some older man will give a young boy a gun, perhaps, and instruct him not to be afraid, to take his time, to aim straight. The men will all look at one another and the boy with a sense of mutual pride, as the man goes over to the gate and with some effort moves the three slats that close off the hogpen. (8)
The boy cum man then takes his gun and slaughters the hog, whose sacrifice will guarantee the continued vitality of this community and its rituals.
“But,” as the narrator says, “I’m sure youVe witnessed all this, of course” (8). And in a sense, this community has indeed witnessed such a “sacrifice” before: even though Horace has not yet been introduced into the text, chronologically this hog killing (December 8, 1985) follows Horace’s suicide (April 30, 1984). Kenan’s manipulation of time makes each of these scenes echo the other; “you” should hear echoes of the hog killing in the suicide/idyll at the end of the novel, but since the suicide actually predates the hog killing, the latter already contains echoes of the former. The hog killing is, after all, not the first time this community has “instructed” a young boy to “aim straight” and has given him a gun.
Once the suicide/idyll is put into conversation with the hog killing, it is impossible not to suspect that Horace’s death, like the hog’s, is a sacrifice carried out for the “good of the community.”16 That is, this community can exist only in the sort of (heterosexual) pastoral wholeness represented in “ADVENT” and “Requiem for Tobacco,” through disavowal or outright elimination of some of its members. The hog and Horace both play a sacrificial role for this community, and the passages detailing their individual moments of death underscore this similarity of purpose:
The hog rears up on its hind legs like a horse, bucking, tossing its head, but only once, twice. It seems to land miraculously on its front legs, but only for a split second. It topples, hitting the ground with a thud, and lets out a sound that you might call a death rattle—all in a matter of seconds. Its eyes fix intently on nothing. (9)
His entire body convulsed several times; it excreted urine. Defecated. The tongue hung out of the mouth and during the convulsions was clamped down upon, releasing blood to be mixed with the ropes of saliva stringing down. His heartbeat slowly decreased in pressure and intensity, soon coming to a halt; the arteries, veins, and capillaries slowly collapsed. The pupils of his eyes, now tainted in a film of pink, stopped dilating, resting like huge drops of ink surrounded by brown liquid in a pool of milk. Finally the eyes themselves rolled back, staring up, as though examining the sun through the canopy of tree limbs. (253–54)
After both deaths, the community is once again free to celebrate a mythical wholeness.
Kenan’s placement of the events on December 8 and on April 29–30, respectively, corroborates this reading of each as a sacrifice intended for the good of the community In Christian mythology, Advent is the beginning, in early December, of the church year. Like the hog killing, it is supposedly a happy time, when Christians celebrate the arrival of the one who is born to die so that the community can live. The “salvation” of the Christian community is contingent on the death of Christ, and in A Visitation of Spirits, Kenan uses this sacrificial idea to sharply indict the Christian community of Tims Creek, North Carolina. Nonetheless, as with Kenan’s use of Go Tell It on the Mountain and A Christmas Carol, this is no simple appropriation of someone else’s story. Horace’s very name—Horace “Cross”—links him to the “sacrificial lamb” of Christianity, but Kenan repeats even the Christian story with a difference: although April 30, 1984, did indeed fall during the Easter season (”This,” as the narrator of A Visitation of Spirits might say, “is a fact”), this Easter is characterized not by a resurrection but rather by a graphic and apparently irreversible suicide. Horace Cross might die for this community’s sins, but—it would seem—he does not rise again.
Through both the hog killing and the tobacco harvest, it is presumably the reader who recognizes the disavowal of difference on which this community is founded; the community itself simply proceeds with its celebration of mythical wholeness, oblivious to the violence its rituals demand and effect. In fact, the reader’s transformation is virtually contingent on the community’s nontransformation: because the community is unable to adapt and is consequently responsible for Horace’s death, readers learn to view such communities askance, to perceive something queer in their very disavowal of queerness. Yet analyzing Horace as simply dead fails to account for death’s ironic lack of finality in the Kenan corpus, and understanding the community as simply untransformed disregards how Horace, even in death, ultimately does become the sort of trickster figure Gates finds in the Signifying Monkey tales in particular and in the African American literary tradition in general. At the end of the novel, Horace—apparently “possessed” by a visitation of spirits—emerges from the woods and shoots himself in front of his cousin Jimmy Greene. Jimmy, who at the time of Horace’s suicide is both the minister at the First Baptist Church of Tims Creek and the first black principal of Tims Creek Elementary
School, had earlier attempted to transform Horace, explaining to him that being gay is “wrong” (113). In the end, however, it is Jimmy who is transformed by Horace, and since he is the head of two community institutions, the ramifications of this transformation are far-reaching. The transformations Horace initiates are always incomplete (or, in the language of the previous chapter, “permanently partial”), but they are simultaneously inevitable and ongoing: the closet that the regime of sameness requires and constructs can never fully contain the “visitation of (queer) spirits” its exclusionary logic unleashes.
The very title of Kenan’s second work suggests that we look carefully at “death” in his works. Let the Dead Bury Their Dead is a collection of twelve stories, most of them once again set in Tims Creek, North Carolina. The collection takes its title from Christ’s injunction, in Matthew 8:22, to a would-be disciple: “But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead” (KJV). Christ’s words in this passage are simply a poetic way of saying “drop everything and look to the future with me” or “put what’s dead and gone behind you.” In Kenan’s rewriting of the Christian injunction, however, such an interpretation is no longer possible; the “dead” in Kenan’s work tend not to stay dead. In both A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, the dead are constantly coming back, in various and perturbing ways, to haunt and disrupt the present. In fact, the very first story of Kenan’s collection underscores the futility of attempts to “let the dead bury their dead.”
“Clarence and the Dead (And What Do They Tell You, Clarence? And the Dead Speak to Clarence),” the first selection in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, is the story of a young boy who conveys cryptic, unsettling messages to the friends and neighbors who come to visit his grandparents’ home. What is especially peculiar about these particular messages is that they come from people in the community who have long since died. For example, Clarence tells Emma Chaney, whose mother died long before Clarence was born, “Your mama says Joe Hattan is stepping out on you with that strumpet Viola Stokes” (5). Clarence and his “queer knowledge” (12) wreak havoc on the comfortable security of the present-day Tims Creek community, reversing people’s assumptions about their pasts, their families, their marriages. Anyone who wanted to abide by the biblical dictum is effectively precluded from doing so: “Clarence told people things a four-year-old boy ain’t had no business knowing the language for, let alone the circumstances around them. All from people dead five, six, ten, twenty, and more years” (8).
Hence, even though I have just argued that there is no resurrection in A Visitation of Spirits, we would do well to view the apparent “irreversibility” of Horace’s suicide with suspicion. Granted, Horace doesn’t return to Tims Creek in exactly the same way as the dead in Clarence’s story, but I contend that he nonetheless wreaks havoc on the (heterosexual) stability of the community. Ultimately, Horace does become the sort of trickster figure Gates locates throughout the African American literary tradition, “surfacing when we least expect him, at a crossroads of destiny” (Signifying Monkey, 64). Like the dead in Clarence’s story, Horace (re)surfaces in order to disrupt the complacent security of Tims Creek, to render unstable the binary oppositions (center/margin, clean/unclean, etc.) that ground the life of this community. And because Kenan relates A Visitation of Spirits in a nonlinear fashion, with the events of April 29–30, 1984 (the day of Horace’s suicide), interwoven with the events of December 8, 1985, Horace’s (comedic) postsuicide trickster role wreaks havoc even as the (tragic) events leading to his death are teleologically represented.
The first and apparently unlikely power relation that Horace reverses is the “opposition” between the “ghosts” and “Ebenezer Scrooge.” As I have suggested throughout this chapter, Kenan’s novel is a complex signification on Dickens’s famous story, with Horace cast in the role of Scrooge. As early as the epigraph from A Christmas Carol, however, there is evidence that Horace has been miscast:
“Are spirits’ lives so short?” asked Scrooge.
“My life upon this globe is very brief,” replied the Ghost. “It ends tonight.”
“To-night!” cried Scrooge.
“To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing near.” (A Visitation of Spirits, epigraph page)
The epigraph introduces Kenan’s text and thereby suggests that A Visitation of Spirits will be some sort of retelling of A Christmas Carol At the same time, this epigraph complicates any easy equivalency between Dickens’s characters and Kenan’s. Although Horace’s whirlwind journey through past, present, and future apparently links him to Scrooge, the epigraph belies such a reading, linking him instead to the spirit. After all, it is Horace, in A Visitation of Spirits, whose “life upon this globe is very brief,” and at the stroke of midnight on April 30, 1984, it is Horace’s life that rapidly heads toward its conclusion.17
As the text continues, Horace’s metaphorical link to Scrooge is obvious; nonetheless, his metonymic link to the ghosts (which, since it is introduced in the epigraph, actually precedes the metaphorical link to Scrooge) continues to surface when we least expect it. For instance, the hog killing of the first section ends with the assertion “But the ghosts of those times are stubborn; and though the hog stalls are empty, a herd can be heard, trampling the grasses and flowers and fancy bushes, trampling the foreign trees of the new families, living in their new homes. A ghostly herd waiting to be butchered” (10). As I have said, Horace is linked to the hog in that both serve as sacrifices for the good of the community. This passage replays that connection, underscoring as well how both disrupt the idyllic stability of the community, “trampling the grasses and flowers and fancy bushes . . . living in their new homes.” Beyond that, however, the linkage here of hogs and ghosts extends the metonymic chain: the ghosts call to mind the hogs who call to mind Horace who calls to mind the ghosts. And if this were not enough, the next section graphically links both the hogs and the ghosts to Horace. This section, the first in which Horace appears, opens with an ellipsis: “. . . What to become?” (11). The ellipsis serves a dual function here. On the surface, it stands in for the process of thought Horace is going through as he decides to turn himself into a bird. On another level, however, the ellipsis serves as a visual link to what has immediately preceded, and Horace is once again connected to both the hogs and the ghosts.
The identification of Horace with the ghosts, as opposed to identification with Scrooge, is crucial for understanding Horace’s reemergence as a trickster in A Visitation of Spirits, since this identification means that, in the end, he may not be so much the object as the agent of transformation. (Scrooge’s ghosts, after all, are responsible for his own radical transformation.) Perhaps, then, we are wrong to read Horace as simply “dead” after his suicide, despite the fact that his death is detailed with such graphic and scientific exactness. Perhaps—to repeat (with a difference) the Gates quotation with which I began this chapter—A Visitation of Spirits is not so much about “a brilliant tormented homosexual, Horace, who commits suicide” (in Rowell, 454). Perhaps such a description particularly overlooks the cryptic pronouncement by the narrator that concludes the suicide scene: “Ifs and maybes and weres and perhapses are of no use in this case. The facts are enough, unless they too are subject to doubt” (^4 Visitation of Spirits, 254). Indeed, the “fact” of Horace’s complete annihilation should very well be subject to doubt, given how Horace—even after his suicide—continues to “live” as the Signifying Monkey cum queer agent of transformation, “haunting” the community in general and Jimmy in particular.
Jimmy’s story unfolds in two ways over the course of A Visitation of Spirits. First, he is one of the main characters in the December 8, 1985, sections of the novel. These sections ostensibly focus on Jimmy’s journey, with his Aunt Ruth and Uncle Zeke (two elderly members of the Cross clan), to visit a cousin who is in the hospital in Fayetteville, North Carolina. More precisely, however, these sections focus on the internal monologues of various characters as they sort out their conflicts with and connections to other members of the family (this is Kenan’s answer to Go Tell It on the Mountain’s “Prayers of the Saints” section).
Second, and more important, Jimmy’s character comes out in all his complexity in three personal “Confessions” sections. These confessions are not dated, but since Horace’s suicide haunts each of them, they must be considered as written after Horace’s death and are probably roughly contemporaneous with the events of late 1985. Overall, the novel is divided into five sections, each of which is then divided into even smaller sections (”December 8, 1985”; “April 29, 1984”; etc.). Three of the five main sections open with these “Confessions” from Jimmy; the final section opens with Horace’s own “Confessions” (which I analyzed in the previous section). As is often the case with events in A Visitation of Spirits, Horace’s confessions actually predate Jimmy’s, despite the fact that they are not included until the novel’s final section. Of course, there is no way Jimmy could have seen Horace’s “Confessions”; as we know, Horace burned his autobiography in frustration. Nonetheless, Jimmy’s own writings betray an ironic anxiety about Horace’s influence. The very heading of Jimmy’s text is, stylistically, a direct echo of Horace’s own: “Horace Thomas Cross: Confessions” (245); “James Malachai Greene: Confessions” (31, 107, 171). Hence, even though Jimmy could not possibly have read Horace’s text, Horace’s story appears to have profoundly influenced the way Jimmy documents his own private thoughts.
There is at least one major difference between Horace’s confessions and Jimmy’s. Although Horace’s “Confessions” section is an extended prose meditation on his own life, Jimmy’s three “Confessions” sections are not—so to speak—straight prose. Each of Jimmy’s “Confessions” sections is interrupted by a short script, complete with stage directions. Significantly, each of these dramatic episodes is a re-presentation of a critical moment in Horace’s life: the first sketches out the strange conversation between Jimmy and Horace a few minutes before the suicide; the second relates an earlier scene, in June 1983, when Horace first “comes out” to Jimmy, looking to his cousin for pastoral guidance; the third, later in 1983, replays a Thanksgiving dinner where Horace offends the entire family by showing up with a pierced ear. Although “confessions” tend to signify uncensored, “unmediated” prose meditations for some reason, Jimmy cannot face his most intense, gay-identified memories of Horace so directly. These memories demand another form; Jimmy desires or needs to distance himself from them. Perhaps Jimmy indulges a fantasy that these dramatic passages somehow position him on the outside, passively observing events onstage from a comfortable seat in the audience. Nonetheless, these passages are contained within his “autobiographical” sections and are thus framed by highly personal revelations of Jimmy’s weaknesses and fears. No matter how much Jimmy would like to distance himself from these memories, they are implicated in his most private and personal attempts to define himself.
These dramatic interruptions are early indications of how Jimmy has been and continues to be transformed by Horace, who, in the role of trickster, delights in reversing the received order of things. In particular, these dramatic passages, and Jimmy’s “Confessions” in general, illustrate how decidedly unstable the heterosexual/homosexual binary has become for Jimmy. Kenan’s revision of Baldwin helps illustrate this point: if Horace can be compared to John Grimes, then Jimmy can be compared to Elisha, the young religious figure whom John admires and counts on for spiritual guidance. Yet to the degree that identity in A Visitation of Spirits, as opposed to Go Tell It on the Mountain, is more explicitly homosexual for Horace, so too is identity less convincingly heterosexual for Jimmy. Of course, Elisha’s performance of heterosexuality is a tough act to follow: Elisha is, after all, a spectacular heterosexual, in the sense that the church makes a spectacle of him and Ella Mae, so convinced are they of the couple’s (hetero)sexual designs. But whereas in Go Tell It on the Mountain the community is convinced in advance of Elisha’s heterosexual prowess (Elisha is, in a way, too heterosexual), in A Visitation of Spirits Jimmy has trouble convincing anyone, including himself, that he is unequivocally heterosexual; instead, in each of Jimmy’s “Confessions,” Horace’s haunting of Jimmy foregrounds the irresolvable instability of the heterosexual/homosexual binary which Jimmy thought he was on top of. Sedgwick’s analysis of the ironies of Billy Budd is apropos here: “The death of the text’s homosexual marks . . . not a terminus but an initiation . . . into the narrative circulation of male desire” (Epistemology, 99–100). For Jimmy, this “initiation” transforms his life on two levels, private and public, and since Jimmy is representative of the larger community, the transformation of his public role ensures that, in the end, Horace’s story does indeed set into play a transformation of this community on the supposed “margins” of the queer world.
The ending of Jimmy’s first “Confessions” section serves as a good introduction to the ways in which Horace, after his suicide, haunts Jimmy’s private life. The dramatic interruption of this particular section replays the conversation between the two on the morning of Horace’s death. After observing this drama, Jimmy returns again to his private thoughts. These thoughts are decidedly restless, however, and are made more so by their placement beneath Jimmy’s recollection of his earlier conversation with Horace:
(Jimmy’s eyes grow wide with horror. He swallows.)
JIMMY: I’m supposed to believe my cousin has been possessed? By a demon?
HORACE: Yeah. Something like that.
I don’t prepare elaborate meals for myself. Many is the night that I have eaten from a can. On the nights that I have no church business, no deacon board meetings, no prayer meetings, no auxiliary meetings or trustee board meetings, I try to read. I still enjoy Augustine and Erasmus. Maybe Freud, or Jung, or Foucault. Black history: Franklin, Quarles, Fanon. Occasionally fiction. But invariably I wind up asleep after about ninety minutes, only to awaken without fail around eleven o’clock to watch the late news. Then it’s back to bed, which in many ways seems the object of leaving bed in the first place. (43–44)
Call me queer, but the question “Why is Jimmy reading Foucault?” is too tempting to pass up here. After Horace’s death, Jimmy clearly has trouble focusing his attention; consequently, he drifts from activity to activity. His scurrying from text to text, in particular, comes across as a restless search for “meaning.” Horace’s undead intrusion into Jimmy’s private life, however, has destabilized the secure meanings around which Jimmy’s life was organized. The inclusion of Foucault on Jimmy’s reading list especially highlights the process of transformation that is at work in Jimmy.18 And particularly in the context of a list beginning with Freud, it is difficult not to imagine that Jimmy is turning to The History of Sexuality for answers. The imagination runs first, perhaps, to some of Foucault’s more famous formulations:
The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology, Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. ... It was a secret that always gave itself away. . . . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (Foucault, 43)
But why limit Jimmy? Perhaps he has long since mastered the basic texts of Foucault and is now reading, in the French original, some of the more obscure interviews. The possibilities are titillating:
I should like to say “it is necessary to work increasingly at being gay,” to place oneself in a dimension where the sexual choices that one makes are present and have their effects on the ensemble of our life. I should like to say also that sexual choices must be at the same time creators of ways of life. To be gay signifies that these choices diffuse themselves across the entire life; it is also a certain manner of refusing the modes of life offered; it is to make a sexual choice the impetus for a change of existence. (Foucault, qtd. in Cohen, “Foucauldian Necrologies,” 91)19
Of course, the Foucauldian fantasies I have conjured up for Jimmy here are not intended to name, definitively, the specific text or texts Jimmy may be reading.20 Quite the contrary: my intent is not to have the final say about what Jimmy’s experiences mean but rather to foreground the ways in which Horace, as trickster, has set into motion an inescapable play of meaning, so that the very impossibility of fixing the specific text effectively produces possibilities in Jimmy that he has, until now, consistently (and homophobically) disavowed. Hence neither of the Foucault selections above should be taken as my vote for what Jimmy is reading, as if I could somehow fix Kenan’s intention. Likewise, I do not intend here to label Jimmy—in a minoritized sense—as “gay.”21 Instead, I propose that Jimmy’s own attempt to fix meaning has redounded on him, destabilizing particularly the heterosexual securities around which his life (and the life of the community) is organized. Before the suicide, gay identity/desire was “safely” embodied by Horace, who was—a la Foucault—a personage, a past, a case history, and the like. After the suicide, Jimmy wants to maintain some sort of security by “containing” gay identity/desire in the dramatic supplements to his “Confessions.” Yet, immediately after coming out of one of these dramatic interruptions, it is clear that Jimmy is unable to leave queerness behind; as Sedgwick suggests, “In the wake of the homosexual, the wake incessantly produced since first there were homosexuals, every human relation is pulled into its shining representational furrow” (Epistemology, 128). In this case, Jimmy attempts to leave Horace behind in the dramatic supplement, only to stumble into Foucault.
Furthermore, even within the Foucault passages I have included above, a movement from a minoritized and contained gay identity to a more pervasive, inescapable queerness is reproduced: what is, in the first passage, a discrete and embodied identity, located in others, has become, in the second, more free-floating, “diffusing] across the entire life.” One of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “spirit” is “a particular character, disposition, or temper existing in, pervading, or animating a person or set of persons” (emphasis mine). In this sense, then, perhaps “a visitation of spirits” refers less to the ghostly crew that leads Horace on his whirlwind journey than to the queer spirit pervading Jimmy’s life after Horace’s death. Ironically, it is Jimmy, not Horace, who seems to have “a secret that always gives itself away.” In the end, Jimmy’s attempts to “contain” a homosexual are undone by the juxtaposition (or is it the coming together?) of Horace and Foucault. The queerness Jimmy is trying to “fix” may very well be within himself.
An episode from one of the other dramatic supplements to Jimmy’s “Confessions” illustrates even more clearly how freely queer meanings circulate beyond Jimmy’s control, despite his best efforts to contain them. It is Horace’s last Thanksgiving, November 1983. Horace arrives onstage late, as the Reverend Barden, the family’s guest, is praying over the food. Jonnie Mae (Jimmy’s grandmother and Horace’s great-aunt) scolds the boy lightly for being late, but when she realizes he has pierced his ear, her scolding becomes severe. She drops a spoon loudly into a dish of corn, and everyone at the table looks up in horror at Horace. The stage directions explain that “JIMMY seems bewildered by the reaction of the women” (183). Nonetheless, Jimmy has trouble finding the appropriate language to counter his aunts’ and grandmother’s reactions:
JONNIE MAE: (to ZEKE): Uh-huh. You see, Zeke? You see? What did I tell you? Now it starts this way, but how will it end? (Stands.) No better sense than to go on and follow whatever them white fools do. You’d follow them to hell, wouldn’t you? I—
RUTHESTER (moving to comfort her): Mamma, it ain’t that bad. He just—JONNIE MAE: He just pierced his ear. Like some little girl. Like one of them perverts.
JIMMY: Mamma, it’s really not that big a deal. Boys pierce their ears nowadays all the time. It’s not thought of as—(184)
Can you say “gay”? For some reason, Jimmy can not; but then again, he can’t entirely not say it, either. Certainly, everyone in this scene is having trouble finding the right words, but it is to Jimmy, more than anyone else, that a trace of queer meaning attaches. Indeed, the very unspeakability of the word (and Jimmy’s is the only fragmented sentence here that could possibly be completed by a single word) speaks queerness.
Moreover, although at the time Jimmy argues that “it’s really not that big a deal,” Horace and his earring come back here to haunt Jimmy’s private confessions. In The Signifying Monkey, Gates traces a “signifying chain” from the slave narrative of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. In Gronniosaw’s narrative, this signifying chain is a literal gold chain that serves as a marker for the African heritage Gronniosaw seeks to discard; in Ellison, the literal chain from Brother Tarp’s days on the prison gang “signifies a heap more” and helps Ellison’s narrator “remember what we’re really fighting against” (Signifying Monkey, 135–36). In Kenan’s novel, Gates’s signifying chain becomes a signifying earring, a marker of both a particular “cultural heritage” and—in an ironic inversion of Ellison—the disruptive force that Jimmy and the others are “really fighting against.”
The dash that signifies the presence-absence of gayness in Jimmy’s speech is a graphic representation of the queer meanings that, once again, Jimmy is unable to contain “safely” in the dramatic supplements to his “Confessions.” The play of meaning that Horace initiates again spills over into the prose sections of these “Confessions,” wresting authoritative control away from Jimmy. Ironically, Horace’s conspirator in this disruptive project is Jimmy’s wife, Anne, whose death comes a year or two before Horace’s. Jimmy often invokes the two characters at the same point in his narrative (”I sit on the porch and wait for the sun. All the while pondering dreams of Anne. And Horace” [36]), and his memories of Anne are often as disruptive as his memories of Horace. Indeed, although one might expect that his wife would help stabilize Jimmy’s heterosexual identity, it is with Anne that the inevitable failure of that identity is often most pronounced.
The possibility of failure is evident in Jimmy’s recollections of the couple’s first years together:
I met Anne during the second semester of my sophomore year. I didn’t sleep with her for almost two years; bedding her had not been my original goal. She fascinated me. . . .
One autumn day, one of the few days in which there were no meetings for her to rush to, she turned to me as we stood beneath a huge cottonwood tree on campus and asked, “Why haven’t you tried to screw me?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or just stare. She had light brown eyes and sometimes she focused them with such unbridled sincerity that they belied her canniness. I kissed her long and hard.
“So you aren’t a faggot?”
I chuckled.
“Good.”
The first time she took me into her bed I was impotent. “Are you sure you’re not a faggot?” she asked. We laughed at the entire situation and went out for Chinese food. I never had that problem again. (174, 175–76)
Jimmy never had “that problem” with Anne again, but as this passage makes clear, he can not seem to shake that other problem: even when he does not speak them, gay meanings attach themselves to Jimmy. Indeed, as with the dash in the Thanksgiving scene, the chuckle and the laugh speak most explicitly in their very refusal to speak. Once again Jimmy cannot say (he is) “gay,” but then again, he can’t entirely not say it, either. Or, more precisely, Jimmy relies on a (sexual) performance to solidify what he cannot convincingly put into words: his gendered heterosexual identity. As Butler might put it, “The abiding gendered self [is] . .. structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which, in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ‘ground’” (Gender Trouble, 141). In this sense, the chuckle and the laugh might be seen as only part of a more general laugh track for this inevitable heterosexual sitcom, and Jimmy and Anne’s affair here may be just one more episode in which heterosexuality attempts to cover its all-too-obvious discontinuities.
Anne has joined with Horace, then, in a monstrous, unnatural coupling that re-members the stable heterosexual meanings of Jimmy’s life for him and flaunts the impossibility of embodying normative heterosexual identities. The opening of Jimmy’s third and final “Confessions” confirms Anne in this role. Jimmy’s narration (at this point, a rhapsody about Anne’s physical beauty and about her hold on Jimmy’s life) is interrupted by a series of direct challenges from Anne: “Look at me.... What do you see?... Do you really see me?. .. Me?... Do you?... Do you even want to, really?.. . Are you even capable?” (171–72). Like Anne’s suggestion that he is a “faggot,” these challenges push Jimmy toward (hetero)sexual assertion, and he concludes: “The metaphysics called it a little death. I think they were right” (172). Yet heterosex for Jimmy is never quite as much fun as it is for John Donne, and Jimmy’s reiteration of the metaphysical poets’ metaphor for sex is not without irony; in what way, exactly, does Jimmy “die a little death” every time he is with Anne? The next paragraph opens with Jimmy’s confession “I have lied. To myself” (172), and although Jimmy has ostensibly moved on to a new topic, it is difficult not to see this admission as a commentary on what has immediately preceded: Anne’s “Are you even capable?” and Jimmy’s defensive answer in the form of a sexual performance.
All of Jimmy’s sexual memories, then, suggest that he is “in the closet”—not the gay closet, exactly, but a closet of crisis, what Sedgwick might label “the closet of, simply, the homosexual secret—the closet of imagining a homosexual secret” (Epistemology, 205). This queer possibility—never substantiated—lurks behind all of Jimmy’s recollections. For example, he writes of the wild adventures he had in college before meeting Anne:
I slept with anything that was willing. I got drunk almost every weekend of my freshman year, many times during the week as well . . . my only regret being that my aunts and my grandmother never seemed to suspect that I was a hypocrite, a liar. For when I came home I still read the Scriptures in church and taught Bible school, only to return to school and recruit the first co-ed who gave me a willing glance. I realize that this was the true sin. (174)
As usual, Jimmy’s “double life” here is not necessarily gay; his “co-eds,” after all, effectively gender that which is so ambiguous in “anything that was willing.” Yet the “secret” that is produced by Jimmy’s closet is never definitely not a homosexual secret, “so permeative has the suffusing stain of homo/heterosexual crisis” been to crises of masculine definition more generally (Sedgwick, Epistemology, 72–73). Indeed, like the dash or the chuckle or the laugh, Jimmy’s “closet” in this memory takes on queer meanings not because it specifically articulates such possibilities but rather because the metaphor of the closet that he implicitly invokes can never entirely disarticulate them.
Moreover, Jimmy’s prose memories are always read in the context of those “other” memories, the memories of Horace, which he can never completely contain. Horace, as trickster, ensures that queerness can never be entirely cleaned out of any of Jimmy’s closets, and the one dramatic supplement to Jimmy’s “Confessions” that I have not yet discussed demonstrates this most clearly. In this scene, Jimmy is confronted by Horace’s explicitly “gay” closet and, in his ministerial role, confidently admonishes the boy, “You know as well as I what the Bible says” (113). Despite his pastoral assurance that homosexuality is “wrong,” however, Jimmy is again unable to keep traces of gay meaning from attaching to himself. Furthermore, this scene, in turn, transforms how straight we read Jimmy’s other private memories; in particular, “anything that was willing” is thrown, decidedly, into gay relief. This time, the semantic marker for the presence-absence of gayness is not the dash, the chuckle, the laugh, or the “double life,” but, well, “.. . you know”:
HORACE (quickly): I think I’m a homosexual.
JIMMY (smiling, puts his hand on Horace’s shoulder): Horace, we’ve all done a little . . . you know .. . experimenting. It’s a part of growing up. It’s .. . well, it’s kind of important to—
HORACE: But it’s not experimenting. I like men. I don’t like women. There’s something wrong with me.
JIMMY: Horace, really. I have reason to believe it’s just a phase. I went through a period where I. . . you know, experimented.
HORACE: Did you enjoy it?
JIMMY (slightly stunned): En . . . Enjoy it? Well. . . I. .. you know. Well, the
physical pleasure was ... I guess pleasant. I really don’t remember. HORACE: Did you ever fall in love with a man?
JIMMY: Fall in love? No. (Laughs.) Oh, Horace. Don’t be so somber. Really. I think this is something that will pass. I’ve known you all your life. You’re perfectly normal. (112–13)
“Like me” is the implicit subtext here—”You’re perfectly normal, like me.” Horace, however, reverses this compulsion toward sameness, substituting instead what Kobena Mercer has called the “challenge of sameness” (”1968,” 427)22 Maybe, just maybe, Jimmy, you are like me: Did you enjoy it (as I have enjoyed it)? Did you ever fall in love with a man (as I have fallen in love with a man) ? In spite of Jimmy’s best efforts, Horace transforms Jimmy’s understanding of himself, and after Horace’s suicide, that transformation grows even more pronounced. “I have never lost my fear of the dead,” Jimmy admits in one of his “Confessions” sections. “No matter how many funerals I attend, perhaps no matter how old I get, I will fear the dead. In my dreams the dead rise” (189).
The challenge of sameness embodied by Horace transforms Jimmy’s private life; Horace destabilizes the heteronormative laws around which Jimmy’s life is organized. This transformation, however, has far-reaching ramifications: Jimmy, as minister, is representative of and for this community. And although Jimmy feels that this community could never accept Horace’s “deviation,” he nonetheless writes that Horace’s “reason for existing, it would seem, was for the salvation of his people” (188). Consequently, the transformation Horace brings about is not merely the private transformation of Jimmy. If Horace exists “for the salvation of his people,” then Jimmy is the minister entrusted to bring Horace’s message to the rest of the community.
One of Jimmy’s professors at seminary inadvertently prepares him for this public role by facilitating the connection between Horace and Jimmy. The professor’s name is Philip Schnider: “We called him Rabbi. He got a kick out of it too, he being one of the rarest of birds, a Christian Jew” (31). This unorthodox character—the very first person introduced into Jimmy’s “Confessions”—tells Jimmy “You, Greene, will make a great theologian” (33). Rabbi’s opinion does not come from his belief that Jimmy has the ability to adhere to a strict code of conduct or to expound how others ought to live their lives. Instead, Rabbi’s opinion comes from his observation of Jimmy’s “Curiosity”: “Curiosity with a capital C. Understand what I’m saying? This is a gift, now. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of guys here who’ve got curiosity. But they don’t have it with a capital C. Understand? They’re bright, sure. Some maybe brighter than you.. .. [But] they don’t have desire. A real desire. Few people nowadays do” (33). Jimmy can not understand what Rabbi means by this cryptic observation, and Rabbi’s subsequent attempts to elaborate do little to clear up confusion. Yet, later in the same “Confessions” section, Jimmy returns to Rabbi’s words. Thinking, as usual, about Anne and Horace, Jimmy concludes, “Anne was not a romantic; I am. So was Horace. But he had something more, that damned curiosity . .. with a capital C” (36). Suddenly, what was so enigmatic to Jimmy earlier exactly describes his connection to Horace. Apparently, after Horace’s suicide, the transformation Jimmy undergoes enables him to understand what had only baffled him before.
“Curiosity” and “desire” are not ingredients that normally go into the making of a Tims Creek minister; desire, in fact, because of the unlikely, unsanctioned, and queer connections it affirms, is usually equated with sin in this community. Still, although Rabbi never clearly explains what he means by these concepts, something that might be called “Curiosity” or “real desire” indeed appears to fuel Jimmy’s ministry, particularly after Horace’s death. After the dramatic episode detailing Horace’s conflict with the family over the earring, for instance, Jimmy returns to his prose “Confessions” with more questions than answers:
[Horace] didn’t quite know who he was. That, I don’t fully understand, for they had told him, taught him from the cradle on. I guess they didn’t reckon the world they were sending him into was different from the world they had conquered, a world peopled with new and hateful monsters that exacted a different price.
What has happened to us? Can I cry out like the prophet Jonah and ask God to guide my hand and direct me toward the proper remedy? Once, oh once, this beautiful, strong, defiant, glorious group could wrestle the world down, unshackle themselves, part seas, walk on water, rise on the winds. What happened? Why are we now sick and dying?... How, Lord? How? How can we defend ourselves and grow strong again? How can we regain the power to lift up our heads and sing? When will the Host of Hosts visit us with favor and strength? (188–89)
Behind this string of questions is a desperate curiosity about why the world is as it is, and an urgent desire for it to be better, freer, more loving. The group had assumed that the “proper remedy” was expulsion of the “abomination.” This expulsion was to guarantee a return to mythical wholeness. Jimmy realizes at this point that such attempts at “purification” actually guarantee not health and wholeness but sickness and death. “Salvation” will not entail securing the distinction between “clean” and “unclean” and expelling the latter. Instead, Jimmy realizes, these fixed and exclusionary understandings of salvation are precisely the problem. “He was a son of this community,” Jimmy writes of Horace, “more than most” (188). With this simple recognition, Jimmy questions and reverses the community’s easy assumptions that queerness belongs elsewhere.
Questions such as these were far from the mind of the Reverend Barden, the minister who preceded Jimmy Rev. Barden had only answers, no questions. I have already mentioned, for example, his unequivocal use of Paul’s letter to the Romans to condemn homosexuality. In the same sermon, Barden turns Jimmy’s questions about weakness into a quick and easy answer:
“I can’t look at evil and turn my back. It saddens me. . . . And you know what it is, don’t you? You know what causes it?. .. Why a weak spirit. Ain’t nothing more. Can’t say the folks don’t know, cause they do. But it’s like the writer said another time: The spirit is willing—O my Jesus, help me this morning—but the flesh is weak. Ain’t nothing else but weak-willed people. What else is gone cause this mess, children?” ... Go head, Reverend, and preach now. (79)
To Barden—and the congregation, which is more than willing to jump on the bandwagon of moral superiority—the answer to the world’s ills lies in overcoming “weakness.” Success in such an effort will be measured by the extent to which one can stand apart from and condemn those who fail to live up to a legalistic, heteronormative code of conduct. To a transformed Jimmy, in contrast, this moral code is the very mark of weakness, and his searching questions signal a queer desire to move away from such an impoverished worldview.
After Horace’s death, this shift is most apparent in a scene that ostensibly has nothing to do with Horace. Despite Horace’s absence, however, Jimmy’s interpretation of this scene (and of the ways in which he is complicit in the community’s repeated failures) has everything to do with how his life has been transformed by Horace. The summer after Horace’s suicide, Jonnie Mae dies, and Jimmy’s mother, Rose, returns to Tims Creek for the funeral. The family sees Rose as an ungrateful “tramp,” a woman who loved pleasure more than she loved her mother, Jonnie Mae. Rose’s three sisters had been the “good” girls; Rose, in contrast, was the pariah. After returning home three times, pregnant and alone, she finally left Tims Creek for good, unable to bear the community’s disdain. Jonnie Mae’s funeral is the first time in his adult life that Jimmy has seen the woman. During the service, she stands apart from the family: “Rose stood at the graveside ceremony as Reverend Raines eulogized my grandmother, reading Paul’s letters to the Corinthians (’Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’)” (120). When Rose is overcome with grief, all but one in the community refuse to comfort her. The haunting refrain from First Corinthians measures this community against a more inclusive vision of society, and the community is found wanting:
When she began to cry, a calm and low sob, she looked suddenly forlorn and forsaken, a child lost and alone. And even now I cannot believe that no one, not Aunt Rebecca, not Aunt Ruthester, not Aunt Rachel [Rose’s sisters], not Isador, not Franklin, not I [Rose’s children], especially not I, turned to comfort her. (”Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.”) Until finally, in a moment of such black tension, huddled over the lowering casket, a thin, invisible line separating the prodigal from the faithful, my Uncle Lester stepped over that line and put his hand on her shoulder. (”For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is part shall be done away”) It was a crude and clumsy gesture, but in all its lack of grace it was full of grace. (”For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”) Seeing that, I knew my sin, but was unrepentant. (120–21)
The passage from First Corinthians that serves as a refrain here is an ironic commentary on the other Pauline passage that so sharply condemned Horace. At Jonnie Mae’s funeral, the individual “pariahs” (Horace, Rose) are no longer the ones who need transforming, as Rev. Barden’s interpretation of that passage from Romans implied. Without love (”charity” in the King James Version), all the community’s pompous words are no better than “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal,” and suddenly, Jimmy sees this clearly, despite his inability to act. When Horace was first introduced into the text, the narrator explained, “More than anything else, he wanted to have grace” (11). Rose’s brother Lester, in contrast to Jimmy and the rest of the community, acts with grace in this scene and, in so doing, allies himself with Horace. Ironically, Lester is only a peripheral character in A Visitation of Spirits; he is repeatedly depicted as inept, hardly worthy of notice. Rose, Lester, and Horace reverse such characterizations, however, making the periphery central to a transformed/transforming vision of a new community.
The “Confessions” section in which the story of Rose appears is also the section in which Horace “comes out” during the dramatic interruption to Jimmy’s prose. The two episodes are related in that both represent the failure of Jimmy’s ministry. They are “confessions” in the limited sense; Jimmy’s inclusion of them is an admission that he has done something wrong. The episode that opens this “Confessions” section, however, suggests that Jimmy has learned his lesson and that Horace and Rose both have disrupted and transformed not only his private life but his public role as the community’s minister, the community’s “representative.” In the opening scene, Jimmy goes to visit a woman in his congregation: Margur-ette Honeyblue, a seventy-three-year-old woman who is presumably on her deathbed. This scene opens the section, but it actually follows the other two episodes chronologically. More important, however, it follows the other two episodes developmentally: gone is the Jimmy who feels it his duty to explain the “rules” to Horace or who—along with the rest of the family—ostracizes Rose, the “sinner.”
Jimmy arrives at “Miss Margurette’s” a few minutes before she is scheduled to take her medicine. Looking directly at Jimmy, Miss Margurette instructs her daughter to bring her a beer so she can wash down her pills. It is a minor incident, but Jimmy recognizes it as a test, and the thoughts this scene elicits confirm not only that Jimmy is a changed man, individually, but also that he has a different vision of how members of the community might relate to one another:
How could I communicate that I was not, did not want to be the holy and pious dictator of a pastor they had been used to for all their lives, that my very presence had nothing to do with my condemnation of their way of life, that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the still [Miss Margurette’s son-inlaw] Lucius had out in the woods behind the house, or how [the family] sold all sorts of regulated beverages illegally from their kitchen, or that the last time they had been to church was to funeralize Margurette’s husband twenty years ago. There was no way to say: I have not come here to judge you. To say: I want to introduce a new way of approaching Christian faith, a way of caring for people. I don’t want to be a watchdog of sin, an inquisitor who binds his people with rules and regulations and thou shalts and thou shalt nots. (110)
Humbled by the incident, Jimmy feels inadequate to bring this new way of living into being: “But looking past those eyes so full of past hurt and past rejection and past accusation, I could only smile and let be what was” (110). “Letting be,” however, in this instance is precisely the place to begin, and Miss Margurette’s reaction to Jimmy’s nonchalance indicates that the process of healing has already begun: “She lay there quiet and as still as the bed. A warm breeze troubled the curtains and she gave me a wink, took a deep long breath, and sighed” (110). Outside the window, Jimmy notes, “a small bird flapped its wings against the wind” (110). Horace, of course, had earlier hoped to escape the regime of sameness in Tims Creek by transforming himself into a bird, and this bird recalls that attempt at transformation. The literal success or failure of that particular transformation, however (”Is it real?,” “Is it fantasy?”), is at this point irrelevant next to other, more far-reaching transformations. After his suicide, Horace survives to haunt Jimmy and open up the meanings that have hitherto grounded the life of this community.
Thus, Horace begins the work of transforming this community by first transforming Jimmy’s public role as the community’s minister. Although the transformation—of this community, of the meanings of “community”—is (always) incomplete, Jimmy’s “new way of approaching Christian faith,” which resists founding a community on exclusion but which no longer resists queer identifications and desires, assures that transformation will be ongoing. The re-vision of Christianity that Horace incites in Jimmy is the flip side of Kenan’s signification on Baldwin. Jimmy Greene, after all, is not the first “Jimmy” in the African American tradition to envision a spirituality more dedicated to justice and love. Baldwin himself writes:
It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. (Fire Next Time, 67)
Jimmy Greene’s Christianity, which rejects the God of “thou shalt nots” and seeks to transform the community into a freer, more caring place, is at least one possible resolution of Baldwin’s injunction here. Through Jimmy, Kenan introduces a crucial distinction between “religiosity” and “faith.” Rejecting the pomposity and homophobia of religiosity Kenan nonetheless validates faith as a genuine force, capable of bringing about connections between human beings (McRuer, “Randall Kenan,” 234).23
Baldwin’s desire is to forge connections between people who do not necessarily share identificatory locations, or who share some locations and not others. Hence, like Kenan’s Jimmy, Baldwin does not need to count on “Christians” to be the group that of necessity institutes this freer, more loving society. In fact, Kenan’s Rabbi is prefigured in Baldwin’s essay by another Jewish character: the young James Baldwin’s best friend, who inadvertently teaches him a lesson about the amount of hate in the “Christian” world. Baldwin writes:
My best friend in high school was a Jew. He came to our house once, and afterward my father asked, as he asked about everyone, “Is he a Christian?”—by which he meant “Is he saved?” I really do not know whether my answer came out of innocence or venom, but I said coldly, “No. He’s Jewish.” My father slammed me across the face with his great palm, and in that moment everything flooded back—all the hatred and all the fear. ... I wondered if I was expected to be glad that a friend of mine, or anyone, was to be tormented forever in Hell, and I also thought, suddenly, of the Jews in another Christian nation, Germany. They were not so far from the fiery furnace after all, and my best friend might have been one of them. I told my father, “He’s a better Christian than you are,” and walked out of the house. (Fire Next Time, 54–55)
In A Visitation of Spirits, Baldwin’s best friend grows up and goes to—of all places—a Christian seminary, where he continues teaching “Christians” about “real desire”: the desire for justice, the desire for love—subjects about which they appear to know so very little.24
Kenan’s tribute to Baldwin complicates the theories of signification Gates develops in The Signifying Monkey. In a review of Mary Helen Washington’s anthology Invented Lives, Gates writes, “[Black] female authors claim other black women as their ancestors (such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry) whereas most older black male writers denied any black influence at all—or worse, eagerly claimed a white paternity” (qtd. in V. Smith, 66). In other words, women writers’ desire to bond lovingly with female ancestors—a characteristic of what Gates calls “unmotivated” signification—stands in stark contrast to what most male writers tend to feel: an anxiety of influence that leads them to critique other (male) writers who have preceded them, repeating and revising those writers’ tropes and narrative strategies. Kenan, however, tends to fit neither of Gates’s gendered categories; he rewrites/reverses Baldwin’s story of a young boy in conflict with the church, but he also repeats, without negative critique, Baldwin’s vision of a more just society Contrary to Gates’s implication, then, some men “lovingly bond” with other men as readily as women bond with women.25 Thus, although I agree with Gates’s reading in The Signifying Monkey of the profundity of Alice Walker’s bond with Hurston, I propose that the Kenan-Baldwin relation disrupts the gendered dichotomy at work in Gates’s theories. Kenan’s embrace of Baldwin, like Walker’s of Hurston, is one of “the most loving revision[s] ... we have seen in the tradition” (Signifying Monkey, 255).26
In the title story to Kenan’s collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a young slave girl named Phoebe—one of many slaves living on the antebellum North Carolina plantation (Canaan) of U.S. Senator Owen Alexander Cross—complains to her mistress about a mysterious slave named Menes: “Misress . .. He Big an Black an Hateful and der aint no cause fuh such ta be ober usens in de Big House. It rit quar. Aint spose ta be lak dat” (308). Despite Phoebe’s concerns, the crisis that commences with this big, dark slave’s control over the “Big House” escalates as the story continues: Menes (also known as Pharaoh) burns down the house and leads a band of slaves into the North Carolina bogs, where they found a “maroon society” dedicated to the perpetual disruption of “business as usual” on the Cross plantation. Although Phoebe initially has misgivings about Menes, eventually she too joins the ranks of those who escape from Canaan.
This story is discovered among the Greene papers after Jimmy’s death in 1998. In the introduction to “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,” dated August 5, 2000, Reginald Kain—or “RK”—of Brooklyn, New York, informs readers: “On March 12, 1998, the Reverend James Malachai Greene died in a car accident on the way home from a conference of ministers in Atlanta; he had just entered the town limits of Tims Creek, North Carolina” (277). According to RK, the story of Menes and the maroon society is part of an “oral annotated history” of Tims Creek and is one of the more interesting documents to be discovered among the Greene papers after the accident.27
Jimmy’s death suggests that Kenan has a habit of killing off characters not long after they come to an awareness of the ways in which their community needs transforming. One might expect, after A Visitation of Spirits, that Jimmy would begin to promote radical change in Tims Creek and elsewhere, but instead, Kenan kills him in a car accident. As in A Visitation of Spirits, however, the “facts” may be “subject to doubt,” and I argue in conclusion that the existence of Menes/Pharaoh marks yet another resurrection of the queer trickster embodied first by Horace and later—because of his desire to reverse the received meanings of Christianity—by Jimmy.28 Menes/Pharaoh, in fact, “literally” rises from the dead: after his death, Menes/Pharaoh’s grave is discovered to be empty, and later in the story, he once again returns to transform the community which has fallen into complacency. In Menes/Pharaoh, Kenan draws on characteristics from both Jimmy and Horace. For example, Menes/Pharaoh actually carries out the work Jimmy envisions: the maroon society would
come to Pharaoh and he’d . . . tell em to keep themselves ready, to look out for one another, not to be like the white man, reaching and grabbing and trying to own everything, even people. Told em to remember that they come from a great land and a great people and such-like. Wont preaching he done, more like learning, learning em to love themselves and the world round em. (305)
Moreover, Menes/Pharaoh’s very appearance carries on the work of “queering” the Signifying Monkey begun by Horace in A Visitation of Spirits. As the notice Senator Cross circulates for Menes/Pharaoh’s apprehension describes him: “MENES, African-born, about 35 to 40 Years of Age, about Six-Feet-One Inches High, Square made, Left Ear pierced with Silver Metal Ring, Queer Markings about Face” (302).
Of course, you might argue, the fact that Menes wears an earring and is “marked” as “queer” means nothing, particularly in this nineteenth-century context. Lots of African slaves wore earrings. It’s not such a big deal. It’s not thought of as—. Yet I submit that Kenan’s work as a whole repeatedly inscribes the presence-absence of queerness into the Signifying Monkey as decidedly as the evasions in A Visitation of Spirits attached gay meanings to Jimmy Certainly, the signifying earring that reappears here need not be, in Jimmy’s words, “thought of as—”; yet even when Kenan’s tricksters are not exactly “gay,” they are not exactly “straight” either. Menes/Pharaoh may not embody a twentieth-century category such as “gay,” but the signifying earring ensures that we nonetheless read him (and his commitment to disrupting, from the “margins,” the hegemonic “center”) through Horace. The heterosexual/homosexual binary is always included among the hierarchies of power that Kenan’s characters have the ability to upset, and in this sense, Kenan’s work “outs” the Signifying Monkey.
Since he is already the African American “figure of indeterminacy” (Gates, Signifying Monkey, n), it is more than a little redundant to “out” as “queer” the Signifying Monkey. Still, I think Kenan actualizes, in both A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, what is only potentially queer in Gates’s analysis of the Signifying Monkey tales. “Outing” the Signifying Monkey entails explicitly adding the heterosexual/homosexual binary to the repertoire of reversals the Signifying Monkey effects; it entails envisioning the sort of “necessarily and desirably queer world” that Michael Warner suggests will overcome the totalizing tendencies of heteronormativity (8). In the Queer Renaissance, the “queer world” has not been “contained” in New York and San Francisco; indeed, the term queer suggests that resistance to heteronormativity will continue to turn up and transform even the most apparently “inappropriate” places. Kenan does not hustle Horace off to the big city in his collection of stories, but despite his initial misgivings about A Visitation of Spirits, Gates does not complain. Instead, on the back cover of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Gates calls Kenan, with his “generous moral imagination,” a “fabulist for our times.” Queer transformations can begin in the queerest of locations; as “fabulist for our times,” Kenan transforms a place on the so-called margins into a center of the queer world.