NEGRO LITERATURE
203
Superiicially, the choice seems to be the impossible pair of alternatives
Freud gave us in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
destroy others or turn
the destruction inward. Yet beyond it in the memorable blues per–
fonnance there seems always to be a resolution, a transcendence, even
a catharsis and cure.
The themes of the blues appear everywhere in Negro literature.
One of the most predominant is the theme of leaving, travel, journey:
"I'm gonna move to Kansas City"; "Some day, I'll shake your hand
goodbye"; "Well, babe, goin' away and leave you by yourself";
"Pick up that suitcase, man, and travel on." Walter Lehrman, in an
unpublished study of the blues (to which I am considerably indebted) ,
finds some sort of movement away from here in eighty-three out of
one hundred lyrics. This sort of aimless horizontal mobility is a con–
stant in American Negro life, substituting for frustrated possibilities
of vertical mobility: if a Negro cannot rise in a job, he can change
jobs; if he cannot live well here, he can try elsewhere. The major
theme of Wright's
Native Son
is Bigger's aimless running; in
The
Outsider
it is the journey from Chicago to New York to start a new
life that proves the impossibility of any such rebirth. In Ellison's
Invisible Man,
the movement is first the great Exodus out of the
South north to the Promised Land. Then, when that fails its prom–
ises,
it is a random skittering up and down Manhattan, between
Harlem and "downtown," until the narrator achieves his only possible
vertical mobility, significantly
downward,
into a sewer (an ironic
·cality already anticipated in Wright's story "The Man Who
·ved Underground").
The dramatic self-pity of the blues, as we hear it in Billie
oliday's:
My
man don't loue me, treats me oh so mean,
My
man he don't loue me, treats me awful mean;
He's the lowest man that I'ue euer seen.
Pine Top Smith's:
Now my woman's got a heart like a rock cast down in the sea,
Now my woman's got a heart like a rock cast down in the sea;
Seems like she can loue euerybody and mistreat poor me.
the constant note in the work of such a writer as James Baldwin.
Go Tell It on the Mountain,
the adolescent hero, John,
is
ugly,
