SLIP THE YOKE
215
to a
sign,
and to repress the white audience's awareness of its moral
identification with its own acts and with the human ambiguities
pushed behind the mask.
Hyman sees the comic point of the contemporary Negro's per–
formance of the role as arising from the circumstance that a skilled
man of intelligence is parodying a subhuman grotesque; this is all
very kind, but when we move in from the wide-ranging spaces of
the archetype for a closer inspection we see that the specific rhetorical
situation involves the self-humiliation of the "sacrificial" figure, and
that a psychological dissociation from this symbolic self-maiming
is
one of the powerful motives at work in the audience. Motives of race,
status, economics, and guilt are always clustered here. The comic
point is inseparable from the racial identity of the performer-as is
clear in Hyman's example from Wright's
Black Boy-who
by assum–
ing
the group-debasing role for gain not only substantiates the audi–
ence's belief in the "blackness" of things black, but relieves it, with
dream-like efficiency, of its guilt by accepting the very profit motive
that was involved in the designation of the Negro as national scape–
goat in the first place. There are
all
kinds of comedy: here one
is
reminded of the tribesman in
Green Hills of Africa
who hid his laugh–
ing
face in shame at the sight of a gun-shot hyena jerking out its
own intestines and eating them, in Hemingway's words, "with
relish."
Down at the deep dark bottom of the melting pot, where the
private is public and the public private, where black is white and
white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is
anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to
sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.
It is not at
all
odd that this black-faced figure of white fun is
for Negroes a symbol of everything they rejected in the white man's
thinking about race, in themselves and in their own group. When
he appears, for example, in the guise of Nigger Jim, the Negro is
made uncomfortable. Writing at a time when the blackfaced minstrel
was
still popular, and shortly after a war which left even the aboli–
tionists weary of those problems associated with the Negro, Twain
fitted
Jim
into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from
behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim's dignity and human
capacity-and Twain's complexity- emerge. Yet
it
is his source in
