394
MORRIS DICKSH'JN
sterile remnant of bourgeois individualism; they envision an artist
who will become an impersonal emanation of the
V olk.
Brown's
novel, and Cain's
Blueschild Baby,
both of which are drenched
in
militant anger, also fulfill Whitman's boast that if you touch
~his
book you touch a man. Both are full of human density and human
contradiction - both are works of art, in other words - and much
as they may finally preach what Cruse calls "black-skin chauvinism/'
they do so only as an end-point in a process of self-discovery,only
rarely bending their immediate perceptions to fit the frame of their
finally raised consciousness.
Let me illustrate this briefly. Both writers follow Cleaver in de–
picting the black man as stud and sexual athlete, as the avenger at
once exploiting and redeeming white flesh. Cain says of his whiteac–
tivist girl friend, "She lived in the dead yesterday of news reports
or the tomorrow of reform. The pressing moment never intruded
till I came and drove her into life." Two pages later he adds, "I
was amazed that she could have opinions and attitudes about every–
thing and still hadn't fulfilled her primary function. I made her into
a woman to meet my needs." This is absurd, more sexist than racist,
but it is not where these writers are going; it's just this sort of re–
lationship that Brown and Cain show their characters growing away
from as they discover that being used and using others are inter–
changeable, that they must learn to live off their own insides. "Every–
one but me had a piece of George Cain. Was no longer me, .but
a composite of all their needs and desires." The healthiest side of
black separatism is the return not just to group solidarity but to one's
own head. When Cain discovers that whites, all whites, are as ugly
as he had once thought them attractive, he is simply inverting ·a
racist stereotype. But doing so helps convince him that "The Man
can't free me. I must free myself." Like Brown he finds that the
sexual myths he had exploited had also exploited and devalued him.
When he finally comes back to the black girl who had waited patient–
ly during his
Wanderjahre
in the white world, in prison, on dope; he
makes contact without a touch of bravado, with affecting anxiety
and humility:
"Am
afraid to sleep with Nandy, make love to her..•.
Have been with only white women where I enjoyed the advantage of
the myths each of us brought to bed. . . . Have never come to .a
