Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Bad Men

Bad Men

Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Howard Rambsy II

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2020 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2020

ISBN 978-0-8139-4412-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4413-5 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4414-2 (ebook)

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Watercolor handsome African man painting (Shutterstock/Cincinart)

For Kenton and Phillis

It’s like—I’m larger than life. I’m a cultural icon. I’m a basketball myth. And my haters, they use that to pin all this stuff on me that has nothing even to do with me. And my fans, it’s all love. . . . but it’s almost like they’re guilty too sometimes!! Making me out to be a hero when that might not have been the whole story either.

—Allen Iverson

Who spoke for the black boys? It was time someone did.

—Colson Whitehead

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1. Bad Men

1. A Poetic Trilogy of Bad Men

2. Rebellious Ex-Slaves as Poetic Muses

3. Sellouts as Muses

Part 2. Black Boys

4. The Sagas of Huey and Riley Freeman

5. Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Creative Productivity

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

Discography

Selected Bibliography

Index

Preface

In 2004 I began working with a program at my university to support the academic and intellectual efforts of first-year, collegiate black men. Given my training in African American literary studies, one of my main contributions to the program involved introducing the students to compositions by black writers. The class was an unconventional English course, so I was not restrained by a typical literature curriculum, nor was I obligated to focus only on novelists, poets, and short-story writers—mainstays of American and African American literature courses. By far the most popular composition that I introduced to the students during the first couple of years was an article entitled Urban Legend (2003), by Ralph Wiley, a sports journalist. The short article focused on the phenomenal Allen Iverson.

Quick? Impossibly quick. Not just quick, but fast, freak-of-nature fast, wrote Wiley. Allen is ‘Rocky’ for the people ‘Rocky’ forgot.

By most accounts, Iverson was a bad man. He was known for his tough exterior and apparent thug lifeways. But for Wiley and the young men in my course, Iverson was also a muse. Iverson sparked ideas, provoked debates, and encouraged heroic thoughts.

The students in the course, several of whom had been designated bad at some point or another, were often compelled to testify that Iverson and men like Iverson were inspirational. Wiley could find the good in Iverson, and so could the young men in my class. I developed a writing assignment entitled Local Urban Legend, where the first-year students were invited to write a short profile piece, in the spirit of Wiley, about the sometimes-hidden talents of people from their home environments. The guys wrote about playground basketball legends, ex-cons from their neighborhoods, and failing students who were far more intelligent than their grade point averages reflected. The consensus among the students was that they could have written much more than what they submitted. That acknowledgment was a pleasant surprise since under most circumstances quite a few of them disliked academic writing assignments.

That early assignment was the genesis for my thinking about the possibility of bad men as muses. Sure, like most people, I had heard the idea that everybody loves bad boys. Still, I was discovering additional prospects for what that might mean for writers. Discussions of bad men, I came to realize, were closely related to considerations of a variety of creative approaches and ideas.

This book illuminates some of the ways that black boys viewed as vulnerable or harmed and black men thought of as bad have served as sources of creative inspiration for an array of contemporary black writers in poems, novels, news articles, blog entries, and comic strips.

Bad Men

Introduction

On March 8, 2012, journalist Trymaine Lee published an article about a teenager who had been killed in Florida. Days later, on March 13, blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates reluctantly began writing about the incident as well. I haven’t blogged about the shooting of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, wrote Coates, because I’ve found the killing depressingly familiar.¹ In his memoir The Beautiful Struggle (2008), Coates had reflected on the violence enacted against young black men that he witnessed in Baltimore during his youth, and at other moments across the years Coates commented on the devastating loss of a close friend who was killed by a police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Despite his reservations that justice would not be served, Coates continued blogging about what occurred in Florida. At the same time, Lee was producing groundbreaking reporting on Martin.

The shooting death of a black boy prompted Coates and Lee to showcase their creativity. In this case, creativity meant swift, relentless productivity. Indeed, in a month’s time each writer published more than twenty online articles, in quick succession, about the circumstances that led to Martin’s killing. Coates’s blogging in 2012 formed a basis for his bestselling nonfiction book Between the World and Me (2015). Lee’s reporting primed him to produce all-encompassing coverage following the shooting death of Michael Brown in August 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. Coates and Lee are two prominent writers among a chorus of creators whose capabilities heightened or expanded because of their focus on black boys.

Similarly, since 2000 black men—many of whom were perceived as bad, insubordinate, or troubling—motivated astonishing output from African American writers. Paul Beatty, Tyehimba Jess, Adrian Matejka, Kevin Young, and the late Amiri Baraka, to name some, concentrated on legendary and disreputable cultural figures as they composed literary works. Those writers were of course extending longstanding practices among African American storytellers and artists who have been moved to share captivating tales of bad men for hundreds of years now. The sheer number and high quality of works on bad men produced during the twenty-first century signal how elemental those figures are to creativity. Those men defined as bad black men are also quite diverse, including a heavyweight boxing champion, an ex-con folk singer, a rebel visual artist, and sellouts (that is, black people who are viewed as alleged race traitors).

This book seeks to advance literary studies by exploring a central question: How have African American writers drawn on black boys and bad men as creative touchstones for producing outstanding compositions? The project illuminates the works of writers, especially black male writers, most of whom have concentrated on these separate yet related subjects for extended periods. Their portrayals of different kinds of bad black men have proved crucial to the production of remarkable writings. Relatedly, depictions of black boys have given other writers pathways to create marvelous works.

I am aware that a project focusing primarily on black male writers might alarm folks worried that black women writers are being diminished or overlooked. When Ayana Mathis wrote a cover story about black male literary artists for the New York Times, she expressed similar worries: I wondered if a focus on male achievement might obscure the equally unprecedented successes of African-American women. And does that question undermine this extraordinary moment for black male writers?² These concerns correspond to long-running, sometimes heated debates about whether black male artists or black female artists receive the most acknowledgment. Competition for recognition intensifies the tensions.³

The writers I have chosen to focus on for this book stimulated my intellectual interests concerning black men. Those interests are undeniably subjective. The focal subjects of this study should not, therefore, be viewed as representatives of all black authors. These writers nonetheless offer advantages for considering the context of African American creativity. Furthermore, this project seeks to address the paucity of works on interrelated groups of contemporary black male writers.⁴

Compositions about bad men and black boys display varying degrees of creativity. Accordingly, this book makes the case that those of us who read and study African American writers can expand our understanding of their works by considering issues pertaining to creativity research—a large, vibrant field of inquiry that comprises assorted concepts, theories, and approaches. Scholars have used numerous critical frameworks to examine African American literary art, and concepts aligned with creativity research might enhance some of our studies. Not all successful writers are prolific. Consequently, there are creativity research concepts that advance analyses of writer output. The focus on productivity, for example, sheds light on the implications of Lee and Coates publishing dozens of articles on a single subject in a short period of time. Or we begin to realize the significance of poets Matejka, Jess, and Young devoting a deluge of poems to individual black men cultural figures, or of cartoonist Aaron McGruder producing such a wide-ranging body of compositions focused on two black boys. The sheer quantities of their works contribute to their quality as well as to the wonderful receptions that they garnered.

Literary scholars and book reviewers have rightly concentrated on satire in novels by Beatty, Colson Whitehead, and Mat Johnson, among others. In the context of creativity research, though, we would be inclined to consider more generally the notion of playfulness among writers. The whimsical, outrageously funny takes on serious subjects that permeate novels by those three writers orient us to the integral roles of amusement and mischief in creative processes. Their playfulness, by the way, is not limited to humor. Rather, the tendencies of writers to mix and merge sometimes dissimilar ideas constitute a kind of playing or experimentation that facilitates creativity. The Underground Railroad (2016) is not a humorous novel, but Whitehead’s decision to present the Underground Railroad as an actual train operating below the earth’s surface and his use of anachronisms reflect his interest in rearranging historical facts in order to present an entertaining story. As he noted in one interview, I am playing with history and time.⁵ Playfulness, productivity, divergent thinking, innovation, problem solving, creative process, and idea generation are some of the concepts that have regularly circulated in creativity research.⁶ Those concepts can strengthen our approaches to examining compositions by African American writers.

In some of their works, Baraka, Beatty, Jess, Matejka, McGruder, and Young demonstrate interest in black men who might be defined as bad. Creative compositions about bad men, no doubt, are hardly new. Folklore figures such as John de Conqueror, Stagolee, John Henry, and Shine appear regularly throughout American and African American cultural history. According to Zora Neale Hurston, black folks created and passed along tales about a plethora of culture heroes, including the Devil, John Henry, the rabbit, the fox, and Jack, the greatest culture hero of the South. The routes of black culture heroes are trans-Atlantic. As Hurston observes, In short, the trickster-hero of West Africa has been transplanted to America.⁷

A number of scholars have examined the histories of bad men. In an article on Sterling Brown’s poetry, Robert O’Meally explains that black badmen represent not so much fearful as exemplary figures and adds that in the case of black badman like Stagolee or Railroad Bill, virtually no law or custom but their own was binding. O’Meally draws on Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness to distinguish between two types of bad men: the bad bad men, who commit crimes against any and all people; and the moral bad men, who operate within American social structures, for the most part to achieve their victories by annihilating stereotyped conceptions about black strength and aggression under pressure, thus beating the white man at his own game.⁸ In his book Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction (2003), Jerry H. Bryant also writes about the two principal types of bad men. On the one hand, there are figures such as Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Tupac who revolt mainly against whites within the white system. On the other hand, there are those whose violent actions are unqualified by morality or protest, as this kind of bad man is willing to commit violence against white people and the people in his own black community.⁹

Cecil Brown’s Stagolee Shot Billy (2003) uncovers the history of one of our most legendary bad men. When a young Brown first heard toasts or tall tales of Stagolee, the figure was presented as a young god of virility, who was for speakers and listeners as impulsive, as vulgar, as daring, and as adventurous as they wanted him (and themselves) to be.¹⁰ Brown traces the infamous bad man’s presence in field hollers, folk ballads, folktales, blues and ragtime music, poems, short stories, and novels. In short, Stagolee was a powerful muse and recurring subject for large numbers of creators for over one hundred years. This rich history of defiant culture heroes persists in the works of contemporary black writers.

My work extends those previous studies by highlighting how bad men inspire the creative output of contemporary writers. Rebellious or disobedient black male characters and historical figures often showcase racial problems that stimulate African American writers to address a range of pertinent issues in original ways. Black boys in troubled situations have equally sparked noteworthy, inventive compositions by writers. Unlike the subject of bad men, however, there has been relatively little research on black boys as creative muses.

In the spirit of encouraging original takes on the study of black writing, I consider genres of compositions that appear infrequently on literature course syllabi or in scholarly discourse. The tendency of scholars and commentators to privilege novels, short stories, volumes of poetry, and autobiographies could delimit our abilities to recognize the multiplicity of what black people have been writing in the contemporary era. Cartoonist McGruder, who figures prominently in Bad Men, is widely known, but he is not a fixture in the canonical history of black literature. Still, the convergence of words and illustrations that define his works can advance conversations about contemporary black writing, thought, and artistry. Coates is a memoirist, journalist, novelist, and, equally relevant, he was a blogger—the mode of composition in which he was most prolific, producing more than seven thousand blog entries between 2008 and 2015. A look at poems and novels as well as comic strips, news articles, blog entries, and rap lyrics can usefully unsettle and expand what we talk about when we talk about African American literature.

In the twenty-first century we’ve witnessed an unprecedented number of honors bestowed on works by black writers: National Book Award winners. Pulitzer Prize recipients. Best sellers. Recipients of prestigious fellowships and academic appointments. You name it, and black writers have accomplished it. Yet the scholarly discourse on Beatty, Matejka, Jess, Lee, McGruder, and Young has been insufficient. Even though Coates is now a widely known writer and cultural commentator, few scholars have examined his blogging, which led to the acclaim he later gained for his long-form journalism and his book Between the World and Me. Poets and rap artists have made subversive black men pivotal to their compositions referencing slavery, but that aspect of their work has generated little critical notice. Scholars have devoted a trove studies to the topic of black masculinity, but we have not sufficiently attended to the notion of black men as creative subjects or muses, even though they have been essential to productivity and innovation in black writing.

There are at least three main reasons to concentrate on bad men and black boys in a book about creativity. First, although we have abundant possibilities for exploring creativity with respect to black writers, the significant compositions involving depictions of bad men make a research project on the subject appealing and informative. Poets and rappers enliven the drama and thrill of their verses and establish an interconnected creative thread by repeatedly focusing on rebellious slaves in their works. Jess’s volume of poetry leadbelly (2005) and Matejka’s volume The Big Smoke (2013) demonstrate how portraying the lives of unruly black men facilitate artistic innovation. Beatty’s award-winning novel The Sellout (2015) displays the divergent thinking that comes into play in a narrative about an alleged race traitor. This study clarifies the extents to which writers concentrating on bold and complex black men have spurred ample originality and increased creative output.

Second, works by Aaron McGruder, Trymaine Lee, and Ta-Nehisi Coates show how writers address African American struggles by centralizing black boys. McGruder’s The Boondocks highlights racial alienation and absurdity in America by tracing the experiences of two black boys who live in a white suburb. Lee’s profuse writings on Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are indispensable contributions in the struggles to raise awareness about the brutalities committed against black boys and young black men in the name of law enforcement. Coates’s blogging about Martin provides a basis for critical explorations of Stand Your Ground laws and white supremacy. An examination of works about black boys by Coates, Lee, and McGruder shows us how writers implement creative acts to raise consciousness about black experience and advance social justice.

Finally, I pursue this subject matter for personal and professional reasons. As a professor of American and African American literature, I have had the somewhat rare opportunity of working with hundreds of black male students in my classes throughout my career. Every semester since the early aughts, I have taught a series of courses comprised entirely of first-year collegiate black men; slightly older guys regularly enroll in my upper-level courses. We cover and discuss a wide selection of black writers and compositions. Their interests and perspectives have prompted my deeper considerations of works about bad men and vulnerable black boys, which became cornerstones in my studies of creativity.¹¹

African American Literary Studies and Creativity Research

My project, observed Houston A. Baker Jr. in 1984, is a minute beginning in the labor of writing/righting American history and literary history.¹² For decades now, numerous literary scholars have contributed to the labor of writing/righting American literary history by producing large bodies of interrelated articles, monographs, edited collections, book reviews, conference papers, course syllabi, and academic resources designed to magnify elements of black literary art. In the process African American literary studies evolved as an academic field, complete with different subfields and specialists. The collective, concentrated efforts of scholars have ensured that literary texts by Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and, principally, Toni Morrison have become the most written-about works in American literature.¹³ The imperatives among literary scholars have determined that canonical authors and historical texts account for the main areas of scholarship in the field. By and large, the scholarly discourse on African American literature showcases authors born prior to the 1950s and texts published primarily before 1990, notwithstanding a few exceptions.¹⁴

While acknowledging the value of historically salient authors and texts, Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers seeks to advance African American literary studies by analyzing compositions from the twenty-first century. Meta DuEwa Jones, Lovalerie King, Shirley Moody-Turner, Derek C. Maus, Emily Ruth Rutter, Cameron Leader-Picone, and other scholars have done commendable work by increasing our knowledge about contemporary black writers.¹⁵ Still, we need even more examinations to pinpoint the dimensions of contemporary African American writing and the relationships to works from previous centuries. For that reason, the current project contributes to these efforts by explicating the works of writers who established their careers based largely on their creative output since 2000.

In addition to examining the works of contemporary black writers, this book also explores creativity—a fundamental yet underdiscussed topic in African American literary studies. So far, creativity has been studied as it applies to the fields of psychology, education, business administration and economics, and social sciences in general, while much less attention has been paid to the field of literature.¹⁶ More so than most examinations of compositions by black writers, this project adapts concepts and lessons from the field of creativity research. This field, which began to flourish during the 1950s, underwent shifts or waves over the decades as researchers sought to explain the operations of innovation, performance, divergent thinking, and other terms associated with creativity.¹⁷ The oldest creative studies program in the country, the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College, was founded in 1967, and programs and curriculums devoted to studying creativity have thrived worldwide in recent years.¹⁸

The field has facilitated the production of a massive body of scholarship through the Journal of Creative Behavior; Creativity Research Journal; Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts; Gifted Child Quarterly; and Thinking Skills and Creativity, to cite a few journals in the field. Hundreds of researchers have made contributions to the critical discourse, providing me with more than enough ideas to consider.¹⁹ Writings by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Dean Keith Simonton, Keith Sawyer, Robert Sternberg, Sandra W. Russ, Emily C. Nusbaum, and Mark Runco have been especially constructive for expanding and deepening my interests in concepts and approaches in the field of creativity research.²⁰ Their insights and findings are interspersed throughout the chapters of this book.

Creativity research and African American literary studies are not easily compatible. Literary scholars mainly publish articles and books about noted authors and literary texts. Creativity researchers, by contrast, often produce scholarship based on experiments and hypotheses involving participants such as children, college students, or randomized adults. African American literary studies is a humanities field concerned with black literature, while creativity research is largely a social science that regularly highlights empirical findings. In addition, publishers annually produce dozens of general-interest books that focus on creativity and draw on findings from creativity research. The differences between African American literary studies and creativity research explain why the fields rarely intersect.²¹ Despite those differences, merging aspects of the fields has proven beneficial. For instance, I discovered that adopting concepts such as creative domains and problem finding from creativity research could enhance our understanding of processes and inventiveness of black writers.

Sawyer explains that creative domains refer to all of the created products that have been accepted by a field and all of the conventions that are shared by members of that field—the languages, symbols, and notations. Domains, more so than discourses or even traditions, connote a broad realm of ideas, evolving beliefs, and everyday practices, not just printed and official texts within in a field.²² Writers who produce groundbreaking works often draw from and combine concepts from multiple domains. Young’s volume To Repel Ghosts, focusing on artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, is part biography and part visual art chronicle, both of which are laced with musical references and playfulness. Matejka’s The Big Smoke draws on boxing, celebrity newspaper coverage, and early twentieth-century social history to present a kind of biography in verse of Jack Johnson. Writers signal the breadth and depth of their knowledge by pulling from and blending creative domains.

Based on my studies of creative domains, I began observing a recurring practice that I labeled concentrated cultural cataloging or cultural cataloging. I coined this phrase as a shorthand way of acknowledging the tendency of writers to rigorously make references to assortments of people, concepts, and objects within a domain or across domains within a composition or related series of compositions. In a single tribute poem for Max Roach, Amiri Baraka name-checks more than fifty of Roach’s fellow jazz musicians.²³ Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus is an extended narrative poem that is comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.²⁴ In The Sellout Beatty references more than 350 cultural and historical figures, including famous athletes, musicians, activists, comic book characters, and ex-slaves. In The Boondocks McGruder refers to black nationalists, white historical figures, hip-hop artists, comedians, movie stars, and politicians.²⁵ Baraka, Lewis, Beatty, and McGruder present multitudes of allusions and references in acts of concentrated cultural cataloging. The wide scope and eclecticism of their cataloging illustrate their fluencies across creative domains.

Cultural cataloging emerged as a concept for me over the course of more than thirty years of listening to rap music. Hip-hop artists,