The Numinous Negro - His importance in our lives; why he is fading

Earlier this year, Al Sharpton led an abortive putsch against Jesse Jackson, though its significance was greater than he, or Jackson, suspected, for it involved someone more important than either man. Both Sharpton and Jackson know this person well. So do you; so does everybody. He is the Numinous Negro.

Jackson had been embarrassed by the disclosure of his mistress and their illegitimate child. Suddenly, the Reverend stood revealed as a hypocrite, and his political effectiveness was hampered.

Sharpton made his opening move in April, on a trip to buy the freedom of black Christian slaves in Sudan. "I think it's outrageous," Sharpton said, "that no nationally known civil-rights group has gone over to Africa to criticize what is happening there." A perfectly good point- but also a barbed one to Jackson, who had been jetting about Africa as President Clinton's special envoy without taking note of the modern slave trade.

Over the following months, Sharpton kept a high profile, as if to say, Look at what I do-and what Jesse no longer does. He demonstrated against the Navy in Vieques, got sentenced to ninety days in jail, and began a hunger strike-a hat trick. When was the last time the VIP Jackson had done any time? Sharpton let it be known that he was thinking of running for president.

But in the flush of success, he overreached. In a jailhouse interview on his presidential prospects in June, Sharpton dismissed the Tawana Brawley case as a factor. "Did I take the blood of the guy I loved and put it on my shirt?" Sharpton asked. "I think the Brawley case pales in comparison."

Wrong comparison. Sharpton was alluding to the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, when a young Jesse Jackson went on television wearing a shirt that he said was soaked in King's very blood. At the time, Jackson's performance provoked angry questions in the civil-rights movement: Had he cradled the dying King in his arms? Had he only dipped his shirt in King's blood? Was it King's blood at all? Blood or not, was Jackson as close to King as his story implied? Though whites rarely noticed it, the controversy dogged Jackson in black political circles for 25 years. Only after decades of activism and politics, and two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination, did Jackson's critics concede that, whatever the truth of the story, he had retroactively earned the right to have told it. By raising the matter now, Sharpton was airing dirty linen.

Black leaders were not happy. "Certain things we choose not to dignify with a comment," said Jackson's press secretary. Sharpton "needs to eat," said one congressional staffer. "[He] sounds like he's delirious." Sharpton had used King to strike at the king, but he had not struck home. His apologies were abject, copious, perhaps even sincere. He asked Jackson to come to prison and pray with him.

Sharpton's three-month putsch attempt was an event in intra-black politics, and hence an event in Democratic-party politics. But it was also something more. At the end of this maneuvering, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton, three nationally known minister- politicians, came together like a conjunction of planets. In astrology, such alignments sometimes predict death, and so it did here. The doomed figure was the Numinous Negro.

Who is the Numinous Negro? He is everywhere, especially in our hearts, and if we are lucky he is our friend. The dictionary defines "numinous" as "of or pertaining to a numen," which was a Roman term for "the presiding divinity . . . of a place." "Numinous" also means "spiritually elevated." Jungians and literary critics love the word, but normal theologians use it too. The Numinous Negro is a presiding divinity. The place he presides over is America, and contact with him elevates us spiritually.

You see him in the gooey prose of white liberals whenever a Negro appears ("Negro" was the accepted word when blacks first became Numinous). Dozens of examples could be culled from the work of the late Murray Kempton, though his humor operated as a brake on his piety. The work of Garry Wills, who has no humor at all, would yield thousands of examples. The Numinous Negro need not be a man. Toni Morrison and Oprah are Numinous Negroes (Ms. Morrison is a seer; Oprah is a sage). Marian Anderson was also Numinous.

Art and entertainment, always eager for shortcuts to characterization, make frequent use of the Numinous Negro. When we see a Negro in movies or television, we not only know he is Numinous (unless he is Thuggish- see below), we can judge the other (white) characters by how they treat him. The saintly Death Row hero of The Green Mile was so Numinous that even movie reviewers noticed the technique. Morgan Freeman's character in The Shawshank Redemption was more complex, though it had elements of numinosity. Some years ago, Freeman played Petruchio in a Central Park production of The Taming of the Shrew. There he was not Numinous at all, simply a figure of farce (and an excellent one). But so ingrained are our expectations that it took this spectator a moment to adjust.