"The Singing Man Who Must be Reckoned With": Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the Poetry of Countee Cullen

The moon is ever manifest.

These things my heart always possessed.

And more than this (and here's the crown)

No man, my son, can batter down

The star-flung ramparts of the mind.

So much for flesh; I am resigned,

Whom God has made shall He not guide? (211)

The mother's voice resists the very masculine striving that the narrator purports to long for in the figure of the athletic Jacob. Her feminine counsel to patience and forbearance implicitly opposes the longings of Jim's body, insisting that the beauty of creation amply compensates for the exclusion and imprisonment of the body. While awaiting a heavenly kingdom, she provisionally accepts the prison bars that immobilize and hide the body.

The mother's image is complicated in that, besides being a sign of Christian pacification, she is also clearly presented as an origin of black identity, whether linguistic or biological. The father is dead. The mother is presented in nearly mythical terms as an ur-mother, the black Southern woman at one with the earth, a figure of the Southern roots of authentic black culture common to such works as Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Toomer's Cane, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. She is the source of language, conveying a form of black cultural heritage to her rebellious sons through "legends" of an enslaved people whom God saves after a long and arduous patience (212). In passing on these stories to her sons she is the figure of intergenerational connection, indeed the figure of generations, of blackness itself. She also seems to represent the fount of language itself, the mother tongue that makes it possible to articulate desire at all. While of a different class and geographical location, she symbolizes a mode of blackness with which Cullen would have been quite familiar, one marked by Christian longsuffering. But she is also the source of the Christian stories which framed much of black public and private discourse, stories which shaped a great deal of Cullen's poetry.

Thus, the mother provides the narrator with the languages necessary for poetry, but the contours of that language conflict with the realization of male desire. This is not to say that personal concerns and desire are necessarily opposed to racial solidarity, as Jim's anger at the world is often provoked by the death or humiliation of other black men. But within the ideological framework of Cullen's perception of Christianity, Jim's desiring and desirable body, with its seemingly inexorable thrust toward sexual consummation, presents the central problem for Christian longsuffering. Thus the body is in a conflicted relationship with the available language that can bring its desire to linguistic expression. Throughout the poem, the mother constantly attempts to quell and quiet Jim's desire, reading that desire as potentially self-destructive.

Nevertheless, this body is constantly threatening to break out beyond the mother's words that seek to control it through "sorely doubted litanies." Indeed, we first see Jim lying abed, not unlike the protagonist of "Heritage": "Jim with a puzzled, questioning air, / Would kick the covers back and stare." Jim's language at this stage of the poem is primarily interrogative, a linguistic marker of his desire since the question moves toward its future answer rather than accepting the mother's hortatory litanies that refuse to assault the "ramparts" of God's mind and will. Jim kicks back the covers, exposing his body to the air, not unlike the writhing lover of "Heritage." His body contains an "Aetna" that seethes with passion and fury. His bones reveal themselves through the skin of his hands "like white scars" when he is enraged at the death of some other black man. He imagines himself speeding "one life-divesting blow / Into some granite face of snow." If the mother's words speak of spirit, Jim seems to be all body, naked and exposed. His physical expressions of rage are immediately "covered" by the mother's words.