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

The split between public and private was all the more inevitable for Cullen given his situation in his adoptive home. Rumor has it that Frederick Asbury Cullen modeled this kind of split for his son, serving both as exemplary Christian leader of the race and as seducer of choir boys (Lewis 76). Perhaps more pertinent for my purposes is Reverend Cullen's model of responsible Christian maleness, "responsibility" in this case turning on one's public activity on behalf of the race. Reverend Cullen's autobiography is replete with the values of Christian self-renunciation in service to God and others. The elder Cullen transformed Salem Methodist Episcopal from a tiny, struggling mission church to one of the most powerful African American churches of the twenties, with more than three thousand members, large property holdings, and a plethora of ministries to the tidal wave of immigrants from the South. While much has been made of Reverend Cullen's criticisms of the cabaret and club life, as well as the prostitution and sexual peccadillos that his adopted son found alluring, Cullen was far from a simpleminded moralist. Indeed, some of his most important work included public action on issues attendant to the assertion of black maleness in the world. He served as president in the local chapter of the NAACP and helped to organize a protest of the race riot in Brownsville, Texas. He helped send W. E. B. Du Bois to the League of Nations, helped organize the Silent Parade, and helped found the Urban League. Among his most important ministries at Salem was a commitment to the YMCA, through which he hoped to rescue Harlem boys from gang activity in the streets (Ferguson 20-21; Sernett 134). Whatever the limitations of such activism proved to be, it can hardly be said that Reverend Cullen's Christianity encouraged racial self-hatred. Indeed, in many ways, Reverend Cullen stood as an exemplar of that icon of racial leadership, the black preacher, noted by Du Bois as a man at "the centre of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousa nd in number" (199).

Whatever Reverend Cullen's private sexual proclivities, it seems clear that he encouraged his son to replicate his belief in the importance of public leadership and proper public deportment. The younger Cullen's notorious complaint against the lowlife depictions of some Harlem Renaissance work surely reflects his father's moralism. But as his father's position is more complicated, so too is the son's. While not entering the ministry, the young poet was drawn to positions of leadership within his own vocation, serving as editor of journals and anthologies from his days as a school boy until the days he ceased most professional activity as a writer. While Cullen has been critiqued for not having followed an editorial policy more clearly focused on folk traditions when he brought out his anthology Caroling Dusk, he clearly conceived of the project as a form of racial promotion--a way of putting the best foot forward, as it were. Houston Baker has suggested that Cullen's poetic project was "celebrated by black p eople because he demonstrated authentic, poetical achievement to appreciative whites" (47). I would go a bit further and say that it demonstrated such achievement to any number of appreciative members of the black bourgeoisie as well.