A "Headless Display": Sula, Soldiers, and Lynching
Chuck Jackson
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 2006,
pp. 374-392 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2006.0048
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mfs/summary/v052/52.2jackson.html
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A "Headless Display": Sula, Soldiers, and Lynching
f
a
"headless display": sula,
soldiers, and lynching
Chuck Jackson
Before it fully begins, Sula heads off its central plot with the
brief remembrance of a disappeared place, a framing narrative that
describes trees before they have been uprooted, buildings used by
local merchants before each has been destroyed by a wrecker, and
the laughter of a people before it has faded into silence. The narrator
describes this place, a neighborhood called the Bottom in an Ohio
valley town called Medallion, as "hot and dusty with progress" before
it was cleared for the gentrifying project of building suburban homes
and a golf course for wealthy white families (5–6). And while the
novel tells the reader that late-twentieth-century developers cleared
out just about every African-American resident who lived, worked,
flourished, gossiped, cried, joked, and loved in the Bottom from WWI
through the mid-1960s, there are still traces of their former community: "the few blacks [who] still huddled by the river bend, and
some undemolished houses on Carpenter's Road . . . the poor, the
old, and the stubborn" (166).1 The project of Sula is to gather these
contemporary remains of the modern black body and flesh them out
into wholes, telling multiple stories about the progress accompanying
black experience outside of its usual, progressive urban centers (such
as Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit). The wicked irony of such a gathering and fleshing out of these fragments is that Sula also breathes life
into and subversively reconstructs a lynching narrative, one of black
modernity's most nightmarish facets.
Even though no lynchings take place in Sula, the novel borrows
from and rearranges actions and objects typically found in lynching
MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 52 number 2, Summer 2006. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
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narratives, including bodily mutilation, the slicing off of a body part
with a knife, two bodies that are burned to death (one of which is
first doused with kerosene), grotesque spectacle, public ritual, and
the persistence of the menacing white gaze.2 Sula combines the
lynching narrative's primary signifiers with the traumatic return of
African-American soldiers from the battlefields of World War I. The
majority of the novel takes place during the years between World
War I and World War II, a time during which the number of lynchings in the United States grew to a disturbingly high number. Sula's
soldiers dramatize, sometimes directly, and sometimes abstractly,
the psychological intensities and traumas specific to the public black
body in-between the war years: the shell-shocked black man, who
returns to the US clothed in a military uniform, and the hanged,
burned, and castrated black male body.3
Sula begins and ends its central plot with images of the notorious Shadrack marching through the Bottom, shouting commands
and holding up a hangman's noose in honor of an event he calls
National Suicide Day. The narration of these first and last National
Suicide Days frame other events in which the returned World War
I soldier appears in a horrific scene that borrows an image from
lynching narratives in order to sustain a metaphor for the modern
black male's relationship to and participation in the national public
sphere. 4 Morrison's representation of two soldiers, who, in 1920,
silently watch Helene Wright violate Jim Crow laws and face off with
a white train conductor, builds on Shadrack's spectacular keeping of
National Suicide Day, as does the novel's other returning WWI soldier, Plum Peace, whose incineration in 1921 dovetails with the irony
of Shadrack's noose. Following Morrison, I begin my analysis in the
year 1919 in order to historicize and contextualize African-American
participation in the war overseas with the undeclared war against
African Americans at home.
Between War and Lynching
In 1919, over 200,000 African-American troops returned from
World War I to the United States (Lewis 13). That same year, W. E.
B. Du Bois wrote regular essays in the Crisis to chronicle AfricanAmerican soldiers as war heroes who suffered both the violence of
war overseas—"with its frank truth of dirt, disease, cold, wet and
discomfort; murder, maming, and hatred"—as well as racial prejudice
and racist violence at home ("An Essay" 63).5 More recently, Lt. Col.
Michael Lee Lanning describes the racism internal to the US military
during WWI, as well as a perverse paranoia among white American
politicians and civilians that fueled the violent reception of black
soldiers upon their return home:
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A "Headless Display": Sula, Soldiers, and Lynching
Throughout the Deep South community leaders urged the
formation of vigilante groups to prevent the wholesale
ravishment of southern [white] women. Sen. James K.
Vardaman of Mississippi demanded that white southerners
defend their wives and daughters against "French-womenruined Negro soldiers" . . . . Instead of marching bands and
grateful citizens to welcome them, black soldiers encountered mobs, complete with Ku Klux Klan members, who
frequently beat them and stripped them of their uniforms.
It was white America's effort to return African Americans to
their "place." . . . One local city official, greeting a group of
veterans returning to New Orleans, declared, "you niggers
were wondering how you are going to be treated after the
war. Well, I'll tell you, you are going to be treated exactly
like you were before the war; this is a white man's country
and we expect to rule it." (150–51)
The black male body in uniform, in this passage, stands at odds with
white nationalist patriotism, which sought to control black citizen-soldiers by signifying their bodies with prewar racist rhetoric, recasting
military black men as "niggers" who are always already about to be
lynched in the name of American purity and Southern pride.6
In a 1919 sartorial economy, robes of the Louisiana KKK (implied in the above narrative as cloaking the members of an otherwise
generic mob) depose the political power that would otherwise attend
the military clothing covering the body of a black solider. As Du Bois
and Lanning point out, the nation demanded that black men wear
uniforms and defend American interests overseas but, both during
the war and once the war was over, the nation would not grant black
men access to the American ideals for which they supposedly put their
lives on the line. In the postwar moment, the visibility of uniforms
reinscribes racial subjects so that official, military clothing, when
attached to the black body, does not signal social or political power
compared to uniforms of any other kind (here, KKK robes, elsewhere
the uniforms of the police, prison guards, or, as we shall see in the
case of Sula, train conductors) that cover and protect white skins.7
The figure of the lynched black soldier functions as a horrific
reminder of how black men (still) represented a visible disruption
of national, political, and racial uniformity in the early twentieth
century.8 Robyn Wiegman observes that lynching operates "according to a logic of borders—racial, sexual, national, psychological, and
biological as well as gendered. . . . [L]ynching figures its victims as
the culturally abject—monstrosities of excess whose limp and hanging
bodies function as the specular assurance that the racial threat has
not simply been averted, but rendered incapable of return" (82). The
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particularity of the lynched black soldier, therefore, adds to Wiegman's
already politically layered analysis of monstrosity yet another layer
of meaning: even as the black soldier returns to the US from military
duty, he is rendered incapable of a return home precisely because
his return signifies the possibility or threat of a new turn in American
racial politics (equality, inclusion, empowerment, authority, suffrage,
social integration, uniform access to capital, property, and education).
The specularity, as Wiegman puts it, of the lynched body mirrors back
a spectacular horror, and the shock value of the veteran status of
such a body renders any sense of African-American national identity
and belonging impossible. In Sula, as in the above history provided
by Lanning, black soldiers who are not "in their place" signify how
America finds itself "out of place": national identity is uniformly attached to bodies that are then violently abjected from the national
public sphere.9
The Soldier with the Hangman's Noose
After its prologue, Sula begins with the horrific violence of war, a
sudden eruption of the grotesque that rains down on the unprepared
Shadrack, a WW I doughboy who is described as having "a head full
of nothing" (7). While running across a French battlefield in 1917,
Shadrack witnesses a fellow soldier's face "fly off," followed by an
explosion that annihilates the soldier's entire head. The narrator reports that Shadrack sees how the soldier's head splatters into "soup
[while] the body . . . r[uns] on, with energy and grace" (8). Shadrack's
head is full of nothing, an abstraction that signifies his disengagement
with military maneuvers. This "empty head" represents the space
of no thought. But, as the narrator makes clear, heads are always,
in a material sense, filled with something: a bodily interior where
brains, blood, and other fluids and sensory organs are kept in place
by a skull, skin, and hair. The explosion of one into the other, in the
above scene, not only points to Shadrack's own psychological break
(his head full of nothing watches a head that bursts into nothing),
but also attaches national importance —a uniform—to the headless
body. The scene launches the novel's critique of an early-twentiethcentury national body by first effacing it, removing its identity, and
then destroying its head, its center of power whose insides come out
even though it still believes itself to be in tact. 10 Shadrack's role as
witness to this event fills his once empty head with nightmares and
hallucinations about his own body, which he imagines is inside out,
exceeding its own limits and moving against his brain's command.
After spending time in a mental hospital and in jail, Shadrack
finally returns to the place where he belongs, his home in the Bot-
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tom. As he travels back to the Bottom, Shadrack designs a strategy
for how to keep himself sane while, at the same time, re-establishing
his identity as a national presence in the local community, one that
deliberately refuses the pageantry of flag-flying ceremonies. Instead,
Shadrack indulges in a morbid theatrics of "the unexpectedness of
[death and dying]" by inventing National Suicide Day. The seemingly weird occasion of National Suicide Day helps Shadrack to heal
his war trauma and, in addition, from 1920 onwards, January third
becomes a yearly, neighborhood event—a quirky, autonomous, oneman veteran's parade: "On the third day of the new year, he walked
through the Bottom down Carpenter's Road with a cowbell and a
hangman's rope calling the people together" (14).
Shadrack's annual public performance with a rope, I argue,
not only calls for a suicidal hanging but also brings together his private experiences in the war (the narrative repeatedly encodes the
enlisted Shadrack and his trauma as "private" [9]) with the public
violence experienced by African Americans at home. As a veteran
with a hangman's noose, Shadrack links the image of the headless
US soldier overseas with the image of a body with a rope tied around
its neck—not headless, but a body with a weapon around its neck
that will kill before it separates head from trunk, top from bottom.
Choosing a hangman's rope as one of his props, Shadrack appropriates one of the lynch mob's most brutal weapons, and adds to it the
rustic accompaniment of a cowbell. As Joseph Roach explains, ritualized, public performance restores and recreates a collective social
memory, producing a bodily understanding of an event that differs
from, and often critiques, the textual knowledge of history (45–49).
National Suicide Day, an imaginative event that becomes "a part of
the fabric of life up in the Bottom" (16), serves as a live critique of
national history as it commemorates the result of international conflict
for soldiers like Shadrack, as well as the unspoken intranational racial
traumas of 1919, a year in which the number of lynchings and race
riots in cities and small towns in the US reached its zenith.
Even though Shadrack clearly explains that the rope that he
holds is for his neighbors to "kill themselves or each other," national
suicide can be read more deeply by privileging the word "national"
(14). With national suicide, the traumatized soldier performatively
asks citizens to turn the nation against its center of power, so that
the national top (the state, the ruling class, the head) is broken and
choked off from the national bottom (the people, the disempowered,
the disenfranchised, the nether regions). Additionally, the holiday
tacitly asks a question: if every citizen of the nation committed suicide, what would be left? What is a nation without its citizenry? By
asking members of the all-black neighborhood in Ohio to take their
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own lives (which no one ever takes seriously), the veteran-instituted
National Suicide Day fantastically transforms the lynching rope into
a suicide noose. Black citizens refuse Shadrack's call, and so the
holiday strengthens life inside the community, even as they fear his
demonstration. Even though for years Shadrack is the only participant
in the National Suicide Day parade (an "annual solitary parade" as
the narrator puts it), the people of the Bottom come to integrate it
into their everyday conversation: "they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday because they had absorbed it into their thoughts,
into their language, into their lives" (15). National Suicide Day not
only allows Shadrack to "get [the unexpectedness of death and dying] out of the way," but it also dislocates the ideological imperatives
of the nation from the body of the wounded soldier and projects it
outwards onto a mass subject (14).
Saving Face and Burning Up11
Shadrack haunts the Bottom from within, scaring the public in
a familiar landscape: "At first the people of the town were frightened
. . . his eyes were so wild, his hair so long and matted, his voice
so full of authority and thunder that he caused panic" (14–15). The
disruptive performance takes place for and through an all-black
neighborhood and, eventually, adds to the neighborhood's sense of
public life.12 The novel's second chapter, 1920, tells the story of a
different kind of alarming public spectacle, one that takes place outside of the Bottom, in the highly policed public space of a Jim Crow
train car, one headed South from Ohio to New Orleans. Two nameless
black soldiers gaze at a spectacular public disruption, one in which a
white train conductor stops Helene Wright and her daughter, Nel, who
mistakenly enter a car reserved for whites and attempt to cross over
into one marked "COLORED ONLY" (20). This scene, too, is haunted
by the threat of lynching.13
Passengers in the all-black train car, including the black soldiers,
become a public audience who watch as Helene tries to save face
once the white uniformed conductor stops her at the midway point in
her destination. The narrator's description of the blundering Helene,
and the reaction of the soldiers who watch her, recalls Shadrack's
witnessing of the effacement on the French battleground. The literal
removal of a soldier's face during 1919 turns, in 1920, into a figurative representation of extreme changes in the faces of soldiers on
a train as they witness Helene's attempt to recover from a public
mistake.14 Whereas Shadrack responds to facelessness by making a
noisy public scene (one that daringly asks a people living under the
awful threat of the lynching rope to take up the same weapon for
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suicidal reasons), the two soldiers in the train car remain silent, but
the narrator calls attention to their facial contortions, which speak
more loudly than words.
The presence of the white conductor (a "salmon colored face"
that stares out of a uniform) chips away at the guard so carefully
put up by Helene. Helene's guard, "a beautiful dress," was supposed
to allow her the comfort of dignified, black bourgeois selfhood, but
under the gaze of the white conductor, its meaning turns inside
out: a worthless or obvious performativity, an attempt to pass (19).
However, it is not Helene's intention to pass as white, but rather to
pass through white space: "Rather than go back and down the three
wooden steps again, Helene decided to spare herself some embarrassment and walk on through to the colored car" (20). Saving face,
in this scene, involves refusing the command to about face, with
a hope that no one will mind or notice as Helene proudly (but not
without anxiety) struggles through Jim Crow space.
The physical faces of the public spectacle (Helene), the policing
agent (the white conductor), and the witnesses (the uniformed, black
soldiers) in this scene serve as a metonymy for the larger, unspoken
narrative of race, gender, power, and the nation during a year that
saw an increase in the number of lynchings. The narrator's tight focus
on faces and their parts adds to the scene's anxiety-producing effect.
Like a series of close-ups in film, the narrative moves from the white
man's ear and its earwax to Helene's recently licked lips, from a white
face to several black faces, from "midnight" eyes to "grey eyes," and
from Helene's "dazzling" white teeth to the taut facial muscles and
the blood that pumps underneath the black skins of the soldiers’
faces (21). It is this fantastical transformation of the unnamed black
soldiers that calls for analysis: "The two black soldiers, who had
been watching the scene with what appeared to be indifference, now
looked stricken . . . [Nel] saw the muscles of their faces tighten, a
movement under the skin from blood to marble. No change in the
expression of the eyes, but a hard wetness that veiled them as they
looked at the stretch of her mother's foolish smile." (21–22). Why
such a strong, bodily reaction from these soldiers who, as far as the
reader knows, might care less about the mistakes, as Helene puts it,
of light-skinned black women on Jim Crow train cars?
Presumably, during 1920, unlike train conductors or luggagetoting mothers who smile, veterans in uniform represent the face of
America. The two black soldiers on the train, however, represent a
two-faced nation: the men have risked injury and death for a nation
that subordinates them with the threat of violence, a threat that,
in its most extreme form, includes death by lynching. The semiotic
power of the white conductor's uniform holds sway over the scene,
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381
fanning the flames of intraracial, cross-gender anger directed from the
black soldiers to the black female civilian. For the soldiers, Helene's
smile turns her face into a kind of torch, a "bright and blazing light,"
a fiery smile that, instead of warming the white conductor, causes
the soldiers to "bubbl[e]" with anger at what appears to be Helene's
shameless flirtation (22).15 Helene gets under their skin and burns
them up. Their faces engorge with rage. The smile is wasted on the
conductor and, because the soldiers can only witness this shameless face-to-face encounter, the narrator describes their uniforms as
a defacement of their bodies. The uniforms are "shit-colored," an
excremental smear on the national importance of black men.16
In the train car's face-off, the whiteness and maleness signified by the conductor and the Jim Crow laws he upholds surface
as victor: the laws are a part of everyday life, upheld and checked
because, at any moment, an interracial transgression might blow up
into a deadly threat. To avoid such repercussions, the soldiers silently
conform so that they might safely and swiftly arrive at their destination. The soldiers "bubbl[e] with a hatred" because they assume
Helene has willfully transgressed. Here lies the outrage: the soldiers
(at least on this train ride) have willfully taken their place alongside
the other black passengers, and assume that Helene has willfully
stepped out of place. In other words, Helene's accidental stepping
out of place, even as it is misinterpreted, signifies an accession to
full-citizenship rights that, clearly, African-American men clothed in
an American uniform, have been denied. On the quotidian battlefield
of separate but equal, Helene has become an unwitting soldier, one
whose actions cause a near-explosion that threatens to derail the
entire system, jeopardizing everybody on board and leading young
Nel to the conclusion that she must be "on guard—always" (22). In
this scene, private fears ooze into the public realm of the train car,
constructing a hallucinatory nightmare thick with the flare-ups of
racial paranoia and danger.
The Soldier Who Burns to Death
Helene's blazing smile threatens to burn the soldiers so much
so that, as an act of resistance, they metaphorically transform their
flammable, liquid interiors into rock hard, cool statuary ("from blood
to marble"). This figurative rendering of one who lights a soldier's
body on fire resurfaces as a literal act, in 1921, when Eva Peace
douses her son Plum, the novel's other veteran, with kerosene and
torches him, incinerating, as well, his dream of an eagle baptizing
him in radiant light.
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Whereas the narrator provides plenty of details about Shadrack's
war trauma, the narrator tells the reader nothing about Plum's war
experiences. The reader only knows that Plum left for war in 1917
and that he "returned to the States in 1919 but did not get back to
Medallion until 1920." Shadrack and Plum are contemporaries who,
as far as the reader knows, have never met. At the same time that
Shadrack makes his way from the hospital to a jail cell to the streets
of Medallion, Plum travels the United States, hitting all of the big
cities in the north, "New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago" (45).
The reader might assume, then, that Plum's postwar urban explorations in the northern US would reconstruct him as a self-assured,
self-possessed "New Negro" of the Renaissance, an African American
whose identity, culture, and aesthetic differs radically from what Alain
Locke, writing during this time, describes as "the dusty spectacles
of past controversy" (5). But Plum, like Shadrack, returns from
World War I without an urban sophistication or military masculinity
in place, either of which might occasion a small-town celebration of
a national hero. Instead, the narrator tells us, "there was obviously
something wrong":
[Plum's] hair had been neither cut nor combed in months,
his clothes were pointless and he had no socks. But he did
have a black bag, a paper sack, and a sweet, sweet smile.
. . . Then he began to steal from them, take trips to Cincinnati and sleep for days in his room with the record player
going. He got even thinner, since he only ate snatches of
things at beginnings or endings of meals. It was Hannah
who found the bent spoon black from steady cooking.
(45)
Plum, neither a war hero nor the novel's heroine, is addicted to heroin,
signified by the "bent spoon black from steady cooking." In addition,
Plum's proud uniform gets traded in for clothes that are "pointless."
Plum's body withers and becomes "even thinner" as it wastes itself in
the sleepy wash of heroin shots. Plum's wasting of what is supposed
to be a nationally-identified soldier's body works as a slow response
to Shadrack's gothic call to commit National Suicide.
Instead of a flashback in which Plum, like Shadrack, trudges
through fields or comes under fire, the novel substitutes a traumatic
story from Plum's infancy. The novel describes a particularly harsh
winter when Plum "stopped having bowel movements" (33). This
painful blockage brings about his terrible, nonstop screams; the
attempts of Eva, his mother, to relieve him are futile. As part of a
desperate solution, Eva struggles to move Plum from the interiors of
the home to the outhouse, an icy, closet-like structure adjacent to
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the house proper. Once there, Eva forces Plum's body to make the
same move, to bring what is inside, out:
Deep in the darkness and freezing stench she squatted
down, turned the baby over on her knees, exposed his buttocks and shoved the last bit of food she had in the world
(besides three beets) up his ass. Softening the insertion
with the dab of lard, she probed with her middle finger to
loosen his bowels. Her fingernail snagged what felt like a
pebble; she pulled it out and others followed. Plum stopped
crying as the black hard stools ricocheted onto the frozen
ground. (33–34)
The scene replaces battlefield trauma with a redescription of the
future soldier's body as a polymorphous soft tissue with something
hard stuck inside—"what felt like a pebble." While this is not a scene
of castration, it is certainly one of waste, violation, and removal. The
hardness of "what feels like a pebble" resembles the marble-like interiors of the nameless soldiers on the train: a masculine center for
the male body. The relief brought about by its removal foreshadows
how, although it is only the size of a small stone, without this seed,
Plum will eventually wither. Plum's fruity name and his fruitless addiction allude to the fruit in Billie Holiday's (also a heroin user) version
of "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching in the South, as well as to
a possibly queer masculinity.17 Seedless, the infantile Plum and the
postwar Plum overlap, signifying a baby fruit without a pit of hardcore masculinity, only sweet pulp, skin, and a hollow space where
something once resided.18
Eva's removal of Plum's pit suggests that the guardianship of
the male body by the mother overrides the soldier-making work of
the symbolic, national, military Father. In Plum's pre-death, junk-filled
dream he imagines not a sergeant or lieutenant, but his mother, Eva,
as America's national bird, the eagle, who tells him "[e]verything is
going to be alright," even as she burns him alive:
Eva stepped back from the bed and let the crutches rest
under her arms. She rolled a bit of newspaper into a tight
stick about six inches long, lit it and threw it onto the
bed where the kerosene-soaked Plum lay in snug delight.
Quickly, as the whoosh of the flames engulfed him, she
shut the door and made her slow and painful journey back
to the top of the house (47).
Plum's hallucination of Eva's body as a national emblem who blesses
and folds Plum under her wing contrasts sharply with the horrific
stench of kerosene and burning flesh that goes along with Eva's act
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of murder. In the dream, Plum condenses the associations of military
security and strength into the icon of the protective American eagle,
displacing the national promise signified by the military uniform onto
the glowing wetness that bathes the skin of his sleeping body. The
nightmare of burning a black male body, in this scene, becomes, for
this veteran, a heavenly dream of "snug delight."
In her retelling of how she lit Plum on fire, Eva connects Plum's
heroin use with the maternal body, an incestuous desire for a return
to the womb. The safety of the womb and the pleasure of junk provide a perverse protection for Plum. As Eva states, "when he came
back from the war he wanted to git back in" (71). Plum takes refuge
in the shelter of the maternal body and its narcotic substitute, and it
is his mother who provides a highly figurative explanation of Plum's
inability to conform to militarized black manhood. The soldier-making experience of going to war fails to ascribe a progressive gender
to Plum, and instead causes him to regress, to once again become
the baby whose only guardian is his mother. That Eva chooses to kill
Plum by lighting him on fire recalls, certainly, the act of lynching. This
is not to argue that Eva has lynched Plum but, rather, that the act of
burning a black man to death in 1921, for Eva, makes him more of
a man than wasting away in junk-filled dreams.19 Between war and
lynching, Plum emerges as the effeminate addict, a soft man with a
"sweet, sweet smile" (45). The astonishing decision on Eva's part to
kill him by burning him to death because she wanted him to "die like
a man, not all scrunched up inside my womb, but like a man" cuts
short Plum's possible overdose, a self-imposed, drug-related death
that would, in Eva's mind, eternally mark him as a non-man (72).
The burnt flesh of his black body, however, connects him with what
could only be, for Eva, a fraternity of men who have died because of
the very fact of their blackness and their maleness, and not because
of their inability to kick their deadly habits.
A "Headless Display"
Long after Plum's death, Shadrack, the only soldier left in the
novel, leads the people of the Bottom out of their private homes and
into the streets. The solitary performance analyzed at the beginning
of this essay becomes, towards the end of the novel, a communitywide, public carnival-turned-mass-riot, one that leads many of the
Bottom's residents to a cold, watery grave.
In 1941, Shadrack discovers that "he no longer needed to drink
to forget whatever it was he could not remember . . . he could not
remember that he had ever forgotten anything," and his awareness
of his own loneliness drives him to put National Suicide Day to an end
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(155). The narrator tells us that Shadrack "did not want to go [and
that] this would be the last time he would invite them to end their
lives neatly and sweetly. . . . But it was not heartfelt this time, not
loving this time, for he no longer cared if he helped them or not. His
rope was improperly tied; his bell had a tinny, unimpassioned sound"
(158). The WW I veteran's loss of interest in his annual performance
signals that something spectacular and terrible is about to happen.
And it does, on an unusually sunny and warm January 3, 1941.
Small groups of people step out of their houses and, for the first
time ever, greet Shadrack with laughter and dancing; one woman
"marches" behind him, a clownish miming of the soldier that sends
neighbors into hysterics (159). Soon just about everyone in the
community has joined in, and the National Suicide Day march turns
into a public party. For once, Shadrack, with his hangman's rope, is
welcomed: "The group . . . called to [the people] to come out and
play in the sunshine—as though the sunshine would last, as though
there really was hope. The same hope that . . . kept them excited
about other people's wars . . . kept them convinced that some magic
'government' was going to lift them up, out and away from . . . those
wars." In 1941, the town risks taking stock in the veteran with the
hangman's rope as a sign that gives levity to their daily gravity. Just
as the people of the Bottom have had to convince themselves that,
somehow, the Great War must have benefited African-American
citizens such as themselves; or that the government might actually
do something about labor discrimination against their friends and
family members; so, too, do they allow themselves to believe, for
a moment, in the possibility that Shadrack's performance is cause
for a mass celebration. This novel calls the passing parade a "headless display," connecting the body of marching and clowning citizens
to the soldier who dies next to Shadrack on the French battlefield
(160). A headless display: the spectacular exhibition of a brainless,
broken body.
As the mass of people crosses into the white part of town, the
parade turns from a carnival into a protest, a demonstration of direct
action. Shadrack leads the residents of the Bottom to the opening of
a tunnel, newly under construction. The tunnel is the final stage of a
public works project begun in 1927 with the construction of "a new
road . . . that would wind through Medallion on down to the river" (81).
However, those in charge of hiring laborers to work on the road- and
tunnel-building projects have—for fourteen years—refused to hire any
of the black men from the Bottom. The construction site represents
the denial of good work at excellent wages for black citizens and, as
a result, the parade begins to revolt. The narrator explains:
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[T]hey picked up the lengths of timber and thin steel ribs
and smashed the bricks they would never fire in yawning
kilns, split the sacks of limestone they had not mixed or
even been allowed to haul; tore the wire mesh, tipped over
the wheelbarrows and rolled forepoles down the bank . . .
Old and young, women and children, lame and hearty,
they killed, as best they could, the tunnel they were forbidden to build.
They didn't mean to go in, to actually go down into
the lip of the tunnel, but in their need to kill it all, all of it,
to wipe [it] from the face of the earth . . . they went too
deep, too far . . . (161)
This act of resistance, of wanting "to kill" what white power has kept
from them, turns deadly and, in the end, the thawing earth shifts
under their feet, and the ground under them gives way, swallowing
the throng of angry black citizens, and bringing them to an early
death. The figurative face that emerges in the place of the tunnel,
its "lip" and the "face of the earth" from which the citizens mean to
remove it, suggests that, while a "headless display" runs amok in the
town, and while the histories of other headless and burned bodies
haunt the text by materializing in unexpected and sometimes shocking ways, ultimately, this scene brings the reader face to face with a
heady question about whether or not this is a self-fulfilling prophesy
of Shadrack's call for "national suicide," yet one committed without
the rope or the torch.
Shadrack, one of the few survivors of the accident, witnesses,
just as he did in 1917, this "headless display" and its march towards
the Bottom's devastating trauma: "And all the while Shadrack stood
there. Having forgotten his song and his rope, he just stood there
high up on the bank ringing, ringing his bell" (162). It would be, I
think, a misreading of this scene to assume that the residents of the
Bottom have, finally, committed a kind of mass suicide. Rather than
read this devastating moment in the novel as a careless act of selfdestruction, or as some kind of warning to anyone who might desire
to destroy property as an act of political resistance, I suggest that
even though Shadrack has "forgotten . . . his rope," that the reader
remember it, and extend the hangman's rope as a metaphor. For what
has happened, in the final analysis, is that public money allocated to
hire labor in a small town has been kept from those who have most
needed it. Shadrack's post at the mouth of the tunnel, on this final
National Suicide Day, suggests that violence against African Americans
should not just be limited to a reading of explosions overseas, or
hangings and burnings at home, but to the long-term effects of racial
discrimination and the unequal distribution of capital. The political
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energy spent in denying the citizens of the Bottom decent jobs exerts
a tremendous pressure—a stranglehold, one that slowly squeezes the
life out of the Bottom, not in a highly visible act of terroristic violence,
but in a more subtle, more systematic way—reshaping public policy
into a metaphorical noose.
The death-defying actions and neurotic habits of characters like
Shadrack and Plum show how the threat of getting strung-up by a
white mob or strung along by the white state haunts the strung-out
black veteran and, ultimately, come to signify the very complicated
presence of African Americans in the national public sphere, as well
as their resistance to and swift removal from it. Shadrack's holiday
performances make room for himself and others to inhabit public
space and, as a result, help to change the Bottom's public discourse,
but they also lead the people to a catastrophic, public death. Other
characters, like Helene, Eva, and Plum, inhabit a far more difficult and
personally fraught relation to the compulsions of white supremacy's
public dictates. In the tension between war and lynching, each character survives the best he or she knows how, trying not to break in
the squeeze of its force. It is with this chain of signifiers in mind that I
would like to conclude by turning to the novel's final chapter, 1965.
With Cash-Register Keys around Their Necks
The twenty-four year span between the climactic collapse of the
tunnel in 1941 to the more integrated (yet less community-oriented)
climate of 1965 might strike the contemporary reader as liberating
the narrative from the obsolete force of mob lynchings that, for so
many years, hung over the Bottom's black community. Even the narrator tells the reader, "Things were so much better in 1965. Or so it
seemed." An African-American presence in the public marketplace
changes the way a place like Medallion looks: "You could go downtown and see colored people working in the dime store behind the
counters, even handling money with cash-register keys around their
necks" (163). Shadrack's noose, which he so ironically and so eerily
holds up for public contemplation from 1919 until 1941, transforms,
in 1965, into something—a string? a chain? the type of loop is not
specified—that holds a key. The novel, by way of closing, charts how
a postwar economy necessitates that more workers will be needed to
manage, or at least run the registers of, small businesses that supply goods for a rapidly changing, high-speed commodity culture. The
employment of Medallion's black population for exactly these positions
suggests that, on the surface, the troubles of racist hiring practices
(which, as the final National Suicide Day makes clear, kept too many
of the residents of the Bottom impoverished and hopeless for far too
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A "Headless Display": Sula, Soldiers, and Lynching
long) have disappeared. The keys to the register, one might argue,
signify equal access to capital as well as a trust in the marketplace
ethics of the employees who wear them around their necks.
However, following Nel's suspicion of these "new" looking young
people, and remembering the anaesthetized Plum's fruitless pursuit
of the eternal high, I direct the reader's attention to the placement of
the cash-register keys around the black workers' necks (163). While
Sula's stories about Shadrack, Plum, and the two soldiers on the train
to New Orleans have much to say about black men's struggle to keep
from passing out of the national public sphere, as well as to keep a
claim on their own bodies, the final image of African-American shop
workers handling money and with keys around their necks suggests
that the lynching metaphor continues into the postmodern moment.
Around their necks, the keys to the cash register register life after
Shadrack's noose, a time in which modern white terror persists in
uncanny ways. Literally, but loosely, this material around the neck
is tied to the shiny promise of easy access to capital, exchange, and
public space. Sula challenges its readers to rethink the meaning of
the black worker's liberation into the postmodern market, letting us
know that this easy access to the cash register, which seems so freeing, comes with a warning that those who bear this key are still not
out from under the symbolic weight of its historical precedents.
Notes
1. Patricia McKee observes how, in Sula, "Morrison identifies both failed
possessions of places and failed actions; various connections between
occupants and their places that never took place" (1–2).
2. Farah Jasmine Griffin argues that twentieth-century African-American
writers work with the lynching narrative, even if it is absent: "[a]s
significant as the choice to use the lynching sign is the choice not to
use it" (47). Morrison's Sula straddles this choice, blurring the line
between using and not using.
3. For further analysis of literary representations of the African-American
soldier, see Trombold and Kaplan.
4. Carlyle V. Thompson's article on Sula makes a case for reading the
novel as an elaborate representation of decapitation. Thompson's
analysis touches on the social history of lynching and, indeed, rightly
argues that we interpret Shadrack's noose as a lynching rope (146).
However, his argument becomes reductive, I think, as the language
of literal, figurative, and metaphorical self- and reverse-decapitation has nearly every moment in the novel representative of headchopping. While it shares an interest in similar sections of Sula, my
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analysis differs from Thompson's in its deeper and clearer focus on
representations of the black WWI soldier's return to the US and the
historically specific horrors of lynching.
5. See also Du Bois's "The Black Man," and "Documents."
6. According to a May 29, 1919 document archived in the Papers of the
NAACP Part 7: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912–1955, "Nineteen
Negroes [were] lynched in eight states of the United States since
January 1, 1919! Four of these burned to death in the presence of
hundreds of men, women and children. Two of the victims have been
returned soldiers, still in their uniforms, recently returned from overseas where they fought to help make the world safe for democracy!"
The detail of the military dress adds further horror to what is already
horrible news and, at the same time, calls attention to an incongruous relation between the black male body, national semiotics, and
white power.
As a result of these lynchings, the NAACP published Burning at
the Stake in the United States, a collection of newspaper clippings
and other materials from the first five months of 1919. This pamphlet
documents the gruesome details of even more public burnings and
hangings of black men in Southern states, including a description of
Frank Livingston’s death on May 21, 1919, in Eldorado, Arkansas.
Livingston had "recently [been] discharged from the army at Camp
Pike" (15). See NAACP, Burning, Thirty, and Papers. For a more
complete history of the lynching of African American soldiers, see
Foner, 126; Grant, 307–308, Ginzberg, 118; Patton, 149 n.5; and
Tuttle, 22.
7. 1919, the year that begins Morrison's novel, was a year of significance
in African-American history: black WW I soldiers returned to the U.S.;
blacks continued a Great Migration from southern rural and urban
areas to find work in Chicago, D.C., New York City, and Philadelphia;
and interracial violence, black uprisings, and black resistance to white
terrorism escalated nationwide, coming to be known as the "Red
Summer," a period of five months (May 1919 through September
1919) during which bloody riots continuously broke out not only in
large northern cities like Chicago, but also in small, rural Arkansas
towns. For more on the Red Summer, see Tuttle as well as Lanning
(152).
8. For more on race, visibility, and public space, see Wagner.
9. For more on order and matter out of place, see Douglass, 36–7. See
also McKee, as well as Baker, "When Lindberg."
10. The term "national body" comes from Lauren Berlant's now familiar
argument that national bodies are "ideally" imaginary, derived from
an abstraction of white male citizenship, and constructed as prostheses "that . . . replace the body of pain with the projected image
of safety and satisfaction" (114). Occupying a site of privilege, the
national body appears as the unencumbered public citizen, sheathed
in the nation's guarantee that this body is the same as everyone
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else's body; its privacies are protected and its corporeality absolutely
whole and seamless.
11. I am indebted to Judith Halberstam's theory of the "face off" in gothic
narrative for my discussion in this section of the novel for, in many
ways, Sula, the titular character, is the novel's social monster, transforming from Nel's friend, to "roach" (insect) and "bitch" (animal),
to the town's inhuman "devil" (Morrison 112–118). See Halberstam,
150–151.
12. For more on race, publicity, and other public forms see The Black
Public Sphere Collective. See, especially, Baker, "Critical."
13. Thompson also concentrates on the language of the face in this scene,
but reads it, somewhat imprecisely, in terms of Helene's "decapitating
smile" and the soldiers' "decapitating taxonomic gaze" (150).
14. For more on the textual relation between figuration and face, see
Edelman, 192–241.
15. The language of "bubbling" as an interior, psychic phenomenon
recalls, of course, the description of Hannah Peace's skin, after she
accidentally catches herself on fire and burns to death. Her body
"bubble[d] and blister[ed] so badly that the coffin had to be kept
closed at the funeral" (77).
16. For smart interpretations of anality and bathrooms in Sula, see
Stockton and Boswell.
17. For an analysis of the queerness of the word "plum" as color, fruit,
and homonym for "plumb" see Brody and McBride, 286.
18. Think of the incredible significance of the plum metaphor and the
squeezing of its "seed" in the final stanza's of Jean Toomer's poem
"Song of the Son" in Cane where slaves are referred to as "dark
purple ripened plums" (12).
19. Although this essay focuses on those scenes that feature black soldiers, the novel also reconfigures the lynching narrative in even more
surprising ways. Sula and Nel, as young girls, accidentally drown a
young African-American boy (Chicken Little) and, when a white bargeman pulls his decomposing body from the water, the image calls to
mind the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till (61–64). In the novel, Chicken
Little's body is found in 1922, but, in the mind of the contemporary
reader, the body retroactively signals the public attention given the
effaced and mutilated body of a young black teenager, also pulled
from the water, who was murdered by the hands of white men for
whistling at a white woman. In addition, as discussed in note 15
above, Hannah Peace, Sula's mother and the sister of Plum, also
catches fire and burns to death, although this fire occurs without
someone else lighting it. The social world of Nel, Sula, Hannah, and
all of the novel's characters is folded into a story about the terrors
and pains of war, and haunted by the monstrous threat of lynching,
suggesting that, while Sula might be the novel's devil, something
even more sinister controls of the nightmares of human butchery.
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391
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