"The United States of Lyncherdom": American Modernism and the Persecution
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I would like to begin today with a little-known poem by the African-American
poet Gwendolyn Brooks:
"The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock"
In Little Rock the people bear
Babes, and comb and part their hair
And watch the want ads, put repair
To roof and latch. While wheat toast burns
A woman waters multiferns.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had.
I blink across my prim and pencilled pad.
The saga I was sent for is not down.
Because there is a puzzle in this town.
The biggest News I do not dare
Telegraph to the Editor's chair:
"They are like people everywhere."
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,
Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.
And I saw a coiling storm a-writhe
On bright madonnas. And a scythe
Of men harassing brownish girls.
(The bows and barrettes in the curls
And braids declined away from joy.)
I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . .
The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.
The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.
(The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, 1591-3)
Now the reason I have chosen to begin with this poem is that I think it makes the two central points that I would like to make today. Or, as Girard, would say, it's all already there, encapsulated in the literature.
Point #1: There is something irreconciliable about how normal people seem to be and the fact that they lynch or could participate in a lynching. Or maybe this is just a problem, or a contradiction, for neo-Enlightenment thinkers who continue to maintain, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, the absolute and inherent goodness of the human race.
In Brooks's poem, a newspaper reporter from Chicago arrives in Little Rock to investigate a lynching that has come in the wake of school desegregation. This reporter finds that the people of Little Rock are just like people everywhere-- they have kids, perform the same daily routine chores-- which make it all the more unthinkable that they could be racists and all the more unbelievable that they could participate in a lynching. But this is my point number one.
Point #2 (and this is one of Girard's central points): Christ's Crucifixion is the model we always use, whether we know it or not, to decode representations of persecution. Or quoting Girard in The Scapegoat: "We have learned to identify our innocent victims only by putting them in Christ's place" (202). In other words, "The loveliest lynchee was our Lord."
At this point, I could talk about Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August, or any of W.E.B. DuBois's stories like "Jesus Christ in Texas," but there is not enough time. Maybe during the discussion period, if people would like.
Before I end this very brief presentation, let me give you a few interesting facts about lynching in the American South. A statistic: Between the years 1882 and 1930, there were 2805 victims of lynch mobs in 10 Southern states. While I don't wish to underplay this carnage, it is really an amazingly small number of victims if you come to think of it. In Srebrenica, over twice that number of Bosnian Muslims were murdered in just a matter of days. And in a century that has seen Mao, Milosovic, Stalin, and Hitler, it is getting increasingly difficult to get excited over a mere 2800 victims. So why, then, in historical and sociological circles (and even in Hollywood) has the topic of lynching become almost as popular as the Civil War? I would suggest it is because sociologists and historians and even non-Girardians sense that there is something primal and generative about lynching. It is a literally mesmerizing phenomenon, not only for those who participate in it--but also for those who study it.
Now of these 2800 victims, almost 2500 were African-American. But three hundred of the victims were white: amazingly this is about 10.5 percent of the victims. (Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence). Of course whites lynched whites, and occasionally blacks lynched whites. But believe it or not, between 1882 and 1930, 148 southern Blacks died at the hands of mobs that were integrated or composed entirely of African-Americans. Two out of every 10 victims were killed by mobs of their same color. (Brundage, Under Sentence of Death, 148). Thus I would like to suggest (and this may be controversial to some) that lynchings in the South, as everywhere else, are only superficially about race. At a deeper level, they are about the Satanic Principle, and all of the contemporary ferment about "race" only serves to veil the real principle at work. These days it is far too easy to invoke race, gender, and class as self-sufficient explanatory categories. Girard somewhere defines modernism as the illusion in our contemporary world that religion ultimately boils down to political and social questions. In other words, lynching in the American South is not reduceable to the problem of racism. Scholars who try to explain lynching by blaming it on "the Cotton Culture," seasonal rhythms, economic fluctuations, castration anxiety or penis envy, or the structural autonomy of southern county governments, or the reversion to "popular justice," etc. are all dancing around (while avoiding) the mimetic theory without knowing it.
Let me end today with someone who knew a great deal more about human nature than any sociologist or shrink: namely, Mark Twain, who clearly belongs in that select club of writers who almost wholly anticipated the mimetic theory (I am grateful to Gil Bailie for drawing my attention to this piece by Twain. See his taped series on the Gospel of Luke for a much more thorough analysis than I have provided here). In a piece entitled "The United States of Lyncherdom" (1901), from which I have taken my title, Twain writes about "the inborn human instinct to imitate" (A Pen Warmed-Up in Hell, 154). He goes on to say that "by a law of our make, communities, as well as individuals, are imitators" (154). According to Twain, lynching is unfortunately propagated mimetically, contagiously like a disease.
And as if this weren't enough already, he makes the following modest proposal:
1. There are currently a lot of American missionaries in China.
2. But the Chinese are pretty good people, so maybe they don't need these missionaries too badly anyway. Further, the introduction of Christianity may do much to destabilize traditional Chinese culture, which can't be a good thing. Or as Twain puts it, "once civilized, China can never be uncivilized again."
3. Perhaps instead, we should bring these missionaries home to the American South, where they are truly needed, since these Southerners are far greater barbarians than the Chinese. "Come home and convert these Christians!" (159). You can't get rid of "the inborn human instinct to imitate," so you might as well import some good mimetic models into the situation.
4. Twain concludes his critique of so-called "Christians who lynch" by pointing out the huge gap that exists between what we would call the gospel and myth. Twains writes that the missionaries "have the martyr spirit; nothing but the martyr spirit can brave a lynching mob, and cow it and scatter it" (158-9). More than any other thinker of his time, I think that Mark Twain clearly understood the huge gulf that must separate Lyncherdom from Christendom.