Black Men on Horseback

A.B. Pratt
May 2020

Paul Beatty and Kehinde Wiley Take History for a Wild Ride

1. The Sellout

Remember election night 2008? The night a whole nation wept, so many tears of disbelieving joy? America was to have its first black president. Some folks dared to see it as the dawn of a post-racist world. Well, the narrator of Paul Beatty’s marvelously disturbing book, “The Sellout”, is having none of it.

You kind of hate him for it. Well, I did, being a cliched older, white, middle class woman, who still believes it was a miracle I never thought I’d see. Fact is, I winced at much of this garrulous, politically incorrect tirade by a guy whose surname is “Me”. But much of the pain was like that stitch in your side you get from laughing too hard, albeit at terrible truths. Beatty is the funniest and most insightful skewer of American racism I’d come across in a long time. He makes you howl. It’s hard not to be impressed with a piece of art that brings out such an appropriately complex response to the somewhat overwrought topic of race.

The plot, in thumbnail: there’s a “farm” town in California, called Dickens, now inhabited only by a poor, black community. Gentrification has led to its being erased off the official map. The narrator, the only farmer left, wants to put it back. His strategy for doing so is to introduce segregation. He ends up in the Supreme Court.

We meet him there, in a prologue, awaiting trial, smoking a joint on the steps of the revered institution. That prologue, as well as the setting, calls to mind the opening scenes of some other notable American tales. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Ellison’s The Invisible Man both begin on a threshold between being jailed and being free. Both foreshadow a redefinition of power in relation to freedom. As Mark Grieff put it regarding Ellison’s book. “History will let you make yourself “human, but only if you continually re-register the terms in which the dominating world would prefer to give your humanity to you.” Beatty, too, is engaged with that project. But unlike those earlier tales, Beatty does it with comedy. Don’t think satire. though. Think, screwball. Those holding the gavel of “justice,” are about to step on a banana peel. And so is political correctness.

Screwball comedy is both the subject, as well as the form, of this tale. One of the beloved figures in the life of Me, the narrator, is Hominy Jenkins, now an old man, who played “the stunt coon” on The Little Rascals on Saturday morning TV. He continues the role here: When Me discovers him in his garage with a noose and a chair, he berates him for being a “self-lynching drama queen,” knowing he is in little physical danger. Why? “For the life of them, black people can’t tie knots for shit.” The gag (and everything before and after), like much of early screwball comedy is, in the words of Art Speigelman, “manic, excessive, over-the-top, obsessive, irrational, anarchic and grotesque.” But such gaffs, we are reminded, allow a momentary release from the awareness of humanity at its most awful.

Hominy gets the joke. But it’s no longer an easy laughing matter to today’s audience. And that disapproval makes Hominy very sad. His acting was his pride, his claim to fame. He enjoys that, and the gags, redressing the racism by refusing to be humiliated by his role. It’s his own private joke. Very complicated stuff. In his mind, he is going to be forgotten as soon as the town of Dickens has been disappeared from the map, for he knows that, like the town, he is a “living National Embarrassment.” This is farce, funny and yet not. It’s a “joke,” in a different register, more like the later screwball of MAD magazine, which, in Spiegelman’s words, was “concerned not only with being funny but with interrogating and deconstructing its subjects with a self-reflexive irony.” Beatty seems to be daring us to laugh, while we seriously consider the reasons not to forget what went down in the past, even, maybe especially, those tasteless truths; many are still alive and well. Is there something else we might do with them, he asks, other than erase them?

Probably Beatty’s most controversial move in that regard is his use of the n-word. To say it is liberally sprinkled throughout is an understatement. The subject is addressed head on. The narrator’s nemesis, Foy Cheshire, is a leading figure in a club called the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals (welcoming black academics everywhere.) Cheshire is determined to rewrite Huck Finn so the unspeakable word is erased from the text (and eventually from the entire language.) But our American farmer/poet, who hoes – not beans, like Thoreau – but square watermelons, only sees that the cat doesn’t get the joke: the slave, Jim, we are reminded, is the wisest dude in the story; thus the n-word is actually emptied of any real substance and exposed as an abusive lie. For this defense of Twain, among his other offenses, the farmer is dubbed “The Sellout”.

But what do we do with this history, not to mention this present – its words, its images?

What the farmer in this book does is cultivate a rich soil of cliches and stereotypes that, like all good compost, has been broken down and made into some powerful shit. His main crop is something like performance art. He draws lines, crosses others, both metaphorical and real. Like the police chalk marking the site of a murder, he outlines a social and cultural body that makes Dickens not only visible but puts it in the spotlight of investigation. How? He posts preferential seating signs and segregates a bus. He makes a mirage of a fictional planned upscale school that sets off a revolution among the disenfranchised students across the street. His “slave,” meanwhile, decides to pose on his front lawn as a jockey statue.

This is a mad voice, in all senses of the word. His spewing has much to do with his grief and rage related to his father, who we learn, early on, has just been killed by the police at a random traffic stop. You might not think this could be turned to comedy, but you would be surprised.

Me’s father was a man of the civil rights generation, raised with an acute awareness of the history of being black in America. Another legacy from his father is the belief that science–social science and psychology– could cure the ills of racism (the mockery of experiments in that vein makes for some wrenching hilarity; trigger warning – it is violent.) Our narrator is not impressed with either social science or black power as he watches black pride bleed into Hip Hop, literally and figuratively, with no answers as to the better and worse of it.

Americans have long clung to the cowboy as the model of manhood. Who was that man? According to Jane Thompkins, who brilliantly analyzes the “inner life” of the genre in West of Everything, a few key traits stand out. First and foremost, these were men training to feel nothing in body and soul, to master and silence emotion and desire. They endured pain. Dodged bullets. Defied death. They were loners of few words. All of this is conveyed in the classic opening image of so many books and movies, a silhouette, against a desert butte, of a man as hard and powerful as that stone, with the desert in the background stretching out to the horizon.

That image – a cowboy dodging bullets on galloping horseback – reminded me of another zany black man on horseback. This one appears in the opening scene of “Old Town Road,” the recent, wacky five minute “movie” which features the wildly popular song by Lil Nas X, The cowboy escapes, but only to find himself in a time warp which lands him on a street of black homeowners in 2019. It’s a road where old mythic codes die, or, better yet, become mere grist for remixes. This mounted dude, spiffed up in the outfit of a bygone era, hearkens all the way back to Don Quixote, another out-of-place knight who is met with bemusement, skepticism, derisiveness. That older chevalier manque, however, was known for his sword that slashed stereotypes. Here too, conventions will be undone. The cowboy, dismounting with bravado, exposes his revolver as a threat; a teenage girl outguns him with hip hop dance moves. He moves on, smoothing his cowboy duds before bursting through the swinging doors of an assumed saloon; it turns out to be a bingo hall!

Beatty’s horseman, like this one, conjures a cartoon echo, drafted by someone who knows full well that power lies with those who can make others the butt of a joke. By invoking the cowboy and all he represents, these artists remind us of the lingering power of the symbol while exposing it as an empty husk, a caricature of the possibilities of what it means to be a man. The joke freshens, re-enlivens, the serious things to which it points. (In Beatty’s case, it might also remind you of the history of conflict between cowboys and farmers; millions of freed slaves invested in thriving, independent farms, where literal and figurative cowboys waged gunfights to the death.) Beatty’s black man, who mostly uses his horse to farm, will invent another way for himself, encapsulated in this tour de force of words, a voice expressing, and eliciting, a breathtaking riot of emotions.

Whatever else he is, the protagonist of “The Sellout” is also an artist concerned with the power of art. In the surreal scheme of this tale, the staged “protests” have effect: Dickens is restored on the map. This is hardly to be taken as optimism for how change might happen in the present reality, however. But as symbols, the fictions do count, celebrating resistance itself, because it is enlivening. In “Old Town Road, the community room collapses the private, gendered, spaces of the desert and the domestic, transforming them into a place for fun, for dance and music that is joyful, playful, erotic. Likewise, a favorite scene in “The Sellout” describes a wayward city bus rolling all the way to the pacific ocean and into the breaking waves, where revelers, liberated – not despite but because of the posted segregation signs that rekindle a flame–frolic in the foaming waves, claiming the west as their home. The re-tooled memory and language offer us, perhaps, not exactly hope, but the nourishment of love and laughter in a screwball world.

2.  Bonaparte Crossing the Alps

Kehinde Wiley, “Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps” (2005), oil on canvas,
108 x 108 inches (Brooklyn Museum, partial gift of Suzi and Andrew Booke Cohen
in memory of Ilene R. Booke and in honor of Arnold L. Lehman; Mary Smith Dorward Fund,
and William K. Jacobs, Jr Fund; © Kehinde Wiley; photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

Jacques-Louis David, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1800-01),
oil on canvas, 102 1/3 x 87 inches (Collection of Château de Malmaison, photo by RMN-GP

Two horsemen, one white, the other black, were recently featured at the Brooklyn Museum. The scene could have been a set for a shootout. You can just see the figures leaping down, their feet set wide, their hands hovering by weapons as they link eyes. It was my thought, anyway, the moment I entered the beautiful, theatrical set up of the exhibit, “Jacques-Louis David meets Kehinde Wiley.”

Duels between great warriors are as old as storytelling itself. Portrayed as a battle between good and evil, these tales are also always working to reinforce ideas about manhood. Well, that’s over. Done. The conflict, nowadays, is no longer the good guy versus the bad guy so much as it is a struggle over who gets to say what it means to be a guy at all – over who gets to define anything, for that matter. This is an ethical fight, rather than a moral one, a defense of the very meaning of democracy, because it’s about making room for more than one or two dominant voices.

“Napoleon Crossing the Alps” was painted in 1801. Image making had already become a self-conscious affair, and David’s commission was a piece of pure over-the-top marketing. (There’s a reason Susan Sontag put the origins of camp sensibility in the late 17th, early 18th century.) We learn at the exhibit that Napoleon actually crossed the alps on a mule, following a well worn path. Here the Emperor is astride a rearing stallion with rolling eye, perilously perched at the edge of a rock cliff, attired in his famous bicorne hat, and cloaked in a golden mantle. (Classic ur-cowboy, except that, in the American west, the emperor’s overt megalomania and narcissism will be entirely covert, possibly unconscious.)

Wiley’s “Bonaparte,” at first glance, might seem a pretty straightforward swap of one heroic warrior for another. The horse, at least, does seem unchanged, announcing virility as a central theme, and the rider as a master able to harness and discipline that potent energy. It doesn’t take more than a blink of an eye, however, to see that this is no simple gesture to honor unheralded, glorious, black heroes. Slowly, the very sly humor registers. The piece, like all Wiley’s work, is having some very serious fun with us.

The rider, clothed in army-isssue camouflage, is, I believe, an unmistakably serious nod to the many, many, young men of color who are often in the front lines of battle. There’s nary a hint of a general’s starched uniform, only the gold mantle that every soldier deserves to wear. Moreover, the headband wrapped around the forehead and tied in back invokes other battles, other peoples, their nobility illustrated in posture, and proud strong facial features, in response to centuries of belittling images.

But then there is the footwear. Timberland boots? It’s a masterful comic touch, insisting on the artificiality of it all, on the relentless presence of media in our lives, of product placement, brand status, and all the image making machinery inextricably linked to hip hop and the rise of a new figure of the American black man.

And then there is the background. David’s Napolean points into the distance, a swirl of crags and rocky cliffs dissolving into an endless sky which fills the entire frame. The words from Jane Thompkin’s study echoed in my head: here he was, the monolithic figure, not obscured by shadows and leaves of the forests, but foregrounded, huge, dominating the land as far as the eye can see. Not a single bonny bluebell, bird, or babbling brooks to be seen. Its nature as power, motion, size, strength, all under man’s control.

The background of Wiley’s picture is also filled from edge to edge, but what his hero points to is, well, it appears to be wallpaper.

Wiley’s backgrounds are always highly textured patterns, often an abundance of forest leaves and meadow flowers, which sometimes appear as patterns on fabric, and sometimes look just like the soft, nurturing, nature that the American western is dead set on erasing. But for this piece, Wiley chose a Victorian print suggestive of a heraldic crest.

Allow me a digression on the history of wall coverings. Digging it, I’ve found the field quite fecund for thought. There’s the ancient urges, of course. From the cave paintings to the ancient paper invented by the Chinese, places of dwelling – spaces specified for human activity – have been adorned by marks of meaning and beauty. By the 15th Century in Europe, wall decorations had become linked to signs of class. Leather, wood, brocade, and velvet were coverings that signaled nobility; later copies of these, on paper, were for middling wannabees.

By the 18th century, it was becoming apparent to the newly mobile that many social conventions were just that – conventions, and artificial. The ability to manipulate images – as Napoleon does with this commissioned painting– was understood as a new form of power. It was also one that was inherently unstable. The idea of Nature arose to replace religion as a more objective ground for legitimating and stabilizing modern power. Unfolding this new ideology of Nature now became the critical work in the masculine realm of thought and action. The troubling signifying power of things like wallpaper was defused by attaching it to the domestic. In that now separate, feminized realm, the sentimental, emotional interiors could be stabilized into new social codes.

But it wasn’t so easy. It turns out, fears abounded about the subversive potential of marks on walls. Who knew? Consider this 1850 reaction to the rage for trumpe l’oeil, those works that trick the eye. I found it in a 2016 Atlantic piece by Jude Stewart: “All this carrying into everyday life of “the shadow of unreality” must exercise a bad and prejudicial influence on the younger members of the house, who are thus brought up to see no wrongs in the shams and deceits which are continually before them,.” (Perhaps with better wallpaper we would not have come to elect a con-man as our leader?)

Revolt spread to the lands of the colonized. Nowhere were European notions of the real and the true more contested than among the peoples overrun by empire. In Africa, as I learned from the African Heritage Foundation, walls were quite explicitly made a theater of ideological struggle. Taken from their villages, women, when separated and moved to various locations in imperial territories, would paint symbols on the walls of their huts, as well as the ornaments on their bodies, to sustain their tribal identities.

Patterns are weighted with meanings. It made me think twice about that army fabric adorning Wiley’s figure. The camouflage cloth on the bodies of fighting men and women is meant to make them indistinguishable from the nature around them. It literally makes them one with it. But it is also doing symbolic, ideological, work, which we hardly notice, unless, like here, it is called to our attention. The leafy pattern on the uniform reinforces the idea that it is Nature that underwrites the legitimacy of American state violence. This claim to Nature’s authority is also the foundation of the empire represented in, and celebrated by, David’s painting of Napoleon. Against a background of mountains and sky, this is a portrait of man dominating nature, a symbol of the ideology that will give license to the mechanisms for destroying it.

In contrast, Wiley’s Bonaparte is posed against a backdrop that both announces both its artificiality and its use as a tool for power struggle. Again, though, it’s not a mere reversal. It’s not that simple. The meanings here are always multiple, conflicted and ambiguous. Many things are evoked by placing the wild stallion and rider against an endless horizon of heraldic wallpaper. There is home as castle, where everyone, rich or poor, can be royalty; there is also the domestic and imperial dungeon, which continues to be “redone” by many as a form of rebellion. Bringing into full focus the fact that the grand, stately theatrics of masculinity are always taking place against a much larger context, Wiley contests those images of brute power with a wall to wall symbol of the rich, voluptuous, interior world of human emotion. Finally, and importantly, this palimpsest of images related to the history of gender and race, is, among other things, a very beautiful, and very funny, joke.

3. Past/Present/Future

To play with the history of race has made many people uncomfortable. Wiley has said, “my job as a looker, as a creator, as a thinker, is to somehow imagine a newness within that bankrupt vocabulary.” That holds for Paul Beatty as well. But conflicts abound over what we want to do with history. Kara Walker, who works in the same controversial, irreverent vein as Beatty and Wiley, further complicates the question. “What do I want history to do to me?” she asks as the caption of a disturbingly ambiguous 1994 cartoon. It depicts a haughty white woman with whalebone skirt frame and protruding boobs, pointedly striding off, but going nowhere, because her tiny, corseted waist is being squeezed even tighter by a rope attached to a large black woman with thick thighs and bulging buttocks. “She is often accused of shamelessness, says Zadie Smith in a recent essay. “The shame is meant to be the shame of being multiple. Of not understanding what the (notably singular) black “thing” is or should be because, in Walker’s work, blackness is so many things. Smith adds, “One gift an artist might give to other artists is a demonstration of how to make work without shame.”

It’s interesting to note that the gay culture of the last century also sought and found a novel voice in extravagant style, in a daring shamelessness, as their way of working against fear, and anger, and shame. Flaunting the inappropriate and the unnecessary were their tools as well. As Susan Sontag points out, Camp was involved in fashioning “a new, more complex relationship to the serious. One is drawn to Camp” she emphasized, “when one realizes that ‘sincerity’ is not enough.”

To many in the present moment, it certainly seems to be the case that sincerity is not enough. These black artists have fashioned forms and styles that insist that comedy is an essential color on their palette. Perhaps we need to laugh in order to face the demons of fear, anger, and shame. The discomfort of screwball comedy, we should recall, was precisely that it did register deep, dark, psychic forces. One thing’s for sure. We fail to acknowledge them at our peril.

Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley
January 24–May 10, 2020
The Brooklyn Museum →

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A.B. Pratt has a PhD in English and has spent many years teaching and writing about American culture. She is currently working on an essay collection and a novel.