SOURCE: "A Play of Abstractions: Race, Sexuality, and Community in James Baldwin's Another Country," in Southern Review, Vol. 29, No. 1, January, 1993, pp. 41-50.

[In the following essay, Rowden analyzes racial and sexual identity in Baldwin's Another Country, focusing on the character of Rufus, his relationships, and his place in the community.]

Of the many blindnesses that have characterized critical readings of James Baldwin's work, one of the most consistent has been the critical failure to consider seriously the lack of continuity uniting the persona of racial spokesman that Baldwin adopts in many of his essays and that of sexual utopian that he develops in his fiction. Although it is usually the completely whitewashed Giovanni's Room to which Baldwin critics point when they want to strip him of his raceman credentials, it is actually in Baldwin's novel Another Country, with its general exclusion of black men and its racial scapegoating of the only one that it allows, that we are given the most explicit evidence of how ambivalent was Baldwin's relationship not only to the sexuality of the black man, but to the simple fact of the existence of black men in society.

Most works of fiction rely on some implied notion of community in order to maintain their narrative and normative coherence. They achieve this coherence by the explicit scapegoating of some person (or persons) who, by extension, become representative of something whose eradication would bring about the kind of communal situation that I am calling "utopian." The scapegoated character exists as the point in relation to which an anti-utopian or dystopian alternative can be glimpsed and textually activated, thereby making possible the normative coding of the various characters and their actions. It is as reactive movement away from this implicitly dystopian alternative that the narrative is constructed.

Of all of James Baldwin's novels, Another Country is the most important for a consideration of this narrative dynamic. In Another Country this dystopianism is enacted by, or perhaps I should say projected onto, the figure of Rufus. At best, Baldwin's Rufus is the depiction of a pathology that is never explicitly acknowledged, a case of internalized racism of almost Frankensteinian proportions. Contextualized by his unlikely group of middle-class white friends, Rufus's life and suicide can best be read not as the acts of a tragically self-aware black man destroyed by the inescapable forces of white racism, but as those of a racially alienated white/black man fatally frustrated by a lack of recognition from the only people whose recognition he can perceive as being of any value, the white bourgeoisie.

As both a self-proclaimed homosexual and a burgeoning literary superstar, by the time Another Country was published Baldwin was, socially, a very strangely situated man. Unfortunately, the more critics and black radicals commented on the dichotomy between the particulars differentiating Baldwin's own life from those of the people he claimed to represent, the more desperate he became to take on the mantle of race-man extraordinaire. The resulting contradictions explain perhaps better than anything else the problematic aspects of the fiction that he wrote after Go Tell It On the Mountain.

The observation that Baldwin's Rufus is, regardless of his other antecedents, in some sense a response to Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas is a critical commonplace, but whereas the claim can plausibly be made that, as Irving Howe put it in his essay "James Baldwin: At Ease in Apocalypse," Wright successfully deployed Bigger as "not so much a distinctive human being as an elemental force through which to release the rage black men had not dared to express," Rufus's sketchiness is much more problematic and ineffective. Rufus's suicidal response to racist oppression, the opening salvo in Baldwin's turn to the kind of protest writing for which he had previously chided Richard Wright, is supposedly the only option available to him in the unremittingly racist society of which he is a part. Unfortunately, we are never actually given any sense of the process that creates what Baldwin describes as "colored men who wanted to beat up everyone in sight, including, or perhaps especially, people who had never one way or another, given them a thought." In Another Country Baldwin never establishes a believable social ellipse upon which we can situate Rufus. What Baldwin wrote of Richard Wright's narrowness of focus in Native Son could more pertinently have been written about this aspect of Another Country:

What this means for the novel is that a necessary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life. What the novel reflects—and at no point interprets—is the isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn.

The Rufus section of the novel fails to do the kind of textual work that would justify its privileged position in the novel. In order for it to function formally in the way that Baldwin wanted it to, i.e., to resonate throughout the rest of the book, elevating the whole to the level of a serious social critique, Rufus's representativeness and his special sensitivity to the racist dynamics of American society would have to have been established with a much greater degree of realism and social specificity. This is, unfortunately, exactly what Baldwin fails to do. Although Baldwin tells us that Rufus is "part of an unprecedented multitude," he is, in fact, presented as being almost totally isolated from any recognizable section of the black community. We are repeatedly told of how well loved and respected Rufus is by his fellow jazzmen, but he is never shown actually relating to them as one black man, or more specifically as one black artist, among others. Instead Rufus's position as an artist, a jazz drummer, is used to justify his friendships with the "artsy" group of whites by whom he has been taken up as a mascot.

From the start, the idea of Rufus as exemplary black man is consistently undercut. By depriving Rufus's plight of any social context beyond casually polemical references to a state of oppression whose particulars Baldwin seems to think are so well known as to be unworthy of delineation, Baldwin fails, to provide the kind of social detail that would narratively validate the relationships that take place in the rest of the book. Regardless of how rhetorically seductive individual episodes in Another Country may be, the kind of social detail that could link these set pieces into the coherent or even comprehensive social vision that Baldwin was trying to articulate is lacking. The attention that Rufus's line "You took the best, so why not take the rest?" has received suggests that it has for many people some special expressive force as an agonized cry from the heart of the racially dispossessed urban "subproletariat." When read in the context of the novel itself, however, it is almost impossible to figure out exactly what Rufus is talking about. Nevertheless, one soon realizes that given the narrative trajectory that Rufus will travel in the novel, this isolation has an absolute strategic necessity. Only this kind of social alienation could explain both the belatedness of Rufus's recognition of the social significance of his blackness and the destructiveness and self-hatred to which this recognition gives rise.

Despite the narrative prominence and popular notoriety that the sexual and racial dynamics in Another Country have been granted, dramatically they are vitiated by Baldwin's fundamental lack of familiarity with the systematic particulars of the bourgeois white world that he attempts to depict and in which he tries to situate Rufus. Baldwin's inability to adequately conceptualize this social milieu makes it impossible for it and the under-depicted black one to narratively coexist and critically interrogate each other. Baldwin's attempt to delineate the emotional and ethnic tensions that might actually be operative among the sexually and racially heterogeneous group of people with whom he populates the book backfires, primarily because he never provides any plausible reasons, beyond Rufus's marginal position as a musician, for these characters to be emotionally involved or even personally aware of each other in the first place. The social landscape upon which the story is played out can only make sense if one thinks about it solely in terms of its narrative utility. Only by going completely outside of the framework that Baldwin sets up and reading the novel as the depiction of the goings-on among a self-consciously experimental group of sexual radicals can this particular collection of people be rendered believable.

This brings full circle the charge that Rufus does not represent black men. Because Another Country's utopianized image of homosexuality as represented by the sexually messianic figure of Eric is, as many critics have pointed out, coded as being exclusively white and male, Rufus cannot be a homosexual. Still, because (at least emotionally) his relationship with Vivaldo is so obviously homoerotic, he can't, given the novel's racial calculus, be genuinely black either. The best he can do is to represent or theatrically enact the kind of black male that Baldwin needs to serve his ideological purposes. This is the black male as bearer of a kind of heterosexual dystopianism that will throw the homosexual utopia with which the novel ends into even brighter relief. The very formlessness and social pessimism of the two novels in which Baldwin actually tried to situate socially the openly homosexual black man, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone and Just Above My Head, indicate Baldwin's investment in the idea of this homosexual utopia and, implicitly, of positive community itself as something that was for whites only.

It is this dynamic of internalized racism that catalyzes the only genuinely well-drawn relationship in Another Country, the one between Rufus and Leona, the pathetic white southern woman whom he destroys. Although the fact of the white male's sexual exploitation of black women had been recognized since the beginnings of African-American fiction, it was not until Oscar Micheaux's The Homesteader that a black writer risked presenting a full-blown romance between a black man and a white woman. Charles Stember's book Sexual Racism: The Emotional Barrier to an Integrated Society, one of the best-known products of a strand of racist but not necessarily valueless sexology, reflects fruitfully on the master-idea of the Rufus section of Another Country and of many of the black novelists who have dealt with such relationships. This is the idea, best expressed by Calvin Hernton, that there is on the part of black men a "sociosexually induced predisposition for white women." If, as Stember has perhaps too sweepingly suggested, "Among men in our society sex is in fact closely associated with a feeling of defilement, and women, especially of the dominant culture tend to be seen as superior creatures," this imagined superiority may explain why the possession of or inability to possess a particular white woman is such an explosive issue for the men in Another Country.

In Sexual Racism Stember suggests that, "[w]hile the majority man attains maximum gratification only in situations where the woman is especially attractive according to cultural criteria, the black man can experience a strong feeling of conquest with almost any white woman." Bearing out this assertion, in Another Country the white woman seems to occupy a place squarely at the center of the black man's. Rufus's, consciousness. She occupies it, however, not as a woman but simply as an instrument, as the catalyst that sets into motion a sociosexual dynamic that seemingly involves not just this particular black man and white woman, but this man, this woman, and all of the men, black and white, to whom the relationship supposedly represents the ultimate act of social transgression. Just as, after a while, to think of Rufus is to think of Rufus and Leona, all of the culturally specific aspects of Rufus's experience that would have to be represented if Rufus were to have some force as an individual are reduced to peripheral elements which are subordinated, if not completely invalidated, by his desperate need, as a deindividualized black man, to acquire an equally deindividualized white woman. "You'd never even have looked at that girl, Rufus, if she'd been black," the imagined voice of his sister says to Rufus at one point. "But you'll pick up any white trash just because she's white." Correspondingly, throughout their time together, Rufus almost never refers to Leona by her real name. She is among other things "Honeychild," "Miss Anne," "Little Eva," "a funny little cracker," and "a splendid specimen of Southern womanhood," but rarely simply Leona.

The Rufus-Leona relationship for most of its course is simply a play of abstractions, one in which any real psychological contact is, obviously on Rufus's part and more subtly on Leona's, systematically evaded. This dynamic can be seen at work even in the initial moments of their relationship. After Leona's first words to Rufus, Baldwin tells us:

She had said enough. She was from the South. And something leaped in Rufus as he stared at her damp, colorless face, the face of the Southern poor white, and her straight pale hair. She was considerably older than he, over thirty probably, and her body was too thin. Just the same, it abruptly became the most exciting body he had gazed on in a long time.

"Honeychild," he said and gave her his crooked grin, "ain't you a long ways from home?"

"I sure am," she said, "and I ain't never going back there."

He laughed and she laughed. "Well Miss Anne," he said, "if we both got the same thing on our mind let's make it to the party."

Both the simple fact that Leona is a white woman and the equally important fact that she is a white woman from the South immediately create a sense of double scapegoating that decisively excises this relationship from the utopian drama that will be played out in the novel's remaining 288 pages. For example, soon after meeting Leona, Rufus:

remembered suddenly his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance.

Leona's sexual availability as a woman enables her to stand in for and ground Rufus's relationship with Vivaldo, the white man with whom Rufus is involved in an unspoken game of racial and sexual competition, while her unique position as a southern woman enables Rufus to turn her into a surrogate for the white men against whom he cannot effectively express his resentment.

Leona, on the other hand, can scapegoat herself by "loving" and then allowing herself to be destroyed by the dangerous "other" that Rufus represents, just as another part of her had loved and been destroyed by the equally abusive relationship that her marriage to a hyperracist southern "cracker" had been. In fact, it is exactly Rufus's otherness, his blackness, that Leona must deny in order to perform her role in the drama that they are enacting. At one point Rufus asks, "Didn't they warn you down home about the darkies you'd find up North?" and she answers, "They didn't never worry me none. People's just people as far as I'm concerned." This response reveals her denial of both racial and sexual difference and, thereby, her repression of the distinctly sexual nature of her interest in Rufus. Being a product of the particular racial and sexual hierarchies which organize southern society, Leona could in fact never be unaware of the transgressive nature of her involvement with Rufus. She, perhaps more than any other character in Another Country, would know that people are not just people, and that there are real and potentially dangerous social implications in the sexual choices people make. Just as Rufus's self-hatred stems from his inability either to enact or reject the roles that have been socially validated for white men and made inaccessible for blacks, Leona's self-hatred is the result of a similar failure to fulfill internalized social expectations. She has "failed" as a wife and as a mother, and because of this failure has marked herself as someone deserving of destruction.

The catalyst in the Rufus/Leona relationship is the homoerotically charged presence of Rufus's best friend, Vivaldo. Because it is Rufus's status as a black man and not his sexual identity, whatever it may be, that makes him essentially unacceptable and places him outside of the positive community that Baldwin is conceptualizing in Another Country, whether Rufus can best be coded as homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual is finally unimportant. As the glimpses Baldwin offers into Rufus's relationship with Eric make clear, exactly the same kind of racial abstractions that will characterize Rufus's relationship with Leona would come into play if the homosexual aspects of the relationship between Rufus and Vivaldo were allowed to take their "natural" course. Tellingly, Rufus is the only character in the book whom Eric's love cannot save.

In a way comparable to the dynamics of the relationships that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines in her book Between Men, Rufus's relationship with Leona provides the means by which the idea of the white woman as the mediating factor linking black and white men can be dealt with. This mediation is one in which, despite the narrative prominence accorded to Rufus's sister Ida, black women play no part other than as sexual objects, as the sources of a sexual release that is peripheral to any status concerns that a man, especially a white man, might have. Emotionally and hierarchically, only white women can situate black and white men in relation to each other. Baldwin writes:

Vivaldo was unlike everyone else that he [Rufus] knew in that they, all the others, could only astonish him by kindness or fidelity; it was only Vivaldo who had the power to astonish him by treachery. Even his affair with Jane was evidence in his favor, for if he were really to betray his friend for a woman, as most white men seemed to do, especially if the friend was black, then he would have found himself a smoother chick, with the manners of a lady and the soul of a whore. But Jane seemed to be exactly what she was, a monstrous slut, and she thus without knowing it kept Rufus and Vivaldo equal to one another.

By forgoing sexual access to the kind of white women to whom Rufus as a poor black man could never have access, Vivaldo creates an equality that enables his friendship with Rufus. The continuum along which white women are placed in the novel goes from Jane who, according to Rufus, is "a monstrous slut" who "dresses like a goddam bull dagger" to the "frail and fair" upper-class Cass who, for Rufus, is thoroughly mysterious and unattainable. By aligning himself sexually with Jane, a white woman who has been coded as undesirable, Vivaldo becomes, symbolically, exactly the kind of black/white hybrid that Rufus envisions himself as being, thereby enabling their relationship.

Because relationships with black women are not in any way a constitutive part of Rufus's sexual self-image and because (given the dictates of the heterosexual codes that he resents but still feels compelled to follow) he knows that he must eventually choose some woman as his woman, Rufus thinks of Leona at the beginning of the novel as simply another disposable sexual conquest, but soon she becomes the woman upon whom his entire sense of himself hinges. Having revealed herself to be one of the few white women to whom a poor black man like Rufus has access, Leona's value as a sexual object is for that very reason suspect, and Vivaldo's response to her becomes a source of tremendous anxiety for Rufus. Rufus thinks:

Perhaps Vivaldo was contemptuous of her because she was so plain—which meant that Vivaldo was contemptuous of him. Or perhaps he was flirting with her because she seemed so simple and available: the proof of her availability being her presence in Rufus's house.

At one point, after his relationship with Leona has become an unceasing round of domestic violence, he snarls at Vivaldo, "I guess you don't think she's good enough for you" and Vivaldo's reply, "Oh, shit. You don't think she's good enough for you," goes straight to the heart of Rufus's dilemma. As long as his relationship with Leona remains the stereotypic interaction of two neurotic social misfits, what I have called a play of abstractions, Rufus is secure, but when he realizes that the oppositions that have characterized his notion of sexual difference and of female sexual value do not really reflect the reality of the flesh-and-blood, pitifully human woman for whom he feels a growing affection, his world collapses.

As Murray Davis has suggested in his book Intimate Relations, "when an individual acquires a new intimate, he is acquiring an identity appendage that is large enough to alter his social group's reaction to him in general and their evaluation of him in particular. Intimates, that is, affect each other's reputations." From Rufus's perspective, Leona's willingness to align herself permanently with a black man reveals her essential limitations. Of all of the white women who would be willing to do so, she is probably one of the best, and she is no Cass. She is not the "princess" that Rufus had half-facetiously and half-longingly called her soon after their first meeting. In fact, at best, Leona would be situated midway between Jane and Cass on the objectifying continuum of sexual value that men like Rufus and, perhaps, Vivaldo use to gauge a woman's attractiveness, and this knowledge is more than Rufus's ego can withstand. Leona instantiates neither the pole represented by Vivaldo's grossly physical Jane or that represented by the princesslike and, for Rufus, untouchable Cass. Tragically, because of Rufus's inability to think outside of these all-or-nothing, virgin/whore dichotomies, these two antithetical female images are the only ones available to him and the only ones by way of which he can orient himself emotionally in relation to Vivaldo and, by extension, to white men in general. His realization that Leona is not Cass, a realization most forcefully brought about by his recognition of the pleasure she takes in sex, forces him to attempt to drag her to the other end of the scale if for no other reason than to relieve the unbearable emotional tension that her unplaceableness creates. Leona cannot be worshipped, and Rufus is incapable of actually loving a woman. Therefore, Rufus's only option is to defile or, as Stember would say, "animalize" her. Having finally attempted to maintain a socially visible relationship with a white woman, rather than just another covert and simply sexual one, Rufus has been forced to see exactly what his romantic options are. He realizes that he and Vivaldo are equals only in private.

The dynamic that I have been describing is borne out most forcefully by the fact that Vivaldo's "abandonment" of Rufus occurs when, for the first time in Rufus's presence, Vivaldo seriously considers taking advantage of the kind of romantic possibility that Rufus is denied:

A tall girl, very pretty, carefully dressed—she looked like an uptown model—came into the room, looked about her, peered sharply at their table. She paused, then started out.

"I wish you were looking for me," Vivaldo called.

She turned and laughed. "You're lucky I'm not looking for you!" She had a very attractive laugh and a slight Southern accent. Rufus turned to watch her move daintily up the steps and disappear into the crowded bar.

"Well you scored, old buddy," Rufus said, "go get her."

"No," said Vivaldo, smiling, "better leave well enough alone." He stared at the door where the girl had vanished. "She's pretty isn't she?" he said partly to himself, partly to the table. He looked at the door again, shifting slightly in his seat, then threw down the last of his drink.

Rufus wanted to say, Don't let me stop you, man, but he said nothing. He felt black, filthy, foolish. He wished he were miles away, or dead.

The fact that Rufus feels not only "filthy" and "foolish," but specifically "filthy," "foolish," and "black" represents one of the most telling moments in the novel. By recognizing both the physical specificity of his blackness and its social implications, Rufus must at last face his repressed awareness of the fact that Vivaldo, his best friend, is a white man with all of the advantages that this entails, and that he, Rufus, is not. Baldwin's strangest achievement in Another Country is that he creates a world in which, when Rufus says of the brutalized Leona, "she's the only chick in the world for me," it makes perfect sense.

Finally, despite his limitations, Rufus is the most complex and important character in Another Country. This is because he is the only one who actually seems to grow not only in self-awareness, but in the awareness of himself as a specific self in the specific world in which Baldwin has placed him. His suicide functions as an overwrought but existentially respectable manifestation of his desire to live and die in accordance with the one "truth" that his history has taught him. This truth is that, appearances to the contrary, James Baldwin's world at this point just didn't have enough room for everyone.