In my flesh shall I see God: ritual violence and racial redemption in "The Black Christ".

   My mother, Job's dark sister, sits
   Now in a corner, prays, and knits.
   Often across her face there flits
   Remembered pain, to mar her joy,
   At Whose death gave her back her boy. ("The Black Christ")

The frontispiece of Countee Cullen's 1929 The Black Christ & Other Poems features in its center a nude black male hanging by his neck from a long, jagged tree limb. Drawn in black-and-white by art-deco illustrator Charles Cullen, the figure's hands are fastened behind his back, and his feet are tied at the ankles. Rising behind the lynched body are sunbursts and a white cloud that ascends into the torso, shoulders, and bowed head of a second man, this one adorned with a crown of thorns. The image depicts the central argument put forth by "The Black Christ," that the corporal text of terror against black Americans should be read alongside the crucifixion of a "white" Jesus of Nazareth. But Charles Cullen's drawing also anticipates the vexing ambiguities that emerge in the verses by Countee Cullen that follow it. The frontispiece raises the question of how poetic invention will align these two sufferers depicted as racialized opposites of spiritual and material reality. Do the figures in the illustration represent two different individuals with distinct cultural histories, or are they dual aspects of a single man? The frontispiece intimates a connection between racial transcendence and divine immanence that invites further questions about the redemptive qualities of an early 20th-century "passion play" set in the Jim Crow South. Exactly what kind of redemption will be championed through the Christian martyrdom of a black lynched body and the unmerited suffering of blacks left behind?

The few scholars who have explored "The Black Christ" remain generally dissatisfied with Countee Cullen's engagement with these questions. On the one hand, most literary critics concur with Darwin Turner's assessment of the 33-page poem as an "impressive failure" (75). Preferring the thematic clarity of the New Negro poet's most famous works, including "Heritage" and "Ballad of the Brown Girl," many critics fault the poetic techniques in "The Black Christ," dismiss its foray into spiritual realism, and claim that Cullen "adds little to an overworked trope" (Sundquist 593). (1) On the other hand, religious scholars consider Cullen's lyrical meditations in this poem to be an effective vehicle for discussing theological concepts. James H. Smylie uses it to examine the ethic of suffering love, while William R. Jones explores the issue of divine racism through the story's conflict. Fascinated as I am by this interpretive elasticity, I agree that the piece is not without its stylistic imperfections. Yet my investigation is motivated by a reluctance to disregard it as being thoroughly flawed, particularly when the clunky machinations of these "flaws" suggest that Calvary "was but the first leaf in a line/ Of trees on which a Man should swing" (lines 17-18).

While previous scholars have focused almost exclusively on Cullen's deployment of Jesus imagery in "The Black Christ," I want to suggest that the poem's preoccupation with the enigmatic question of theodicy--why do the righteous suffer?--offers a more provocative point of entry. (2) Cullen patterns his narrative, in particular, after the wisdom literature of Job and incorporates its legal rhetoric, sensory imagery, and distinctive solution of redemptive suffering into the modern crucifixions of black men. In "The Black Christ," when a young black man named Jim is hunted by a southern lynch mob for striking a white man in self-defense, Jesus suffers in the victim's stead, disguising himself in Jim's dark flesh moments before the rope is pulled taut. Cullen further modernizes Christ's resurrection in the poem as the tree that once sagged with Jim's body miraculously sways free in the climactic scene. Bearing witness to the miracle is Jim's brother, the nameless narrator, whose inability to reconcile God's apparent goodness with the agony of racial oppression frames the poem's most compelling moments of introspection. There is also Jim's mother, the black matriarch described in the poem as "Job's dark sister," whose unquestioned faith earns the most precious reward (935). Indeed, in his effort to construct a socially relevant work and to achieve a certain figurative, aesthetic, and theological coherence, Cullen does not confine the thematic breadth of his narrative to the New Testament.

The gruesome spectacle of lynching may command the attention of Cullen's readers and provoke our most visceral response, yet I find that the principal issues that circulate through "The Black Christ" have little to do with identifying the underlying causes of lynching or exonerating black American victims of lynching or condemning white lynch mobs. Readers who have analyzed this narrative poem for a cohesive social exposition against lynching have been frustrated by the meager political strata buried beneath the poetics of racial redemption. Of ultimate importance to Cullen, and arguably to the legions of black American writers and artists who take up the black Christ metaphor, is the affect of terror and the way in which black communities of faith negotiate the questions of moral evil and divine justice that are central to the Book of Job.

To be sure, the painful consequence of racial violence is a pervasive theme in black American literature. For an overwhelming number of 20th-century writers, representations of the primarily southern spectacle of lynching induce a particularly brutal quality of horror and grief, with their macabre images of ropes, charred bones, and angry white mobs. In the eighteenth century, the term "lynching" typically applied to "nonlethal summary punishment such as flogging or tar-and-feathering," but later definitions of the extralegal procedure indicate that to be "lynched" was to be publicly executed by hanging, burning, and other forms of torture (Dray iii). Victims of lynching were often charged with crimes, then denied due process of law, dragged from their homes and even from jail cells, only to be killed before criminal evidence could be collected and verified. Anti-lynching activists such as Ida B. Wells, along with the NAACP and other early 20th-century civic organizations, worked tirelessly to expose false and inflammatory accusations and to expose ways that white vigilante justice was used in the U.S. South as a method of social control over African Americans.

"There is much killing in American history, a great deal of it no doubt senseless and unnecessary," notes historian Philip Dray, "but lynching celebrates killing and makes of it a ritual, turning grisly and inhumane acts of cruelty into theater with the explicit intent that they be viewed and remembered" (xii). In the wake of ritualized acts of violence, one of the ways that black American writers make what theologian J. Deotis Roberts calls "creative use of suffering" is by imagining a faith-based response to violence through the figure of a black Christ. Literary texts from Langston Hughes's poem "Christ in Alabama" (1932) to Ernest Gaines's novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) take the historical reality of lynching into consideration with the ways that black communities of faith have traditionally read their past, present, and future in Judeo-Christian scripture. These literary renderings acquire new dimension when assessed within the context of a black religious culture that is replete with its own exegetical activity.

In accounting for the syncretism of the black Christ metaphor, the figurative language of the Bible is an obvious source. This sacred text portrays the act of being "hanged on a tree" as indicative of divine judgment and rejection in the ancient world. Hanging, in this context, applies primarily to the manner in which the sinner was publicly shamed and not necessarily to the torture-ridden execution that often followed (Hengel 24). While the New Testament Book of Acts in 5:30 and in 10:39 links the instrument of public degradation--the tree--to the cross on which Jesus Christ was sacrificed, Paul's epistle to the Galatians reads the Crucifixion within the framework of Old Testament law. For example, Deuteronomy states:

   If a man guilty of a capital offense is
   put to death and his body is hung on a
   tree, you must not leave his body on
   the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him
   that same day, because anyone who is
   hung on a tree is under God's curse.
   (Deut. 21:22-23)

With this ancient law in mind, Paul remarks that it is Jesus who "redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13). The ancient Romans not only crucified criminals and political insurgents, but used such torture to punish and deter rebellious slaves--an association that intensified the perceived indignity suffered by a Messiah (Hengel 62). Moreover, the tree to which these Bible verses refer is actually a large wooden stake, often affixed with a cross beam; and yet there is an uncanny connection between the Deuteronomic tree and the southern poplar trees that, in the words of the Billie Holiday song, bore "strange fruit." (3)

While the Bible offers one door through which scholars can enter the imagined kinship between ritual violence and racial redemption, black cultural memory offers another. The allusion circulates through the survivalist religion of late 18th- and 19th-century slave communities with its unique syncretic blend of evangelical Protestant beliefs and West African religious practices. Sociologist Orlando Patterson contends that "Jesus and his crucifixion dominate the theology of the slaves," and that enslaved blacks were particularly captivated by the dualistic nature of the crucifixion theme, which places "the ethic of judgment" alongside "the ethic of the redeemed sinner" (75). Spirituals, sermons, slave narratives, and tracts such as David Walker's Appeal strike a balance between the Christian God as divine judge, on the one hand, and comforting savior, on the other hand.

Although the specificity of the biblical allusion may vary, representations of the figure of the black Christ share a similar premise--that black people, who have been judged by white society as intellectually, culturally, and biologically inferior, share through their suffering a special kinship with Jesus Christ. The metaphoric enterprise also condemns the racist, anti-Christian beliefs and practices of whites by explicitly and implicitly labeling them as "crucifiers." With regards to the religious discourse of post-Emancipation southern lynching, literary representations of the black Christ swell in accordance with the historical occurrences of the practice in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. In 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois published a poem in Darkwater: Voices within the Veil that captures the horror of a white man who admits to lynching a black man "in Thy name." Tormented, the murderer cries:

   Awake me, God! I sleep!
   What was that awful word Thou
      saidst?
   That black and riven thing--was it
      Thee?
   That gasp--was it Thine?
   This pain--is it Thine? (Du Bois, "The
      Prayers of God," lines 98-102)

Other visual and literary arts of the Harlem Renaissance further indicate the popularity of this figure. In Claude McKay's "The Lynching" (1920) the spirit of a burning victim "ascend[s] to high heaven," where "His father, by cruelest way of pain,/Had bidden him to his bosom once again" (lines 1-3). Two years later, Cullen would foreshadow the themes of "The Black Christ" in the sonnet "Christ Recrucified," in which the speaker declares: "The South is crucifying Christ again/By all the laws of ancient rote and rule" (lines 1-2). (4) Walter White's novel The Fire in the Flint (1924) and Georgia Douglass Johnson's play A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) also conjoin lynching with a black Christ icon.

In his study of crucifixion in the ancient world, Martin Hengel maintains that, "by the public display of a naked victim at a prominent place--at a crossroads, in the theatre, on high ground, at the place of his crime--crucifixion also represented his uttermost humiliation which had a numinous dimension to it" (87). But what new meanings are generated when black American storytellers, singers, artists, preachers, historians, and activists seek out this "numinous dimension" in lynched black bodies? Few literary texts explore the issue as explicitly as Cullen's "The Black Christ." In the narrative poem, the character Jim is hanged on a tree, and the concluding line removes all doubt as to this tree's symbolic value: "Its roots were fed with priceless blood./It is the Cross; it is the Rood" (lines 969-70). In keeping with the biblical account of Christ's death, Jim foreshadows his own death during one of his nightly conversations with his brother. "I have a fear," Jim states:

   "This thing may come to me some day.
   Some man contemptuous of my race
   And its lost rights in this hard place,
   Will strike me down for being black."
      lines 219-23)

And yet the racial determinism that compels Jim's prophecy is complicated by his brother's depiction of him as prideful and headstrong. In one of the many instances in which the narrative insinuates that Jim and the New Testament Savior are not one and the same, Cullen notes the young man's embittered intentions to defend himself if attacked and to avenge with aggression a painful legacy of "many thousands gone." Jim continues:

   "But when I answer I'll pay back
   The late revenge long overdue
   A thousand of my kind and hue.
   A thousand black men, long since gone
   Will guide my hand, stiffen the brawn,
   And speed one life-divesting blow
   Into some granite face of snow.
   And I may swing, but not before
   I send some pale ambassador
   Hot footing it to hell to say
   A proud black man is on his way."
      (lines 224-34)

Such sentiments may be heroic, but they are hardly "Christ-like." The last couplet even suggests that Jim is willing to risk damnation in hell for the pleasure of a single "life-divesting blow." The narrator further emphasizes Jim's heroism by frequently describing him as handsome, passionate, and of an "imperial breed"--a prince, perhaps, from an "Ethiopian Prophecy. (5) Jim also exhibits a deep admiration for the beauty of creation. Christened by his brother as "Spring's gayest cavalier," Jim describes nature's seasonal rebirth through lush images of music, animals at play, a "lady" draped in green and gold. His language is replete with classical imagery and is tellingly devoid of any Christian or biblical allusions. (Thus Houston Baker characterizes Jim as "pagan-spirited." (6)). Significantly, it is this delight in Spring as both an expression of innovation and an agent of transition that contributes, in part, to his encounter with a lynch mob.

"The thing we feared has come," Jim states later in the narrative (line 464). He stumbles into his family's rural cabin, bleeding from the head, with a branch in his hand. As he waits for the "two-limbed dogs" to arrive, he insists on explaining his actions--testifying, so to speak--to his brother and mother. He tells them that, during his revelry with Spring, he met a white woman who shared his appreciation for nature's beauty: "Spring blew too loud and green a blast/For them to think on rank and caste" (lines 519-20). The sensual allusions of springtime fecundity notwithstanding, no explicit mention of a sexual relationship between the two is made until a white man disturbs the interracial couple. After striking Jim, he accuses the woman of being "a black man's mistress, bawdy whore" (line 553). Jim would later confess that it was not because of any personal affront that he hit (and most likely killed) the white man. "Spring's gayest cavalier" claims to have defended the honor of not one, but two ladies "rich and fair" against a villain who "had unlatched an icy door,/And let the winter in once more" (lines 587, 591-92). (7)

The narrator hides Jim in a closet once the story is told, and soon after, a mob of white men bursts into their home. In the ensuing scenes, the New Testament machinery, clanking louder now than ever, takes full control of the plot. When the white men shout, "Lynch him!", Cullen's narrator remarks, "O savage cry,/Why should you echo, 'Crucify!'" (lines 646-47). When a lone voice advises the men to wait "with slow talk of trial, law," before conceding to the mob, he is cast as Roman procurator Pontius Pilate (line 649). And at last, when Jim reappears before his accusers strangely illuminated against the wall "as if evolved from air;/As if always he had stood there," the changed expression in his face and the gentleness of his voice signals a startling Christophany (lines 679-80).

At least one critic has said that "The Black Christ" features "a Negro boy who is lynched and who lives again after death" (Ferguson 113). But in fact the figure who was once Jim has been displaced by Jesus Christ of the New Testament. This "Son of God" gives his life voluntarily: "No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again" (John 10:18). Rather than have his African American protagonist express a similar willingness to sacrifice his life, Cullen allows Christ, now black, to walk into white hands. Likewise, in his discussion of the poem, Smylie states that Cullen "does not interpret Christ's crucifixion in terms of a sacrifice to satisfy wounded honor or a debt for human sin, but rather in terms of theo pathes, the God who is with us and for us in our human agony" (164).

Even the members of the lynch mob detect something strange about the black man with "a crown/Of light" above his head (Cullen, lines 700-01). Considering the way that vigilante groups have historically been careless about the identity of black suspects, it should come as no surprise that the mob in the poem ultimately disregards its moment of hesitation and drags the black man outside. What results is "a cry":

   So soft, and yet so brimming filled
   With agony, my heart strings thrilled
   An ineffectual reply,--
   Then gaunt against the southern sky
   The silent handiwork of hate.
   Greet, Virgin Tree, your holy mate[
      (lines 775-81)

With this image, Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ" appears to blend the two figures in Charles Cullen's illustration into a single bodily text. Angry and grieving, the narrator--still an unbeliever--barrages his devout mother for her faith. But when, during the course of his rant, the closet door creaks open in their home and Jim emerges unharmed from his hiding place, the surprising twist is revealed. The single body is split in two again and we are left to comprehend Jim and the fate of his divine double. The narrator states:

   Either I leaped or crawled to where
   I last had seen stiff on the air
   The form than life more dear to me;
   But where had swayed that misery
   Now only was a flowering tree
   That soon would travail into fruit.
      (lines 898-903)

Who, then, is the Black Christ? As the Harlem Renaissance lyricist who was obliquely reprimanded by Langston Hughes for wanting to be "a poet--not a Negro poet," (8) Cullen would certainly have been aware of the cultural currency of racial modifiers. By qualifying the noun "Christ" with the adjective "black," the title of Cullen's poem calls attention to the existence of a normative, standardized version of the New Testament figure that is understood in Euro-American Christian discourse as white. Indeed, at the height of his grief, Cullen's speaker invokes this manifestation of Christ during a debate with his mother. He demands, "... is the white Christ, too, distraught,/ By these dark skins His Father wrought?" (834-35). The works of African American writers frequently illustrate how the benevolent, life-affirming qualities that are associated with Christ can be undermined by the politics of race when Jesus is figured in the image of an oppressor. Yet one of Cullen's boldest statements lies in his depiction of Christ as a man who is without a fixed racial identity. The poem depicts the workings of an imminent deity that has the power to reanimate himself in every "face" and take on the form of any human being, even the "dark skins His Father wrought." In turn, Cullen's Christ's decision to save Jim's life by enfolding his spirit in the victimized flesh of a black man offers a fresh interpretation of the biblical account of his voluntary sacrifice. Consider Paul's epistle to the Philippians, in which he remarks that Jesus "took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross" (Phil. 2:7-9). In Cullen's poem, it is blackness that acts as a sign of humanity in its fundamental, and most humble ("servant") state. This shape-shifting--or rather, this race-shifting--Christ transcends race, even as He embodies the pain and suffering that are associated with its cultural construction in the segregated South. Anticipating one of the principal tenets asserted by black liberation theologians 40 years later, "The Black Christ" underscores the belief that "God enters human affairs and takes sides with the oppressed ... through Christ the poor are offered freedom now to rebel against that which makes them other than human" (Cone 8). Such a reading corroborates the narrative's cautionary subtext that, with each lynching, Christ is (re)crucified by whites who claim to be his followers. It may also explain why Cullen's poem is "Hopefully dedicated to White America."

But puzzling issues still remain. If Cullen hoped that "White America" might learn from this miracle, then it is worth pointing out that he apparently leaves no whites present to witness the modern resurrection he stages. His poem gives no indication that the mob lingered long after the execution. The only people who do bear witness to the "flowering tree" and benefit from God's saving grace are the members of Jim's family. To be more specific, the crucifixion saves only Jim's brother, and affirms the faith only of Jim's mother. In the poem, the ministry of Jesus Christ is confined to his parting words to Jim's brother, a direct plea for "a greater faith, a clearer sight" (line 724). And turning to the only woman in the room, he states: "Mother, not poorer losing one,/Look now upon your dying son" (lines 728-29). Despite the poem's ambiguous dedication, the narrative's climactic event seems enacted for the benefit of these two souls. Because Jesus steps forward in Jim's body only moments before a white man raises a "heavy club to smite" (line 671) the speaker and his mother, arguably, it is these two "innocents" (line 710) whom Jesus is most interested in rescuing. Jim, on the other hand, seems to disappear from the story--which reinforces the idea that "The Black Christ" is more Christian conversion narrative than anti-lynching treatise. (9) And so with a black deus ex machina, the narrative focus shifts from the restoration of one man's body to the restoration of another man's soul.

Cullen's poem abounds with biblical allusions, from echoes of Psalms 4:7 in the first line through reference to Genesis 32 when the speaker laments an apathetic world in which "Jacobs" no longer dare to wrestle for God's grace. The poem invokes as well events and figures of Exodus, Joshua, 2 Samuel, Ezekiel, and Job. The latter referent opens up the richest and most critically rewarding interpretive possibilities for "The Black Christ." (10)

In addressing the issue of theodicy, Cullen incorporates three critical elements of the Old Testament book in his work: the personification of the two fundamental aspects of Job's character through the poem's narrator as "questioner" and the mother as "devout believer"; the adaptation of legal rhetoric that transforms Job's desire for a hearing in the divine court to the narrator's plea for racial justice; and finally, the manipulation of sensory images in Job to convey the substance of faith and to critique the subjective hazards of the racialized gaze. Additionally, Job's appeals for vindication feature strong images of nature and God's creative power that are echoed in Jim's romantic meditations on spring. Even the shape of Cullen's poem shares basic similarities with Job's literary structure. In both works, layers of poetic discourse--lamentations, speeches, and dialogue--are situated between the narrative prose of a prologue and epilogue. But more importantly, the narrative's engagement with the Book of Job allows us to read the summary execution of the black Christ as a divine test of faith for the narrator and his mother--a test that problematically employs "Lynch Law" as its crux.

In the scriptural prologue of Job's spiritual drama, the prophet-writer claims to provide unusual access to God's heavenly council. He indicates that it is in this meeting place that God first brings Job to the attention of Satan ("the Adversary"), and the two deliberate over the exceptional quality of his faith. For Job is "blameless and upright," God insists, "a man who fears God and shuns evil" (Job 1:8). Satan responds by raising the unsettling possibility that Job's righteousness is self-serving, a matter of convenience; he remains faithful because his godliness has been rewarded through personal wealth and abundance. The adversary's challenge--"But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face" (Job 1:11)--sets the story's plot in motion. God authorizes Satan to destroy the esteemed man's livelihood as well as his children, animals, and servants. Testing Job a second time, with God's consent, Satan strikes Job's bone and flesh. While his wife admonishes him to "curse God and die!" (Job 2:9), his three friends--Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad--advise him to accept his ruination as chastisement from God.

The trio's counsel is expressed through platitudes of retribution theology that Job himself once abstractly upheld. Now as he experiences the reality of pain and loss, Job struggles to reconcile the deterministic view of suffering as punitive with his sincere belief that he has committed no sin deserving of such punishment. In a series of speeches reminiscent of Psalms 42-44, Job argues his case to his friends and grieves his alienation from God with anguished pleas to heaven: "Why have you made me your target? Have I become a burden to you?" (Job 7:20). He refuses, however, to accept the simplistic solutions of his friends, and never does he claim to have intimate knowledge of the ways of God. Just as the prologue maintains that "In all this, Job did not sin in what he said" (Job 2:10), the appearance of God in the story's conclusion re-confirms Job's godliness. God acts as judge in the epilogue, and as biblical scholar Robert Fyall states, "Yahweh does not charge Job with sins he has not committed, but he does charge him with ignorance. This leads to Job's repentance and a restored relationship with God" (33). Having passed the divine test, Job is rewarded two-fold: "the Lord blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first" (Job 42:12). Although God's mysteries are never unraveled in the story's denouement and many of the believer's questions are left unanswered, Job concludes that the righteous sufferer is valued by God and that suffering contains a redemptive power that can strengthen the faithful.

So it is with "The Black Christ." Cullen reflects the dual nature of Job's character in the poem's opening representation of divergent world views held by the narrator and his mother. The narrator, Jim's brother, who once "cursed Christ's name," testifies in the prologue to his own Jobian encounter for the benefit of "all men's healing" (lines 2, 20). (11) For him, the world has become a tree, "diseased, trunk, branch, and shoot" (line 39). This proselytizing framework anticipates Jim's "resurrection" by associating lynching with crucifixion.

The opening verse of the poem explicitly locates the backslider as the primary beneficiary of the miracle:

   How God, who needs no man's applause,
   For love of my stark soul, of flaws
   Composed, seeing it slip, did stoop
   Down to the mire and pick me up,
   And in the hollow of His hand
   Enact again at my command
   The world's supremest tragedy. (lines
      7-13)

In the Old Testament, Job's poetic speeches swarm with angry questions, whereas the prophet-writer depicts Job as a patient and passive man. In "The Black Christ," the narrator embodies the questioning Job, while his mother symbolizes Job's patience. Cullen links her unwavering faith with the rigid social structure of the agrarian South in order to construct a woman whose "kinship to the soil" is expressed as a spiritual imperative (line 152). The narrator comments, for instance, that he and his brother often expressed to their mother a desire to leave the South, "But custom and an unseen hand/ Compelled allegiance to this land/In her, and she by staying nailed/Us there, by love securely jailed" (lines 318-21). Moreover, by christening the narrator's mother "Job's dark sister" (line 935), Cullen not only renders the biblical figure black, but he genders Job's more docile attributes female. Thus, he invokes common literary representations of the southern black "church mother" whose religious devotion operates in concert with super-human moral strength, endurance, and intuition. Indeed, it is the church mother in "The Black Christ" who first intuits the presence of the divine in Jim's flesh. It is she who uses prayer to endure her son's persecution and bears witness to his return with the declaration: "Let your heart's conversion swell/The wonder of His miracle" (lines 884-85).

The narrator makes clear that, as children, he and Jim were comforted by their mother's bible stories of the oppressed Hebrews in Egypt, but as they grew older and more aware of the "things she knew not," God's power diminished in the face of subjugated life in the Jim Crow South:

   "Likely there ain't no God at all,"
   Jim was the first to clothe a doubt
   With words, that long had tried to sprout
   Against our wills and love of one
   Whose faith was like a blazing sun
   Set in a dark, rebellious sky.
   Now then the roots were fast, and I
   Must nurture them in her despite.
   God could not be, if He deemed right,
   The grief that ever met our sight. (lines
      201-10)

The narrator follows Jim's lead and continues to nurture his unbelief. In spite of his mother's pastoral vision, for him, the South is haunted by ghosts of lynched black bodies that rot all hope of harvest. Hurt and angry, he grapples with poverty, discrimination, and the ever-constant threat of violence through intense debate with his mother, who insists that trust in God "is our one magic wand" (line 431). But when mother and son suffer their own divine test-Jim's lynching--the narrator angrily erupts in his despair, and demands in Jobian fashion, "Why? Hear me ask it. He was young/And beautiful. Why was he flung/Like common dirt to death?" (lines 817-19)

The discursive relationship that Cullen forges between "The Black Christ" and the Book of Job goes beyond tortured cries and relentless questions, however. A closer look at the Old Testament account's rhetoric of the law clarifies the nature of the narrator's spiritual struggle within the context of racial violence. From the heavenly council in the prologue to the divine "verdict" of the last chapter, the Book of Job is a legal drama. The title character is both a worshipper and a litigant whose most desperate plea is for a hearing before God. Job insists upon his innocence throughout the book, but in chapters 9-10 especially, he reveals his frustration over his inability to participate in an open legal contest. Of God, Job states, "He is not a man like me that I might answer him,/ that we might confront each other in court" (Job 9:32). Job asks in vain for an arbiter to petition his case and for witnesses to defend him. He even imagines how his own cross-examination might sound in court:

   I will say to God: Do not condemn me,
      but tell me what charges you have
      against me.
   Does it please you to oppress me, to
      spurn the work of your hands, while
      you smile on the schemes of the
      wicked?
   Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see
      as a mortal sees?
   Are your days like those of a mortal or
      your years like those of a man,
   that you must search out my faults and
      probe after my sin--
   though you know that I am not guilty
      and that no one can rescue me from
      your hand? (Job 10:2-7)

Such judicial language takes on added significance when considered within the context of racial violence in America. One of the defining characteristics of lynching is that it occurs outside the courts where ordinary citizens act as judge, jury, and executioner. Dray notes that lynching was frequently practiced by "vigilance committee" in the colonies during the Revolutionary era and later in isolated frontier territories during the nineteenth century (20-22). And yet by 1905, Dray states, "lynching had come almost exclusively to mean the summary execution of Southern black men" as an expedient form of communal justice and social control (18). Lynching records kept by Tuskegee Institute indicate that 3,447 black men and women were lynched in the U.S. between 1882 and 1962. In 1929, the year that Cullen published "The Black Christ," seven African Americans were lynched. The number of deaths increased to 20 the following year. (12) In his discussion of lynching's illegality, Dray singles out the denial of due process as one the practice's greatest atrocities:

   Lynchings, even where they have been
   the accepted norm, have always disturbed
   many Americans. This is not
   simply because they are barbaric, inhumane
   acts, but because they inherently
   disavow a right Americans hold
   dear--the right to due process before
   the law. Since early in the eighteenth
   century, before the founding of the
   American republic, due process has
   been understood to include a clear
   accusation of charges stating what law
   the accused has violated, a court made
   up of competent authorities, the right
   to confront one's accuser in a trial held
   under proper proceedings, and the
   right to be freed unless found guilty.
   (Dray 18)

Despite the impetuous nature of mob violence, lynchings required organized reinforcement from an entire white community in order to maintain an oppressive social structure that could consistently divest black Americans of their constitutional rights. Likewise, the collective anonymity of the executioners ensured that few lynchers were ever prosecuted. Federal anti-lynching legislation was also extremely difficult to pass, leading one scholar to comment that "lynching almost became a nationally sanctioned pastime" (Harris, "Lynching" 464). In passages that parallel Job's petition for his day in court, the mother and the narrator in "The Black Christ" look to heaven for due process of the law. They know that neither Jim nor any other black person will be judged fairly in the racist South. Of the white man who attacks him, for example, Jim states: "My right/I knew could not outweigh his might/Who had the law for satellite" (lines 560-62).

Talking with his mother, the narrator laments God's apparent detachment and the apparent reasons that he and his family are too inconsequential to receive any special divine attention. He longs for a pantheon of warrior gods, like ancient Greek and Roman deities, who protect human supplicants by providing happiness and wealth in life before, and not necessarily after, death. Later, the narrator mocks his mother's Christian faith and angrily questions why her loving God would not protect his creation, why would she continue to praise a Christ who had done nothing "for [her] who spent/ A bleeding life for His content?" (lines 832-33). His mother steadfastly insists on religious faith as the answer. When Jim is dragged into the night and lynched, we are told that the black matriarch prays aloud, asserting God as "the judge of all that men might do" (line 802). The mother of "The Black Christ" appeals to a heavenly advocate in ways similar to Job in 17:13 when he states: "My intercessor is my friend as my eyes pour out tears to God;/on behalf of man he pleads with God as a man pleads for his friend." Whereas Job appeals to the God of the Hebrew Bible, Cullen asserts Jesus as the intercessor and "defense counsel" for his Christian characters.

In the concluding chapters of the scriptural Book of Job, God speaks through a storm; he "answers" Job through a series of rhetorical questions that call attention to his life-giving power and creative dominion. At last Job repents, asserting an understanding that the God "who fathers the drops of dew" (Job 38:28) and can "pull in the leviathan with a fishhook" (41:1) has a plan for his life that even includes suffering. As Fyall interprets, "Job had wished to bring God to trial and Yahweh himself accepts the legal framework and refers to Job as one who has a case with the Almighty, and it is he who finally pronounces the verdict" (34). Likewise, when Jim appears unharmed in Cullen's poem, the narrator is chastened by the miracle. He reflects, amazed and ashamed, on the parting words of the black Christ who called him "brother." His soul turns to God instantaneously, emboldened by a vision that resonates not only with Job's theophany, but with the vivid conversion narratives of former American slaves. (13) Jim's "resurrection" proves to the narrator that God has heard his own cries and his mother's, and has judged both innocent. Furthermore, his brother's "resurrection" extinguishes all doubts of God's saving grace. Just as Job humbled himself before God's mighty query--"Would you discredit my justice? Would you condemn me to justify yourself?" (Job 40:8)--so the narrator now claims to be "forever on [his] knees" by his mother's side: "Ever to praise her Christ with her,/Knowing He can at will confer/Magic on miracle to prove/And try me when I doubt his love" (lines 943-46, emphasis mine).

"The Black Christ" shares with the Book of Job, then, a theodicy of redemptive suffering, or the idea that the suffering of the righteous can benefit the doubtful. When placed within the context of unwarranted and disproportionate suffering in black America, however, Cullen's use of the figure of ritual violence as an "accessory device" (14) grossly undermines the consolatory worth of his representation of lynching as a spiritual test. The narrative's anti-lynching argument is almost incidental to its valorization of sacrificial religious devotion in black communities and promotes unquestioning Christian faith in the modern world. Readers of Job are privy to the rules and regulations of God's test; for example, "he is in your hands; but you must spare his life," God says to Satan in Job 2:6. Yet readers of "The Black Christ" are left to wonder whether or not the moral evils that afflict southern black folk are safeguarded by similar restrictions. Cullen's narrative poem certainly compels us to grapple with the inscrutable nature of life's greatest mysteries through religious faith. But if the poem also compels us to weigh the extraordinary rescue of a lynched body against the divine hands that tied the noose (or allowed the noose to be tied), then such a rendering heightens, rather than alleviates, the wasteful suffering of countless black victims whose lives were not spared.

Cullen's narrator declares himself comforted by his new, fraternal connection with Christ, one that may fortify him through challenging times. He realizes, in the words of theologian Howard Thurman, "that there is a fellowship of suffering as well as a community of sufferers" (237). Nevertheless, by attributing the horror of lynching to a greater design, by attempting to make "sense" out this senseless act, the spiritual realism of the poem averts our attention away from those human beings who are directly responsible. The members of the awkwardly staged lynch mob appear and disappear like phantoms after their performance in the narrative, severely diminishing their culpability. In keeping with Anthony Pinn's critique of redemptive suffering, I would also argue that the use of this ethic in Cullen's poem, "does not move toward the lessening of oppressive circumstances; rather, it lessens a sense of accountability and responsibility on the part of oppressors. The possibility of redemption through suffering, although not removing a sense of guilt, significantly reduces any urgent need to change behavior oppressors might feel" (89).

Furthermore, with such phrases as "the days are mellow for us now," the poem concludes abruptly with a placating sense of closure in spite of ongoing chaos (line 931). While the mother prays and knits "in a corner," the narrator gives the impression that his entire days are now spent in supplication (line 936). We are left with an image of order and contentment in the peaceful rural milieu where, incidentally, lynchings continue unabated. It is an ending that one of Cullen's contemporaries called "grotesquely unnatural" (Wood 93). Cullen's pastoral fantasy naturalizes the suffering of black Americans by rendering their rural poverty, their racialized subjugation and passive silence, and even their grisly murder as potential pathways to racial redemption. What began as a spiritual indictment of human suffering becomes a southern parable of black endurance that leaves worldly systems of lethal oppression profoundly undisturbed.

One final instructive comparison between "The Black Christ" and Old Testament wisdom literature can be found in Job 19. The righteous sufferer anticipates the day of his vindication in this oft-quoted passage:

   For I know that my redeemer liveth,
      and that he shall stand at the latter day
      upon the earth:
   And though after my skin worms
      destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall
      I see God:
   Whom I shall see for myself, and mine
      eyes shall behold and not another;
      though my reins be consumed within
      me. (KJV, Job 19:25-27)

Significantly, verse 26 of this chapter has been identified as one of the book's most difficult to translate, "almost unintelligible" according to one Bible commentary (Rodd 40). A slightly different translation of the verse is suggested by the New International Version of Job 19:26: "And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God." (15) Religious scholars have debated over whether or not Job, whose body the Adversary has been permitted to torment, is claiming to behold God after his skin has been scourged with disease or after his skin has "wasted away in death" (Fyall 51). Does he see God from within his flesh or from without? As Rodd states, "These translations accord with the view of a vindication either during or after Job's lifetime" (41).

I am intrigued by the indeterminacy of this verse, for it echoes the imaginative ambiguities of the 20th-century black Christ metaphor. Cullen's poem celebrates the enduring faith of one who believes that she will see her Savior in the afterlife, but it also rewards the irreverent call of another--a modern soul-searcher--who demands proof of God's existence and a demonstration of his righteousness in the here and now. Indeed, the black mother holds fast to the definition of faith as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1): "I had no need to view/His side, or pass my fingers through/ Christ's wounds" (lines 400-02). But her son remains unmoved. He longs instead for stone and wooden idols "to feel and touch and stroke" (line 341). Cullen's sensory images play not only on the reliability of God, but on the subjectivity of racial constructs. Race hatred and the pain it causes figure in the poem as eyesight and insight, through "corrupt unhealthy glances" (line 606), through "woe-ravaged eyes" (line 731), and through ideas and deeds that are "streaked" (line 449), "mirrored" (line 457) and "filmed" (line 462) on the eyes. When the narrator judges the efficacy of faith in the same fashion, however, he finds a God who "in [his] sight has never done/One extraordinary thing" (lines 326-27). Ultimately, the poem's "Doubting Thomas" is swayed by the material substantiation of God's grace through Jim's rescue on earth.

   I saw; I touched; yet doubted him;
   My fingers faltered down his slim
   Sides, down his breathing length of limb.
   Incredulous of sight and touch,
   "No more," I cried, "this is too much
   For one mad brain to stagger through."
      (lines 886-891)

It is in his brother's dark flesh, then, that the narrator "sees God." But most importantly, the poem ultimately suggests that a divine presence can be found in every victimized body, and that this profound realization is at the core of the unbeliever's awakening. The religious conversion of Jim's brother comes to fruition through his acknowledgement that the tree on which the black Christ was crucified is only one of many unknown trees in the South, "whereon as costly fruit has grown" (line 962).

While the black Christ can certainly encompass every facet of Jesus Christ's life, death, and resurrection, the cultural deployment of the figure represents an attempt to isolate those aspects of Jesus of Nazareth that are associated with his bodily persecution and martyrdom. Outraged by the Scottsboro case in 1931, Langston Hughes makes a similar connection between Christ's divinity and the scourged flesh of black people in the poem "Christ in Alabama": "Christ is a Nigger/Beaten and black/O, bear your back. (16) Over three decades after Hughes wrote his poem, a similar image of the Crucifixion would be summoned forth in 1964 in the "Wales Window for Alabama," designed by stained-glass artist John Petts and donated by the people of Cardiff, Wales, to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham one year after a bomb murdered four girls there. The window features an image of a crucified black Christ with his head bowed and arms outstretched, one hand held up in protest, the other extended in a sacrificial posture. Of the several messages etched in the colored panes, none is more poignant than the suggestion that the blast which brutally ended the lives of the four innocents reverberates on a higher, spiritual plane. Etched around Christ's feet are the words, "You do it to me" in reference to Matthew 25:40. (17)

An older stained-glass window of Jesus stands in the same Birmingham sanctuary. The Christ in this image has a white face and blond hair and stands before a door with the staff of "The Good Shepherd" (John 10:7). This window was damaged during the 1963 bombing, and repaired afterwards, and now adjoins its newer twin from Wales. While both windows in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church represent Jesus Christ, the brown-skinned image uses the biblical narrative to chronicle a precise historical moment in the lives of black southerners. It memorializes the pain and suffering of the bombing through the sacrifice of the black Christ, just as it honors the redeeming triumph of the Civil Rights Movement through his never-ending resurrection. (18)

The same year that white supremacists bombed the Birmingham church, Howard Thurman wrote that a man who suffers "has to handle his suffering or be handled by it" (236). Thurman's eloquent meditations on human suffering maintain that spiritual and physical anguish can function like the stained-glass of the "Wales Window for Alabama," as a lens through which new light can be refracted: "Openings are made in a life by suffering that are not made in any other way.... Serious questions are raised and primary answers come forth. Insights are reached concerning aspects of life that were hidden and obscure before the assault" (238). The black Christ is one figure that black writers and artists have deployed to image the redemptive "openings" that are generated by the assault of racial violence. Cullen's narrative poem, in particular, suggests an articulation of the thought processes of a community of sufferers by comparing well-known biblical accounts to the inexplicable practice of lynching in the South.

Although neither Christ's resurrection nor Job's trial aligns neatly with Jim's death in "The Black Christ," Cullen effectively mixes metaphors to provoke questions of faith and to demonstrate that "Belief/Is something more than pain and grief" (lines 63-64).

Notes

The author wishes to thank Danielle Elliott, Heather Williams, and Kwame Dawes for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

(1.) See also Redding 112. Cullen's contemporaries also remarked that The Black Christ & Other Poems seemed to fall short of his previous achievements. See Wood 93.

(2.) Theodicy, generally speaking, is an element of theology that is concerned with the question of how evil and suffering can exist in a universe created by a good, loving, and all-knowing God. My understanding of theodicy and its engagement with African-American life and religious culture has been greatly influenced by theologians William R. Jones, Patricia L. Hunter, Jacquelyn Grant, and Anthony Pinn.

(3.) Written and composed by Abel Meeropol, "Strange Fruit" was first sung by Billie Holiday in 1939 at The Cafe Society. Whether or not the white Christians who revived the extralegal practice of lynching during Reconstruction singled out public hanging on trees and poles as a matter of expediency or as a part of a religious imperative is not clear. Nevertheless, the dishonoring of the black sufferer is further exacerbated by the way in which corpses were often left unburied and were harvested for souvenirs.

(4.) Qtd. in Wagner 335. "Christ Recrucified" was originally published in Kelley's Magazine in 1922.

(5.) "The Black Christ," 113. Many African Americans, especially during the nineteenth century, read the redeeming potential of Africa in Psalm 68:31, which states: "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God." See Raboteau 41-42.

(6.) Baker 49.

(7.) Smylie has compared Jim's actions in these scenes to the title character of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, which was published in 1924, five years before "The Black Christ."

(8.) Hughes makes this statement in the first line of his 1926 essay, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (27). Huggins attributes Hughes's comment to Cullen in Harlem Renaissance (208). Cullen's literary editorials in the Opportunity frequently expressed his concern that African American poets were unduly pressured to limit the subject matter of their work to racial issues. In the introduction to Caroling Dust, he further maintained his wish that "any merit that may be in his work to flow from it solely as the expression of a poet--with no racial consideration to bolster it up" (qtd. in Turner 71).

(9.) By characterizing the poem as a conversion narrative, I expand Baker's claim in his 1974 monograph, A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams. In his brief discussion of "The Black Christ," Baker remarks: "If the poem is seen in this light, some of its apparent flaws turn out to be necessities, e.g., the long retelling of incidents and the sense of suspense and wonder the narrator attempts to create toward the conclusion" (48). Baker connects Cullen's agenda to the cultural forms and techniques common to conversion stories. I use the poem's engagement with Job to evaluate the quality of the conversion and the use of racial violence as its catalyst.

(10.) Religious scholars have identified parallels between Job and Babylonian, Sumerian, and other wisdom literature of the Ancient Near East. See Rodd 128-33. The archetypal sufferer figures in ancient western wisdom literature the complexities of human suffering, endurance, and faith. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, allusions to the story's theme can be seen in Goethe's prologue to the first part of Faust (1808) and in Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor' of The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880). More explicit references appear in works such as H. G. Wells's novel, The Undying Fire (1919) and Robert Frost's drama, "A Masque of Reason" (1945). In African American literature, Richard Wright cites verses from the Old Testament book in at least three of his works: Job 23:2 in Native Son (1940), Job 18:12 in Black Boy (1945), and Job 21:5 in The Outsider (1953).

(11.) Thus Cullen's contemporaries compared the speaker in "The Black Christ" to the redeemed sinner of John Masefield's poem, "The Everlasting Mercy" (1911). See Shillito 92-93. Also, see Ferguson 115.

(12.) For lynching statistics, see Zangrando.

(13.) For more information on the conversion narratives of black American slaves, see Clifton H. Johnson, ed.

(14.) In her discussion of "literary lynchings," Trudier Harris notes that representations of ritual violence are often manipulated to fit the authors agenda: "Indeed, lynching and burning scenes sometimes become accessory devices, embellishments to suggest the innate character of white society, its destructive nature and brutality" (Exorcising Blackness 69).

(15.) According to Fyall, the Hebrew translation reads: "And after my skin they have stripped off--this." The word "they" was replaced for "worms" in the King James Version of the Bible (Fyall 51).

(16.) Hughes first published "Christ in Alabama" in 1931 in Contempo magazine and reprinted it in Scottsboro, Limited along with three other poems and a play in 1932.

(17.) "And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" (KJV, Matt. 25:40).

(18.) For more information see Smith and Cobbs.

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Qiana Whitted is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Her current project, of which the present essay is a part, is a study of African-American literary engagements with divine justice and the problem of evil.