Invisible Man, Chapters 12-13

Yams != sweet potatoes (262-67)

End of Chapter 11 -- broad thematic connections:

Blondes:

Note the "platinum blonde" on the subway:

 "Across the aisle a young platinum blonde nibbled at a red Delicious apple as station lights srippled past behind her" (250)

vs. the blonde at the Battle Royale:

"A sea of faces, some hostile, some amused, ringed around us, and in the center, facing us, stood a magnificent blonde -- stark naked...I was strongly attracted and looked in spite of myself. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. The hair was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, the face heavily powdered and rouged, as though to form an abstract mask, the eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon's butt" (19).

Apples:

Note the "red Delicious apple" (250) mentioned way back in Chapter Two as Trueblood describes the harassment he and his family have incurred from the "biggity school folks up on the hill" (52) and the assistance of "white folks" (53).

The Invisible Man watches Trueblood bite into a plug of chewing tobacco" when "Something tinkled against the porch and I picked it up, gazing at it from time to time. It was a hard red apple stamped out of tin" (53).

Chapter 12:

After being discharged from the factory hospital, the Invisible Man is assisted by a woman called "Miss Mary"(Mary Rambo). Mary is a new human mother figure who is certainly not insignificantly named.

In Chapter 12 alone she takes him in and nurses him back to a state resembling health (252-3) and attempts to awaken a sense of racial responsibility in the Invisible Man:

"'What you plan to make out of yourself'...'So what's wrong with being an educator?' (254)....'whatever it is (you do), I hope it's something that's a credit to the race'...'It's you young folks what's going to make the changes...Ya'll's the ones. You got to lead and you fot to fight and more us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the ones from the South that's got to do it, them what knows the fire and ain't forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits. They finds a place for theyselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. Oh, heap of them talks about doing things, but they done really forgot. No it's you young ones what has to remember and take the lead'" (255).

Mary draws him away from the challenging masculine environment of the Men's House where he no longer fits in, especially after his actions on 257-8 into a residence that more closely resembles a family home led by "a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face" (258). The Invisible Man appreciates this, though he does get annoyed by "her constant talk about leadership and responsibility," particularly when he encounters difficulties finding work.

"It was a most painful position, for at the same time, Mary reminded by constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement; and I was torn between resenting her for it and loving her for the nebulous hope she kept alive" (258). 

Here, the Invisible Man will struggle to make peace with himself, his past, his future, and his prospects. He no longer has the same plans he had before and he appears to alternate between blissful recollection of the south (the yams on 263-66) and the desire for mockery and vengeance on its most prominent figures (265).

Chapter 13:

Yams: 

Why is the IM attracted to the yams?
What is the significance of his: - claim that it is good just from looking at it, and the man’s advice to try it first - choice to eat it while walking down the street (264)
- thoughts about shame and public actions (265)
- accusations about Bledsoe’s chitterling habit
- return to get more yams and claim that they are his “‘birthmark’” (266)
- why he doesn’t think that he will be able to enjoy the hot fried pies?

Yams and the Invisible Man's attitude towards the South/home
What does he find when he walks away after finishing his yams? How does it make him feel? (267-75)

Event: The Eviction Speech

What drives the IM to act? (270-75)
What are the points of the IM’s speech? Is it totally contradictory? Does he actually instigate the protest? (275-281)
The Invisible Man feels identification, pity, and shame when he looks at all of the household articles and significations of family:

"an ornate greeting card with the message 'Grandma, I love you' in childish scrawl; another card with a picture of what looked like a white man in black-face seated at the door of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric 'Going back to my old cabin home'...an old breast pump with rubber bulb yellowed with age, a worn baby shoe and a dusty lock of infant hair tied with a faded and crumpled blue ribbon...[and] lapsed life insurance policies with perforated seals stamped 'Void'" (272).

 His speech seeks to vindicate their human dignity (with mixed effects) against his sense of "dispossession," which is mixed with

"a pang of vague recognition: this junk...all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been. And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day....why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects" (273). 

He draws attention to the familiar articles referenced above in his speech on 277 and on 278 suggests that the old people "'look like my mama and my papa and my grandma and grandpa, and I look like you and you look like me'" (278).

In the second half of Invisible Man, the main character encounters various substitutions for biological family and for traditional authority. The Brotherhood enter into the plot as an alternative to Mary's economical housekeeping and programs of redemption. Mary simply sees the Invisible Man as a smart young man, but she insists he personally bear the responsibility for the improvement of the race (255). At the same time, she takes care of the Invisible Man without expecting anything in return. He ends up rejecting the maternal environment of Mary's on the basis of the "odor of [her] cabbage...a depressing reminder of the leaner years of my childhood" (296). He realizes that he is costing Mary too much and providing too little -- he is a ward or charge and not an equal. He sets off to meet up with the brotherhood on 298 in order to make money and, he thinks, do so on his own terms.

Brothers 

By 295, the Invisible Man has written off all of his early training and aspirations as mere "Bledsoeing" (295). Bledsoe is no longer an idealistic father figure that he aspires to be liked by or to imitate, but a hypocritical and ridiculous example of what southern social institutions once encouraged him to aspire toward. The "Brotherhood" is a more inclusive and fully developed manifestation of the union of "brothers" that the Invisible Man encountered in the union meeting at Liberty Paints on 219-223.

The Brotherhood, on the other hand, are neither interested in genuinely benefiting the Invisible Man as an individual or helping him to develop as an individual -- they want him to represent his race within their organization and to do so in specific and calculated ways. Yet, the Invisible Man appreciates that the Brotherhood, more than any other social group he has ever encountered, accept him on his own terms as an equal individual.

Brother Jack first addresses the Invisible Man as "brother" on 289 and the Invisible Man has to "repres[s] an impulse to call him down about the 'brother' business." He is very reserved with Brother Jack but he does toy with him --

(Brother Jack) "'But you were concerned with that old couple...Are they relatives of yours?'"
(Invisible Man) "'Sure, we're both black'"
(Jack) "'Seriously, are they your relatives?'"
(IM) "'Sure, we were burned in the same oven.'"
The effect was electric.
(Jack) 'Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race!'" 

Is there a right and a wrong way to engage history? Brother Jack suggests that in “‘times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back upon the dead to give them a clue.’” Do you think that this is the right approach, given his earlier disdain for old attitudes? There is “‘little the dead can do’” but they are not “‘absolutely powerless.’”

Why will Mary not do as a landlady (308-9)? Why is the IM given a new identity (309)?

What is the IM’s private attitude towards Booker T. Washington (311)?

 On 300 he walks into an entirely different world than he has ever seen before -- the social world of the Communist party in New York during the 1930s and 1940s. Among these brothers he finds himself treated as more of an equal, though his difference is still acknowledged. This fuels his belief that the party is a forum for him to be (and be appreciated for being) himself.

It is not long before Brother Jack begins suggesting a father figure for the Invisible Man to strive to publicly emulate. On 305, Jack suggests that he might become "'the new Booker T. Washington'" and goes on to state that

"'it isn't a matter of whether [the Invisible Man] wish[es] to be the new Booker T. Washington...Booker Washington was resurrected today at a certain eviction in Harlem...You shall be the new Booker T. Washington, but even greater than he'" (307). 

The Invisible Man writes off all of this talk of influence (at least somewhat) on 311:

"'But to hell with this Booker T. Washington business. I would do the work but I would be no one except myself -- whoever I was. I would pattern my life on that of the Founder. They might think that I was acting like Booker T. Washington; let them. But what I thought of myself I would keep to myself" (311). 

The final section of the reading for Tuesday in which the Invisible Man is requested to sing is significant because it functions as his initiation into this new world of "Brothers" (and "Sisters").

On 311 a member tells him that "'You're just who we need. We been looking for you'" and requests -- addressing him as "'Brother'" -- that he sing "'a spiritual...Or one of those real good ole Negro work songs'" before demonstrating the style of song himself on 312. The Invisible Man watches and listens to the reactions on the part of the party members, who shame the member who made the request. The Invisible Man remains silent until he announces the man's drunkeness and diffuses the tension by joking -- in a way no one really understands but himself -- about the meaning of the man's requests: "'He hit me in the face...with a yard of chitterlings...He threw a hog maw...He's high as a Georgia pine'" (313). The Invisible Man continues to make folksy jokes about the other man's drunkenness until race is no longer in the forefront of the situation. In this way,

 "as though I had told them something which they'd wished very much to hear, had rendered them an important service which I couldn't understand" (314)

The Invisible Man thus successfully becomes a part of the Brotherhood -- a new family predicated on theoretical beliefs of human equality and worker solidarity. At the same time, he can't help but think that they have made too big an issue of political correctness:

"But now after the mutual laughter something disturbed me. Shouldn't there be some way for us to be allowed to sing? Shouldn't the short man have the right to make a mistake without his motives being considered consciously or unconsciously malicious? After all, he was singing, or trying to. What if I asked him to sing?" (314)

What does dancing with Emma fulfill for the IM? See the veteran's contemplation of what he will do in the "'dream'" of New York back in Chapter 7: "'you might even meet a few white folks. And listen...you might even dance with a white girl'" (152). Even after the attendant Crenshaw insists that "There's other kind of freedom besides some ole white trash women,'" namely "'shows'" and "'big restaurants,'" the veteran maintains that short duration of the Invisible Man's planned stay in the city will be spent

"'working, and so much of his freedom will have to be symbolic. And what will be his or any man's most easily accessible symbol of freedom? Why, a woman, of course. In twenty minutes he can inflate that symbol with all the freedom which he'll be too busy working to enjoy the rest of the time'" (153).

 Is he comfortable with Emma and the Brotherhood (and sisters)? Is this freedom? (314-15)?
What does he admit that he dislikes about “people like Mary on 316-17?


Consider:
Chthonian
"History" -- "old people" -- etc (291).
The things about "people like Mary" that he dislikes (316)

Additional Reading for Thursday 4/3 & Tuesday 4/8 -- skim:

The Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, 1910-1933, magazine still exists today

1. W.E.B. Du Bois "The Negro and Communism" (from The Crisis, September 1931, 6 PDF pages)
2. -----. "The Black Worker" (from Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, 1935, 7 PDF pages)