7 Nothing But a Man

In recent years a subgenre ofblack film has celebrated the heroism of the picaresque outlaw who, like Sir Gawain in mortal combat with the Green Knight, Lancelot in pursuit of the Holy Grail, or Amos Tutuola's Palm Wine Drinkard in quest of the ultimate high, seeks himself in brave quest outside the benisons of society. The urban outlaw has especially appealed toa number of black writers. The hero of the best novel ever written by a black, Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, came from this picaresque tradition. In black genre film, this outlaw is a combative hero, who roves the city from one adventure to another, each one offering deeper rewardsof both self-knowledge and gratitude from the black group in whose name he fought.

Indeed, the urban outlaw often seemed more appealing than the pastoral hero; though rural ambience provided an opportunity to sketch an anatomy of white racism, the urban scene lent itself to rich fantasies of black aggression and rebellion. John Shaft simply called forth more heartfelt response from black audiences because he scored more points against "the system" than did Br'er Rabbit.

In the midst of the recent "blaxploitation" movie cycle, filmmakers found itconvenient, and even self-serving, to neglect and even demean, the less urbane pastoral hero of black folklore. For them the rural hero must have seemed too close to Uncle Tom and too muchat his ease among the whites in the master class. To be on the side of the pastoral hero was somehow to acquiesce in his plight. And yet in black genre film history, a few filmmakers attempted to create a folk Negro who washis own man.

In fact, over the years the pastoral subgenre has yielded some fine movies and a few lost films with good reputations. One of the earliest black films, the Lincoln Company's The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, followed its prim black version of Kipps or David Copper-field from country roots to city success. While such pioneers did not start a tradition, in the 1970s when a few blacks took nominal control over a few movie projects, the genre surfaced again. Raymond St. Jacques successfully combined a fad for nostalgia and the black pastoral genre in The Book of Numbers, a tale which tells of small town hustlers who take on big city adversaries. Gordon Parks, Jr. reached for similar style in his near-miss biography of folksinger Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter.

In the white-dominated depression years, Hollywood contributed several smallblack pastoral films, among them the two-reeler, Yamacraw, Langston Hughes's and Clarence Muse's Way Down South, and a string of imitators. The best Hollywood attempts— MGM's Hallelujah! and Fox's Hearts of Dixie —were among the earliest, although each was burdened by excessive sentimentality and uneven treatment of traditional black roles.

Recently the genre has enjoyed a revival through the success of four powerfully done, pictorially elegant pastoral films and an interesting liberal tract shot in the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands: The Learning Tree, Sounder, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), and Conrack (1974). But as in earlier genres such as the hard-boiled film noir detective films of the 1940s, the infusion of lush financial support allowed enlargement of the sphere, variations in the form, and additions to the motifs, to such an extent that some of the films were carried outside the bounds of the genre. This is not to say the results lack former quality, but rather, former qualities.

The Learning Tree combined painterly camerawork by Gordon Parks, the natural pastoral settings of his boyhood Kansas, and a crackling narrative of a black boy initiated into the rites of passage to adulthood–all of which were the branches of Parks's "learning tree." Sounder similarly used pictorial beauty and rural nostalgic detail as means of nearly equalling the effect of Parks's coolly pacedwork. The film suffered only from its backers' too obvious wishes that it succeed financially as a "crossover" movie that would touch the sensibilities of both black and white audiences. Predictably, like a good Andy Hardy movie punched out by MGM in the 1930s, it eventually spawned a colt in the form of Sounder II.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitt man also drew its strength from pastoral roots, although its success owed less to genre formulas and more to a gimmick that allowed its story to be told through the point of view of a white reporter; the film thus qualified for viewing in the ultimate "crossover" market, the parlor audience of prime-time television. Its finest quality derived not from genre traits, but from a bravura performance by CicelyTyson as the vigorous, open-hearted black girl, who grows to antique maturity without losingher zest for involvement in life.

Conrack was yet another colorful pastoral film. The latest of the genre was the least successful because its story rested on an ingenuous white hero imbued with a missionary spirit that many folk blacks regarded with suspicion. While Conrack is not as naively patronizing as the college student who worksin a community organization only long enough toearn his three credits in "Soc. 102," he comes close. As a result, the rural black kids, theirlocal teachers, and their gruff white supervisor are mere foils for the white carpetbagger whocan risk innovation and censure because he has no permanent investment in the situation's outcome.

In the half century between The Realization of a Negro's Ambition and Conrack, the best example of black pastoral genre film was Nothing But a Man. Alow budget, independently produced little movieshot on location in the South and New Jersey, the black-and-white, penny-pinching format did not allow deviations from generic formulas nor intrusions by well-known stars. Finite resources required that the producers rely on materialsat hand, and familiar pastoral elements thus gave the film a rough-handed integrity.

Straitened circumstances forced the hero to develop his character on familiar ground. Unlike the outlaw picaresque hero, the pastoral hero succeeds by keeping faith with himself, by remaining the same rather than changing, and by acquiring self-knowledge that eventually reinforces his preference for the small victory of survival with dignity. Like the heroof nineteenth-century romance, he neither killsnor is killed. In the end he may not prevail but only endure. His integrity is nonetheless preserved, because his small victories take place on a field chosen by himself—"down home" rather than in the city where, as revisionist historians are now suggesting, the integrity of the nuclear black family was destroyed by the shockof the Great Depression.

From its opening titles to its quiet ending, Nothing But a Man unfolds in harmony with this pastoral generic tradition. Like the myth of the eternal return, the narrative carries the hero from familiar life into inferno (the city) and then to eventual rebirth back home. The same line of incidents carries the hero's son by an earlier liaison out of the same urban blight, wrapping him too in the redemptive folds of pastoral innocence. Reinforcing this quest for the stable norms of familialheroism is the fact that the hero begins as a gandy dancer on the railroad, a monastic, nomadic life whose sterility promises none of the fulfillment possible within the family circle.

We are in a black movie, not only because the themes are black, but because our point of view is from within black circles in segregated Alabama. Whites are seen only as malevolent grotesques, omnipotent employers empowered to deny the gift of a job and wages, and polite mutes who are powerless prisoners of their racist culture. Indeed, the lines are drawn so sharply between the black and white antagonists that we need no detailed anatomy of black life to tell us who the heroes are. Nevertheless, anatomic subplots abound. During the course of the narrative, the hero is at spiritual loggerheads with his unctuous father-in-law; he wrestles between the poles of black male freedom and domesticity; he is driven to the verge of vengeful violence, pulling back in time to keep his integrity; he descends into the wretched black city, only barely escaping its baleful forces that destroyed his own father.

32. In Nothing But a Man, the sexually segregated male world is seen as a prison from which Duff (Ivan Dixon) must escape. (Roemer-Young and DuArt; National Film Library, London)

Nothing But a Man opens on a black male, almost cloistered society ofgandy dancers, which appears under the main titles. They work out in the flat Alabama countryside where life is hard, but as satisfying as the ring of a good hammer against steel. We are in the midst of an idyll. The camera tilts up and catches the sun; the rhythms of labor throb in time with the track workers' bending backs; their work is depicted as the central theme of their lives as the camera peers tightly down to where the hammer hits the spike.

The reality of life in a track gang, brought to us by a long fade to black and out to the interior of the bunkhouse car, is a little like a minimum security prison. There the men play fitful games of checkers with bottlecaps. One of them paces from one pal to another, picking verbal fights, hazing, and "signifying." Another worker, still in his overalls, aimlessly shaves as though to break the dullness. At last the camera tilts down on the hero, Duff Anderson—even his name has a good brown tone—paring his nails. "What are yougetting pretty for?" one of the gang asks, as though to a "lifer" with nowhere to go.

At last a cut takes us outside the cloying walls, perhaps to a better place. We are on a handcar, driven along the tracks bya one-lung engine. The men are seen against the lowering sun, their heads leaning forward in anticipation against the wind. A string of truck shots catches the pineywoods, telephone poles, glinting car tops, and tidy rows of tracksideshacks flickering by. Through another cut, we are in a rustic juke joint. Duff is morose. The seedy saloon is little different from the bunkcar, except for a whiney whore cadging beers. Real emotion and feeling are disguised by the poses of aesthetique du cool; the masks devised to conceal feelings from white men are used against black men.

Aimlessly, Duff ambles into anighttime church service and brightens a bit atthe sight, if not the message, depicted as a serial montage of warmhearted women and homey institutional ambience. The opposing life styles at last confront each other: black male celibacyversus the warm circle of black institutional family life in which respectable women have a place. After the service at a chicken supper, Duff meets Josie, the strong, cool, quietly beautiful preacher's daughter. Upstairs as the service resumes, led by a hard driving visiting preacher from Birmingham, Josie is seen as a cool quiet island amidst the cadenced black litany. A cut carries Duff outside, away from the church's light and into the dark. But we know he has been touched by the experience and that he has been drawn toward its promised affirmation.

Cutting back to the bunkhousecar or to the juke joint would have made the dichotomy into a cliché. Instead, we are made to witness a debate by being taken into the preacher's family circle where they argue about the social effect of Josie taking up with a railroadsection hand. Another cut tells us she has won:a floor full of dancers seen against a backlight, and then a two-shot of Duff and Josie sipping beers. Black masculine life makes a last bid for Duff's loyalty when two of the section gangunsuccessfully intrude and try to draw him away. Duff has left celibacy for the traditional family.

33. Duff (Ivan Dixon) soonlearns that the saloon life, populated by womenfor hire, offers only a cheap compromise, as visually narrow as the bunkhouse. (Roemer-Young and Du Art; National Film Library, London)

Thus, in two reels Duff's place in the black world and the choices it thrusts upon him have been established. Only the introduction of his white antagonists remains. Theycome in the dark, hovering over Duff's parked car where he sits with Josie. His new role is thereby challenged by the whites, who press against its territorial limits and the limits of Duff's ability to protect the vulnerable blacks within his orbit. To the whites Duff is anything but a man. Indeed, they stop hazing him only when one of them identifies Josie as the preacher's daughter, and fears the wrath of some powerful white protector of the preacher. Duff is a cipher in the cracker's calculation of risk.

The incident exposes Duff's impotence against white violence and begins to threaten the pastoral family life that Josie hasopened up to him. We sense it visually as they dawdle among some playground swings. Duff talksof going North. But then he says "It ain't thatgood up there neither." He thus rejects the city life as a solution: "Guess I belong here morethan there." But ambivalence clouds his future."They can't get you if you keep movin'," he says.

A cut takes us to Josie's house where we know her father can help only by asking Duff to become, like himself, less than a man. As though to confirm the point, there is even a white man there, the superintendent of education, who calls Duff "boy." Duff bristles, both at the white man's casual effrontery and atthe preacher's safety in his protective shell within the accommodating black bourgeoisie. The power of Josie's father extends only to denying Duff access to his daughter and to offering gratuitous advice. "I think if you'd try living ina town like this instead of running free and easy you'd soon change your tune," he taunts Duff. Visually the point is made when Duff and Josie part. She stands out against the white of theverandah as Duff walks out into the rain on theway to the city and to his son. For him the price of pastoral life and its dignity is too high.

We know Josie will not give him up easily when she contrives to meet him at the bus station. But his errand is symbolicallyvital and he must do it alone. His son lives ina shack in Birmingham with a skinny woman who has tired of him. Duff's life becomes an episodein a long black history when the woman tells Duff of his own father's presence in the town. The quest for his son turns into a quest for his father, a drunk whose life was broken in the streets of Birmingham. Through gritty streets, up a rickety back stair, into a seedy room, Duff goes to find his father. Shabby, drunk, left armhanging limp and useless, the man has been keptalive by a good tough woman whom he bullies andexploits. The not-yet-old man's life reaches nofarther than the dirty saloon where he sometimes rests his head in the bar slop. It is clear from his example that the city promises nothing. In contrast, on the way back home, Duff is lifted by Josie's appearance, beautiful and resilient in white gloves, in the bus station.

34. Duff (Ivan Dixon) seeks out his father and finds him broken, and eventually killed, by urban life. (Roemer-Young andDu Art; National Film Library, London)

Marriage down home, despite the opposition of Josie's father, points to a finer life than either flight to the city or escape into black male tribalism. In the long, visually powerful sequence which follows, Duff, Josie, and a linear montage of prospective white employers serveas an anatomy of black victory and defeat in the rural South. She supports him in small bits of witty badinage, intercut with scenes of painful rejection by indifferent white foremen and supers.

From marriage ceremony, to bed in a small house, to sleepy rising to face a new job, everything is closely shot with quiet intimacy, not claustrophobia. Duff's new black co-workers are less nomadic, more caught up in society, more politically aware. In his carpoolthey chuckle between puffs on cigars over theirlame attempts to shuffle and "torn" in the proper manner. At the lumber yard the white workersserve as an anatomy of the variety of white responses to blacks. Within the limits of the movie's segregated point of view, the whites are outsiders. Nevertheless, they are seen clearly enough for Duff to distinguish between one of thethem who decently surrenders the right to call Duff "boy" and another who insists on learning the details of Duff's sex life. We do not yet know how Duff will respond to his new, more stable life. We only know that he feels comfortableenough to refuse to smile to whites on demand, and to begin to think of organizing black workers into a union.

At home he finds a flurry of visual delights with intimations of black defeat off in the distance. In rapid succession there are giddy two-shots of the newlyweds exchanging gibes about sexual prowess. In their carefree sharing of taking the laundry off the line, everything is all puffs and billows of sheets and laughter, punctuated, only slightly ominously, by Josie's whimsical request for a boxing lesson for her schoolchildren. The soft scene is broken late in the day by a shrewish argument inthe next cabin between a shrill wife and her husband lounging on the porch in the halflight. "You no good around the house," she snaps. Again, Duff is given a glance at cloying, psychic dangers in the black South.

Surely enough, his circle of tranquility collapses under pressures generatedby his headstrong resistance to white hazing. His efforts to organize the workers are used as an excuse for a locker room confrontation in front of his more accommodating co-workers. Duff is fired and eventually blacklisted. In despair, unwilling to pick cotton, wear a bellhop's uniform, or take other "niggerwork," Duff must move on.

In a montage of arch white bosses remote from the centers of black life, thefilm loses its black focus. Only Josie remains as a figure holding the film's center. Leave the South? "You can always do that, Duff," she says, acting as the voice which favors pastoral roots. But it is asking too much, especially when Duff must come to find her in the beauty parlor in order to borrow money to fix his car. "It's not as bad for a girl," she says. "They're not afraid of us."

The conflict between the urgefor roots and desire for mobility grows. At home Josie, though pregnant and soon to lose her teaching post, volunteers to do "day work." Duff's response is to smash a chair he had been repairing in the yard. The older generation further corrupts or distorts the issue. On the one hand, Duff's father says "make them think you're going along, and get what you want." On the other, Josie's father sneers "maybe you ought to leave, . . . You'd be a lot better off in the North." Josie literally bleeds over the argument; as Duff, slumped in despair, sighs "so I've been told," she gashes her finger in the kitchen. The accident is Duff's cue to snap at her father: "You're half a man!"

Reinforcing the kinetic and verbal languages are pictures, which line the walls of their home, painted by Josie's schoolchildren. These paintings strengthen the suggestion that, despite the pounding taken by Duff, thepastoral life is verdantly fertile.

Nevertheless, Duff is broken by the pressure, at least for the moment. He shoves the pregnant Josie to the floor, and in one of the film's few fade outs, goes to Birmingham, compulsively drawn to his father's boozing half-life. Duff seems ready to surrender the last tendrils of pastoral roots for the numbing comforts of urban anomie. He ambles through the wet streets of the city, searching for his father, who first blindly rejects his son, and thendies in a drunken stupor on the way to the hospital.

Clearly, the streetscape is hell. A black funeral director blankly looks up from his desk and asks if he should "say a few words" over the dead and impersonal corpse. Thedead man is the nadir of urban rootlessness: hehad no age, no job, not even a birthplace. At the cemetery, a clanking backhoe, shot from a low angle, digs the nameless grave. Duff and his father's woman return from the burial through an urban wasteland like the Jersey meadows or the ashen empty landscape in Fitzgerald's GreatGatsby. Ancient marshes now dry, strung with utility poles and dotted with out-of-plumb tombstones are intercut with the empty faces in the car.

It is life on the bottom and Duff is touched. He decides in these depths to go back home, to "make me some trouble around town." He will even chop cotton at $2.50 per day, the job he refused when he still thought of the city as a last clear chance for salvation. His father's woman cannot believe in his rebirth. "They'll run you out," she predicts with a city dweller's skeptical shrug.

In one of the few dissolves, the filmmaker moves from urban despair toward reinvoking Duff's low key revival of faith in the pastoral scene. The dissolve is out of a one-shot of Duff turning into a rain-soaked doorwayas he seeks to rescue his son from yet another generation of urban blight. He takes the boy back home in the rain, into the room where Josie's pupils' pictures line the wall, and where shereceives them with wide-eyed assent. Their two-shot embraces are from a low angle, reflecting the faith in the Tightness of the decision to return home. They cry as Duff reassures her: "Itain't goin' to be easy, baby. But it'll be all right."

Duff, by returning, sets himself apart from the picaresque outlaw hero who rejects his ascribed status on the bottom rung by choosing hustling opportunism rather than theintegrity of home country. Duff, the pastoral hero, has learned the value of being governed bya formula that equates survival and success with sameness, roots, and permanence, rather than social mobility. Here symbol, unifying motifs, and mythic system all support the pastoral ideal of endurance. He has a vibrant country woman,who teaches the young. He knows that if all elsefails, he can still pick other people's cotton at least to be close to the soil. He knows he has, at the least, drawn the line by refusing toendure the extremes of humiliation at the handsof white bullies. He has even told them he willkill for the right to be "nothing but a man." To distort Faulkner, the pastoral hero does not wish to prevail, only to endure.

35. The scenes played between Duff (Ivan Dixon) and Josie (Abbey Lincoln) form a softly visual narrative of spiritual wholeness. (Roemer-Young and Du Art; National FilmLibrary, London)