The Flagellants by Carlene Hatcher Polite

First published: In French as Les Flagellants, 1966; English translation, 1967

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: Late 1960’s

Locale: New York, New York

Principal Characters:

• Ideal, a headstrong young black woman who was reared in a southern black community
• Jimson, a black poet who responds to Ideal’s demands that he seek employment by telling her that it is a waste for him to squander his mental energy working for the white society
• Adam, Ideal’s first husband, an older man whom Jimson vilifies for his weaknesses
• Papa Boo, Jimson’s grandfather
• Rheba, a white librarian with a “pitiful lackluster birdface” who hires Jimson to work for her
• Johnny Lowell, Jimson’s sharp-dressing, manicured, West Indian supervisor at the Bureaucratique

The Novel

The Flagellants is the story of the romantic relationship between Ideal and Jimson. After a brief prologue establishing Ideal’s childhood connection to a black community called “the Bottom,” the novel unfolds as a series of arguments between the couple, representing the historical gender conflicts between black men and women.

The first chapter introduces Ideal, who huddles alone on the bed in a dingy New York City apartment she shares with Jimson. Her mind weaving a frantic interior monologue, Ideal attempts to come to terms with her deteriorating relationship with Jimson. Troubled because she is unable to do anything but sit around each day waiting for his return, Ideal takes her anger and frustration out on Jimson. On their way home from the local bar, the ongoing quarrel about why their relationship is a failure explodes into a public spectacle, with Ideal climbing onto an overturned trash can and publicly denouncing Jimson for failing to live up to his own goals as an artist. Jimson has betrayed both of them, Ideal drunkenly announces, because he has not been working on his poetry and is having an affair.

Jimson enters into the verbal sparring match, accusing Ideal of setting up standards that no man could fulfill and thus causing her own unhappiness. Later he tells Ideal that if she ever calls him a “black dog” again, or reminds him of his race, he will use violence against her. Jimson then recounts the story of his grandfather, Papa Boo, a miserly, hypocritical black man who worshiped the white man he worked for but treated his own family like dirt because they were black. Papa Boo told the young Jimson that his dark brown skin was a curse from the devil.

The tension between Ideal and Jimson stems from financial pressures, coupled with the fear of being deprived of independence and being forced into stereotyped gender roles. Ideal is depressed by their poverty as well as by having to work at a mindless secretarial job to support them. She resents what she perceives as Jimson’s irresponsibility and urges him repeatedly to get a job. Jimson, fearing that employment in the white-dominated culture is merely a glorified version of slavery that will distance him from his self-defining poetry, resists Ideal’s request.

Eventually Jimson finds a job, one that he believes is worthy of his time, at the Bureaucratique, a company dealing in social services and peace activism. Relishing the chance to work at a socially meaningful position, Jimson is disappointed when he learns from his flashy supervisor, Johnny Lowell, that he need do nothing more than look busy while discreetly helping himself to as many job perks as he can.

As the novel builds to its dramatic conclusion, the couple engage in a violent dispute. Ideal chastises Jimson for betraying her with another woman, and Jimson defends himself by claiming that although he loves Ideal, her constant demands made him insecure and in need of affirming romantic involvement. Jimson says that Ideal’s overbearing demands are like those of all black women, who need to reduce their men to dependent weaklings in order to maintain their status as strong matriarchs. The novel ends with Jimson telling Ideal that now that she has suffered as much as he has, he wants to stay with her. Ideal, finally able to act on her recognition that she and Jimson are destroying each other with their fears and defensiveness, begs Jimson to leave her, telling him to “go out there and find . . . [your] giant, kill him, become his spirit.”

The Characters

Ideal and Jimson, both articulate and fiery, are doomed because their ingrained fears and defenses prevent them from trusting each other. Language, instead of working as a communicative bond between them, becomes so exaggerated and overblown that it creates a divisive wall. They rail against each other in florid, convoluted prose, often becoming so involved in their tirades that they seem to disappear into a forest of words. Polite gives almost no description of either Ideal’s or Jimson’s physical characteristics. The work of characterization is done through dialogue. What starts as realistic conversation between the two invariably picks up speed and becomes more and more grandiose. The monumental quality of their words elevates both characters above the realm of everyday reality and transforms them into larger-than-life figureheads of “black man” and “black woman.”

Polite’s use of dialogue establishes an ironic inconsistency between what the characters say and what they do: Both are trying to escape from the stereotyped roles their defensiveness forces them to project onto each other, but their language works against their demands for individuality and reestablishes them as stereotypes. The more the two argue about their individuality, the more their hyperbolic language suggests that they are indeed representations of stereotypes.

Even the characters’ names imply that they are larger-than-life, mythical figures. Ideal’s name suggests that she is the perfect model of womanhood. Ironically, Ideal does come to represent the black matriarch, the woman who can “do it all.” At one time this role model may have been necessary for the survival of the black community. Because she presents Ideal struggling against this role, Polite raises the question of the damage done by such a stereotype.

Jimson’s boyish name hints that he does, in fact, represent the emasculated black “son” of the all-powerful white man. By illustrating Jimson’s refusal to sacrifice his art in order to have a stable life in the white community, however, Polite suggests that her hero is not as powerless as he believes he is. Jimson is presented as suffering because he has been made to feel so helpless that he is unable to acknowledge his own strengths.

Polite introduces Ideal as a child in a prologue. As the first chapter opens, Ideal is a young woman who has already abandoned her first husband and her career as a dancer to live with Jimson. The device of the prologue allows Polite to show the magical influences that have shaped her heroine. As a child, Ideal is merely a sensitive, observant filter for the dazzling characters of “the Bottom.” She hopes always to remember the vivacity of the black community: the near-sexual religious ecstasy of the worshipers in the Baptist Church, the preacher who ascends the pulpit and in her childish imagination is transmuted into a giant, the clawlike hands of her ex-slave grandmother, the circus-trained tightrope walker named Frog, the men who populated the corner pool hall, the murdered woman Inez who is slashed to ribbons on the street corner, and whiskey-drinking Red John, who sold his soul to the devil.

After showing the individuality of the characters who shaped her heroine’s consciousness, Polite uses the body of the novel to trace the transformation wrought on Ideal by her relationship with Jimson. By contrasting the unique perceptions of the child Ideal with the stereotyped role into which Ideal evolves, Polite emphasizes the damage inflicted on the consciousness of black men and women by their fear of losing their identity to one another.

Critical Context

Noting the important influence that earlier generations of African American writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison had on younger black authors, critic Robert Gross pointed out that these older writers often found it hard to interest publishers in books that dealt frankly with the African American experience. After the Civil Rights movement, more people became interested in the black experience.

Polite’s experience has been that relationships between black women and men are destroyed by the pervasive gender stereotypes grown out of racism. Because it addresses the ways in which black men and women battle against one another within these stereotypes, The Flagellants is generally considered in context with other novels that remove politics from the global arena and place it on the individual level. Polite fulfills author Franz Fanon’s insistence that the black writer take on the role of “awakener of the people” not by writing a didactic, revolutionary text but by drawing attention to the power struggle in the relationship of one black couple.

Responses to The Flagellants, Polite’s first novel, have been mixed. Author and critic Irving Howe called the book “an arty duet of rant,” and complained that Polite writes with “excruciating badness.” Gross disagreed, saying that Polite’s “unique, concrete language . . . captures the feel of real, sensory objects and takes on an independent, stylized life of its own,” appropriate to the characters’ struggle to escape their psychological dilemma.

Unlike many writers who believe that the novel has great potential for social change, Polite is doubtful. Her ornate language and the high-pitched intensity of her characters have been recognized as attempts to reinvest the novel with contemporary relevance, but Polite questions the value of writing: “My work has no meaning if people are unable to eat every day.”

Bibliography

Bracey, John H., August Meier, and Elliott Rudwick, eds. Black Matriarchy: Myth or Reality? Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971. Examines developments in the African American family after the end of slavery. Provides statistical evidence of the various adaptations black families have made, focusing on matriarchal trends and the importance of the extended family.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. Selections from personal narratives by African American writers, civil rights activists, and cultural critics. Different aspects of African American life are presented. Many of the excerpts deal with gender relationships within the black community, as well as topics such as the suppression of African American individuality.

Gross, Robert A. “The Black Novelists: ‘Our Turn.’” Newsweek 73 (June 16, 1969): 94. Gross calls Polite an original and stylistically gifted writer, identifying her with other contemporary authors such as Ishmael Reed and Ernest Gaines who inject vitality into the American literary scene with their willingness to address the complexities of black life and grapple with the problems of American society.

Hooks, Bell, and Cornel West. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1991. A series of dialogues and interviews between contemporary cultural critics Bell Hooks and Cornel West. The discussions focus on gender relations in the black community, analyzing ways in which race and gender relate to Marxism, African American spirituality, sexuality, and liberation struggles. The authors consider the role of the intellectual within the black community as well as the ways in which education forms ideology.

Howe, Irving. “New Black Writers.” Harper 239 (December, 1969): 130-131. Howe emphasizes the individuality of contemporary black writers. Rather than belonging to a single school or movement, each author works to present unique views of African American life. He admires the thematic importance of The Flagellants but condemns what he perceives as excessive hyperbole and self-pity in Ideal and Jimson.