An Examination of the Black Confidence Man in Two Black Novels: "The Man Who Cried I Am" and "dem"

Abstract

A LTHOUGH NOT EXCLUSIVELY an American phenomenon, the confidence man has certainly spawned with ease in our waters. He is almost as familiar in American literature as Cooper's mythic Westerner; he is perhaps more familiar in American life, for as Richard Wright says in The Outsider, modern life is a kind of confidence game.' The con man plied his trade in the old West, yet he also fared well as a Yankee peddler in the East. He sold patent medicine and cure,alls from a covered wagon at the roadside, peddled gadgets in his Yankee get-ups, and did his sleight-of-hand tricks on a Mississippi gambling boat. He was the secular Tetzel of the nineteenth century (goods hawker and moral trapsetter for the guilty-hearted) and he is probably cousin-german to the traveling salesman, so much a part of the American scene and the American joke in our not too distant past. Today he sells guaranteed used cars, permanent youth and healthful filter tips. He is the political panderer of offshore oil, the drug pusher, the hustler, the numbers runner. His mask iand product may change from time to time, but his salient characteristics are permanent: he is smooth-tongued, quickwitted and fleet of foot, 'a master of guile. The Lightning-Rod Man, was Melville's early experiment with this fictive breed; a purveyor of panaceas, he sold his meretricious product in times of fear and anxiety, for the confidence man flourishes in an atmosphere of distrust and disillusion. Melville's most clomplete examination of the type, however, waited until The Confidence Man (1857), in which he placed his protean character aboard the Fidele plying its way down the !Mississippi on April Fools' Day. The book is a satirical masquerade acted out on the Fidele, itself a fantastic Mardi Gras afloat appropriately bound for New Orleans with