In My Flesh Shall I See God: Ritual Violence and Racial Redemption in "The Black Christ"

Abstract

My mother, Job's dark sister, sits Now in a corner, prays, and knits. Often across herface thereflits Remembered pain, to mar her joy, At Whose death gave her back her boy. (The Black Christ) he frontispiece of Countee Cullen's 1929 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-andwhite 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 cloud that ascends into the torso, shoulders, and bowed head of a second man, this one adorned with a crown of thorns. 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. 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? frontispiece intimates a connection between racial transcendence and divine immanence that invites further questions about the redemptive qualities of an