[p. 122]

John S. Bak

Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations
in Tennessee Williams's 'Desire'

"'Welcome, my children,' said the dark figure, 'to the communion of your race!'"

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown"

"What they think we going to do — eat 'em?"

— Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

"My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served."

— Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

In widening Freud's psychoanalytical theory in "The Uncanny" (1919) that monsters are projections of our own repressed fears and desires to a national context, Leslie Fiedler had influentially argued almost half a century ago that America itself is gothicism writ large because at the heart of its ideological myth of selfhood is the desire to know that self through its antipathetic relationship to the Other, to confirm one's (national) righteousness, as it were, by affirming evil in another.(1) Privileging the Puritan model of heteronormative white Christendom to frame that national self, America irrevocably marginalized its sexual deviants, unshackled slaves, and godless savages, those gothic specters whose necessary presence in American literary production haunts the dominant culture and serves to justify its hegemonic control. Since that pursuit of forbidden knowledge of the Other belies the Christian innocence it proclaims to be preserving, any prelapsarian ideal contained within American selfhood must be viewed with suspicion. That suspicion has, in fact, been the locus of American letters since the Republican era, which is why scholars today view American Gothic less as a genre and more as [p. 123] "a discursive field in which a metonymic national 'self' is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness [. . .]."(2)

Tennessee Williams, like many gothic authors in America, understood perfectly the hypocrisy inbred in this Puritan model and openly attacks it in two of his most gothic works, "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer. Queer Christian allegories whose protagonists cling desperately to an unflagging faith in the Puritan ideal and the Otherness that it inscribes, both texts irascibly reproduce the religious imperative only to expose it by their unconventional ends. Perhaps indicative of Williams's view of his own place within Cold War culture as its public spokesman and invisible anathema, his Anthony Burns and Sebastian Venable project a respectable front while struggling internally with the inconsistencies between their spiritual leanings and the homosexuality it repudiates in them. Consequently, both consider themselves at first to be without grace and only obtain that grace through an act of self-sacrifice — a violent apotheosis which makes them unlikely Christ figures. Avatars of the Eucharist who nourish society at the moment their bodies are literally consumed, Burns and Sebastian become for Williams a quiet plea for Christian tolerance towards its gay Other and a subversive swipe at heteronormative America for turning Communion into a performative act that determines which desire is saintly and which is sinful and who can partake of the Lord's Supper and who cannot.

That both Burns and Sebastian are depicted in the end as being finally duped by their own catechism is proof that they too are not truly the Other we are meant to pity or admire but rather victims of a larger, inescapable system which harbors the very seeds of Otherness its necessarily externalizes. Williams declares that source to be human desire, specifically the desire to know sin, especially sin in others, which he portrays as more unforgivable than the act of othering itself because heteronormative white Christian society is at its epistemological core. Taken on its own terms, desire is transhistorically inclusive but becomes, when policed, as it is in Puritan America, an effective tool — perhaps the most effective tool — in signifying the private Other and in protecting the national self. Yet desire, as Williams readily maintains, brings us more into communion with one another than our different skin colors, sexual proclivities, or religious leanings divide us, and therefore, any preservation of delusory Self/Other binaries [p. 124] proves to be not only inherently hypocritical but also politically futile since one's skin color and religious affiliation might align him with the cultural Self, while his sexuality would deem him its Other. Always suspicious of what is deemed the "norm" — can someone, such as that person just described, be two-thirds the norm, for example? — and eager to dismiss its dichotomizing tendencies, Williams is once again championing his famed fugitive kind here by exposing the shortcomings of social othering.

And yet, in invoking the distorted image of the Last Supper in both works to unfetter human desire from its proscriptive Christian dogma and, moreover, in equating that desire with blackness, Williams proves unable to escape his own racial othering and thus inadvertently reinscribes in "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer that white national bugbear which Toni Morrison describes as "the potent and ego-reinforcing presence of an Africanist population."(3) Though allegories about religious othering, then, both works Other themselves, where certain acts of sexuality and the piety that declares them illicit are inadvertently rendered benign in comparison to the carnivorous "black mass" Williams has eating its way through white society.

Exploring tropes of blackness in Williams's work to uncover his troubling relationship with African Americans is not new, of course, though such a reading per "Desire and Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer — two key texts that reply upon blackness to define white America's shortcomings — has curiously escaped critical attention.(4) Nor is studying Williams's literary obsession with desire, particularly homosexual desire within its Cold War context, [p. 125] particularly cutting edge today.(5) What is original, however, is the combined reading of these inquiries in relation to Williams's intertwining sexual, racial and religious tropes in his Cold War literary productions in an effort to defuse their othered natures but which unfailingly refract Williams's own potential fears and prejudices.(6) To be sure, from 1946, when Tennessee Williams was writing "Desire and the Black Masseur," to 1958, when his Suddenly Last Summer premiered on Broadway at the York, the African American was still very much a national scare-figure among the ruling white caste and would become increasingly more threatening at the decade's close. As such, the black mass, grammatically embedded in Williams's short story title and visually reproduced in its worshipers who celebrate the Passion or in the play's poor savage children who devour Sebastian on a white hot street in Spain, only casually denotes an interest in religious perversion; it also displays the author's racial fears, conscious or otherwise.

I

Since "the Negro problem in the United States" addresses national "obsessive concerns" particularly in "the ambiguity of our relationship with Indian and Negro," Fiedler contended, the "proper subject" of American Gothic is "slavery."(7) Toni Morrison would bring Fiedler's argument to its natural conclusion, positing in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that not just American Gothic but American literature on the whole was "made possible, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism."(8) All recognizable traits of the national character are in fact just "responses to a [p. 126] dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence,"(9) with white literary America translating blackness into its various fears of the self, and desire residing at the heart of those fears — the illicit desire to possess blackness but also to submit to it. Coming under the scrutiny of the recent "whiteness studies," texts of white authors like Tennessee Williams, then, are said to speak through or around blackness in order to express or to hide those fears, opening his texts up to endless racial permutations:

Encoded or explicit, indirect or overt, the linguistic responses to an Africanist presence complicates texts, sometimes contradicting them entirely. A writer's response to American Africanism often provides a subtext that either sabotages the surface text's expresses intentions or escapes them through a language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate but still attempts to register. Linguistic responses to Africanism serve the text by further problematizing its matter with resonances and luminations.(10)

But how can a white writer be charged with harboring a fear of black potency (sexual and political) if indeed his texts not only solicit but even trumpet its presence, as Williams's "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer so obviously do? Such a question has, in fact, worked to deflect readings of racial tensions in the two texts toward those of a purely sexual or at least metaphysical nature, prompting most readers to isolate Williams's intended Other as the sexual deviant or the society who judges him.

In "Desire and the Black Masseur," for example," Williams exposes black-on-white racism through the racially-motivated sadomasochistic violence meted out in the story — not to fan the flames of social unease among his predominantly white reader at the time per se, but rather to allegorize how black and white relations, like any that exists between Other and Self (black/white, gay/straight, communist/capitalist, etc.), reflect a certain desire for metaphysical wholeness, for completion, which is only impeded by the social need for othering. As Williams writes, "For sins of the world are really only its partialities, its incompletions, and these are what [p. 127] sufferings must atone for."(11) Therefore, the story introduces the black masseur's racist desire to punish the white patron Anthony Burns in order to demonstrate his transformation by the end:

he hated white-skinned bodies because they abused his pride. He loved to have their white skin prone beneath him [. . .]. But now at long last the suitable person had entered his orbit of passion. In the white-collar clerk he had located all that he longed for. (CS 220)

Such language indeed runs counter to Williams's public support of Civil Rights and interracial relations (sexual and otherwise) throughout the late Sixties and Seventies and allows us to differentiate author from narrator and recognize thematic exposition.(12) The explicit black-on-white racism thus emphasizes mutual misunderstanding between black and white cultures that frequently privilege social over spiritual constructions and, consequently, misdirects our reading away from the story's racial implications and towards those more consistent with the homosexual author's relationship with the era.(13)

To be sure, since Williams overloads the story with tropes of physical and metaphysical fragmentation that, in conjunction with those of black-on-white violence, work to privilege this Self-as-Other reading, he forces us to identify with that which we are culturally inclined to repress, namely human desire. Anthony Burns, a product of mundane, white bourgeois culture, is at first ignorant of what "his real desires were" (CS 217), sexual or otherwise, probably because he could not instinctively find "his real desires" replicated anywhere in his middle-class [p. 128] environment. Being one of fifteen children in his family, graduating from the largest class in his high school, or securing a job "in the largest wholesale company of the city" (CS 216), Burns only knows the invisibility these institutions have afforded him, to say nothing of his affiliation with an even larger one: white, Christian, and presumably to others (and to himself, at the start), heterosexual. Conformity, though, stifles desire not only because it breeds sameness but also because it prohibits contact with the Other it necessarily marginalizes. Burns enjoys his conformity at first because contemplating desire would imply transgression; and transgression, a confrontation with the Other; and a confrontation with other, his resultant visibility. Once Burns enters the secret world of the Turkish baths, however, tellingly situated "in the basement of a hotel, right at the center of the keyed-up mercantile nerves of the section" (CS 218), he stumbles into that revealing world of his Other — black, pagan, and homoerotic.

Eve Sedgwick had first explored the homosexual as Gothic Other in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, then more fully in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, wherein she notes that the Gothic novel was "an important locus for the working-out of some of the terms by which nineteenth- and twentieth-century European culture has used homophobia to divide and manipulate the male-homosocial spectrum."(14) One of the key tropes of homosexuality that she describes is the "unspeakable," that shibboleth pregnant with signification though lacking in appropriate or acceptable signification.(15) When the black masseur intuits from the start there was an "unusual something" (CS 219) about Burns and does not leave the cubicle when Burns undresses, it would appear that story reproduces Sedgwick's trope in suggesting that Burns's homosexuality, and not the masseur's blackness, is the Other Williams tries to unveil and eventually demystify. And yet, the story does not stop at simple intimation, for when the Negro begins beating Burns, we discover what that "unusual something" is: "as the violence and the pain increased, the little man grew more and more fiercely hot with his first true satisfaction, until all at once a knot came loose in his loins and released a warm flow" (CS 220).

[p. 129] As that homosexual Other of Cold War America, Williams would frequently draw on this trope of unspeakability in his drama — be it in Brick's silence about his relationship with Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the old southern spinsters' banal conversations in Something Unspoken, or even Violet Venable's machinations to silence Catherine from revealing her son Sebastian's homosexuality. Yet he rarely shied away from addressing homosexuality openly in his short fiction. With the pregnant silence and single-sentence dialogue between Burns and the black masseur containing a gothic element beyond the tabooed desires of the story's homoeroticism and sadomasochism, something still must be haunting this story. Who, then, is the real Other that Williams others? That question brings us back to Toni Morrison and to the 19th-century writers like Hawthorne and Melville she discusses, whose "theatrical presence of black surrogacy" unavoidably carries the authors' last word on race relations in America.(16)

II

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is an excellent example of "black surrogacy," one which indirectly informs us about Williams's own complex Other in his story. In his acerbic allegory about the dangers of religious devotion and self-appointed grace, for example, Hawthorne could not avoid exposing another specter of which he was perhaps only liminally aware — the escaped slave.(17) Not having yet made known his abolitionist sympathies by the time of the story's writing — those only being loosely depicted in his biography of president-to-be Franklin Pierce — Hawthorne was simply unaware that in othering Goodman Brown and his religious piety, he was also othering another.(18) For if hypocrisy runs deep in the American idolization of the Indian at the moment we were rapidly killing him off, it never did so with its treatment of the black man, with 19th-century idolization of the blacks rarely countering the demeaning images of Jim Crow or Sambo. Thus, while assuring himself and his 19th-century readers of their goodness in light of their ancestor's mistreatment of foreign races [p. 130] and divergent creeds, Hawthorne is equally raising elitist concerns when he makes Brown feel most pure at the story's climactic black mass, an obvious attempt to invert Christian dogma for ironic effect but one which draws visually on the fugitive slave to dramatize that inversion.(19)

Just as Williams would do in "Desire and the Black Masseur" and even later in Suddenly Last Summer, Hawthorne attempts in the final scene at the black mass to bring all men into communion, joined not by race or creed but rather by sin and desire, for among the "pious people" were those of "dissolute lives" and "spotted fame": "Scattered, also, among their pale-faced enemies, were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native forests with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft."(20) While Brown confronts all of humanity at the black mass, he and Hawthorne inevitably associate that sin with blackness, moral for certain but unavoidably racial as well, as Toni Morrison maintains. Once he stumbles upon the black mass, for instance, Brown calls the parishioners a "'grave and dark-clad company'" (STS 117). Though this is reported speech from one who has repeatedly demonstrated his racist and chauvinist attitudes in the story, which Hawthorne uses for controlled ironic effect, it is soon confirmed by the third-person narrator (who has not yet emerged differently from the author himself): "In truth they were such" (STS 117). While simply describing how their appearances are blackened by the cover of night, Hawthorne cannot, as Toni Morrison repeatedly describes, avoid rendering the racial Other through the repetitive use of tropes equating sin, evil, and desire with the black face.

Referring frequently to the "sable form" (STS 119) of the black mass's high priest or the surrounding woods of New England as the "benighted wilderness" (STS 117), Hawthorne mixes fictional setting with historical reality, for the escaped slave, not yet a reality in Brown's Puritan day despite an Africanist presence already on American soil, was literally on the run from the bounty hunters eager to profit from the Fugitive Slave Law that President Pierce did little to repeal despite the abolitionist leanings that helped lift him into Office.(21) To be sure, memories [p. 131] of Nat Turner and the slave insurrections that had killed 55 whites in August 1831 in rural Virginia were still very much alive in 1835 when Hawthorne penned his story, and, despite the efforts of Garrison's Anti-Slavery Society, fears that such an insurrection would not discriminate southerner from Brahmin were all too real in Hawthorne's New England.

Thus, in the story's defining sentence — "'Welcome, my children,' said the dark figure, 'to the communion of your race!'" (STS 119, emphasis added) — we find communion of sin and human desire being equated with the devouring black race, to say nothing of Hawthorne's use of the word "communion" in the story both as a body politic and as the Eucharist. In exposing one ghost of the American Other, Hawthorne had awakened another, and in that visual representation of the black mass, the slave — now freed of his shackles — is gathering strength in the forest around Salem's villages, an emancipation not entirely without its national fears: "this black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly northward" (STS 115). The gothic is thus recycled for another generation of readers, with the knowledge that young Brownman Good is sharing his bed with his "pale wife" Faith (STS 120). No doubt this awakening of the specters of miscegenation and of black sexual potency, both historical components of WASP othering still very much active in white America today, has helped contribute to this dated critique of Calvinist grace's longevity, with discerning black readers like Morrison recognizing themselves encoded here as that sable race.

Like Hawthorne, Williams too chastises Puritanism in the end of his story for being at the root of American bigotry (religious or otherwise), suggesting that his real argument is not with blacks or homosexuals but rather with the religious zealots who position themselves as the standard-bearers of desirable human behavior. It was perhaps for this reason that gave his white protagonist the name Anthony Burns, historically the last black slave to be returned (despite public outcry) to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law in 1854, only later to be granted his freedom when he was purchased by the black congregation of Boston for $1300.(22) [p. 132] By usurping the historical identity of a black man and making him into a white, middle-class Christian homosexual like himself, Williams simultaneously deconstructs the racial Other and reinserts himself in the role of the fugitive/victim — here, the gay man wandering less visibly among heteronormative America.

Yet Williams too cannot avoid succumbing to desire's need to protect the self, for buried within his allegory — where Anthony Burns becomes Christ and the black masseur sinful humankind for whom he must die — is the message that their covenant is only sealed when the one's body is figuratively, and literally in the story, consumed.(23) It is not by chance, then, that the story (and Burns) climaxes during the Passion, nor that once Burns discovers his desire and recognizes the sin that accompanies it, he pursues a method of atonement not unfamiliar to the Christian world, as Hawthorne had demonstrated with his Reverend Dimmesdale. For through the open window of their room, they hear the "mounting exhortations of a preacher" delivering his Easter sermon to an all-black congregation with the message "Suffer, suffer, suffer!" (CS 222), to which the "black" Mass (again, with all the racial and religious connotations being evoked) respond appropriately: "[. . .] a woman stood up to expose a wound in her breast" while another "had slashed an artery at her wrist" (CS 222). As counterpoint to the penitent hysteria taking place in the church next door, the sadomasochistic suffering the black masseur visits upon Burns reproduces desire in both, and hence its sin ad infinitum; the only solution for Burns is a beating so fierce that it kills him ecstatically — sin, desire and its atonement culminating in one final and grotesque homoerotic administering of last rites. As in Hawthorne, then, predatory religion and devouring blackness combine in Williams to reveal both what he intended to attack and what he culturally could not avoid as the story's white author.

To be sure, in parodying Christian doctrine through sadomasochistic homoeroticism, Williams attempts to exposes the hypocrisy its mantra "procreate" but whose canonical laws police the sexual act involved. Whereas Western sexuality before Christianity was essentially an appetite to satiate like any other, it had become by Augustine a desire, a sexual instinct [p. 133] othered, and so to desire was to recognize, and perhaps to indulge in, that forbidden Other, all the while equating it with sin. Reenacting Christ's punishment as their atonement demonstrates how religion is at the heart of gothic evil, something Hawthorne had suggested through his character Goodman Brown. Desire, that true human religion, is more salubrious in the end because it reflects a natural instinct in us, one that socially-constructed religious dogma works to pervert in the end. The true Other here, then, is not the homosexual, nor the black, but the Christian, whose hegemonic role in American society has replaced innocence as our birthright with guilt. Or so Williams would have us believe.

If "The Desire and the Black Masseur" portrays itself as an allegory about the process of othering through the Christian recognition of sin in another, just as Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" positions the community of sinners as harmless with respect to Brown's self-election, it must also unavoidably produce an Other. In other words, there must equally be in Williams's story a specter lurking behind the writer's words who masks a deeper prejudice of the Other, one more nationally inscribed within Williams's own relationship to the dominant caste from which Williams cannot escape. Though kin to the black race in his own role as homosexual Other during the early years of the Cold War, Williams was still relatively invisible, and if maintaining one's invisibility often included revealing it in another or calling it to the nation's attention (which not a few demagogues in white America disingenuously did in the Fifties), then perhaps Williams's tropes of blackness are not as innocent or altruistic as they at first appeared to be. Perhaps, in calling attention to the stark visibility of the black mass, Williams is also deflecting rising attention away from the more invisible homosexual, who too were objects of Cold War persecution.

III

Early in her book, Toni Morrison describes her sudden awareness that, as each text is an inevitable extension of its author's consciousness, any racial Other encountered or suppressed in it is the liminal projection of the author's view of self:

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary mediation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in [p. 134] the writerly conscious. It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity [. . .]. What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.(24)

If Anthony Burns is a very loose autobiographical sketch of Williams himself during his early discovery and internalized rejection of his own homosexuality (as most readers would agree), and if Toni Morrison is correct in how she characterizes white literary America's obsession with blackness to define itself (which most readers would also be inclined to accept), then how are we to see Williams's reflection in the character of the black masseur? Or is he? Is it that the writer pursues the dual nature embodied in the story's two antipathetic characters? Or is that Burns's whiteness (and Williams's too, by Morrison's contention) becomes more visible by comparison and thus his homosexuality more invisible, the open secret only those who knew Williams, arguably the majority of Williams's contemporary readers of his short fiction, were meant to understand?

To be sure, Williams clearly emphasizes the political language of color in the story's chiaroscuro. Whether they be the "milky glass" (CS 218) which obscures the view to the bath's interior, or the white patrons walking about the "white tiles" (CS 218) of the baths dressed in sheets of "white fabric" (CS 218) and looking "as white and noiseless as ghosts" (CS 218), tropes of whiteness are used to offset the presence of blackness, since all the "masseurs were Negroes" (CS 218). Burns, himself a "white-collar clerk" (CS 220), only adds to this sepia photo's negativity, as do the steams of "white vapor" and the bath's "white tables" (CS 219), with the black masseurs appearing "very dark and positive against the loose white hangings of the baths" (CS 218).(25) As Morrison suggests about all "images of impenetrable whiteness" in American literature, they "need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency":

[p. 135] Because they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control, these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and mediation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness — a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing."(26)

Though the black masseur seems anything but "dead" or "impotent" or even "under complete control" given how he treats Burns, it should be remembered that he works for his white boss, who exercises ultimate control by firing the black masseur by the story's end. If the black masseur is powerful it is only because the feeble white Burns allows himself to be dominated by him.

Thus, if the homosexual Burns grants the black masseur authority over him so as to satisfy his desire/penance duality, the black masseur finds pleasure in projecting upon Burns all that he finds offensive about white America, so that every strike of his fist on Burns's white flesh is retribution for every lash white America laid on his ancestors and continues, economically and socially speaking, to lay upon him. Williams makes this politically implicit among the story's imagistic details, for when the black masseur tells Burns, "Put this one," and holds out to him "a white sheet" (CS 219), we are to understand that he is costuming Burns as a clansman (ironically, itself an instrument of heteronormative Christian invisibility) and exacting his revenge vicariously. With all power structures inverted here, where the black man can now mock the timidity of the white homosexual man with his identity-concealing white sheet, the reader is confronted with two pervasive gothic Others in the story. And yet, it is the specter of black/white relations in America that remains to haunt the reader, for if the "pervert" Burns dies in the story's end (as do most pre-Stonewall gay characters, and not only those found in Williams), the black masseur not only moves on to haunt the baths of another city, but takes with him his own desire to consume white society along the way, just as he had the body of Burns. His black-on-white racism, which was only meant to signify his transcendence with the white Burns at the end, is restored after their completion is achieved, and thus the specter allowed to escape.

The story's final image of the black masseur literally consuming the white man all the way down to "his splintered bones" (CS 222), in fact, is not without its racist precedent in [p. 136] Williams's oeuvre. In his youthful story "Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll" (written in 1931 when Williams was only twenty), for example, the predatory black man is described repeatedly as being "a black beast who had taken grotesque human form" (29), who is "prodigiously, repulsive ugly" (CS 28) like the "'nigger' in the revolving circle of wooden dummies at which baseballs are cast for Kewpie doll prizes at carnivals and amusement parks" (CS 28), and who is "savage, inarticulate" (CS 29).(27) And he is also given a voracious appetite, both for his work, which he "gorged" (CS 28), as well as for the naked young white girl swimming in an isolated river, whom he "devoured with his eyes" having felt "sick with desire of her" (CS 32). While slave insurrection is only hinted at with the gang of Negroes who "work" for an Irish boss laying road in Jackson, black predatoriness is implicit. Even when the hulking black figure decides against raping the young white girl whom he discovers alone by the river because he sees himself as "Ugliness seizing upon Beauty — Beauty that could never be seized" (CS 33) and calls himself a "big — black — devil" (CS 33), he thwarts any attempt at being allegorical. As such, Nicholas Moschovakis finds the story "for the most part irredeemably [. . .] racist in its premise and execution": "At best, its conclusion tesitifies to Williams's jejune efforts to affirm the humanity of African Americans — to himself as well as to others — however unseemly and embarrassing the results look now."(28)

Despite this story's similar metaphysical message to "Desire and the Black Masseur," its language also plays upon white fears of the marauding black mass, with Big Black finding reincarnation in the later story's black masseur. With the black masseur "mov[ing] to another city, obtain[ing] employment once more as an expert masseur" (CS 223), just as Big Black is freed to join another road gang in Savannah, any final metaphysics that Williams had intended to capture in either is irreparably undone through its reliance upon images of the consuming black mass:

And meantime, slowly, with barely a thought of so doing, the earth's whole population twisted and writhed beneath the manipulation of night's black fingers [p. 137] and the white ones of day with skeletons splintered and flesh reduced to pulp, as out of this unlikely problem, the answer, perfection, was slowly evolved through torture. (CS 223)

Nor is it coincidental that both works should express black emancipation through tropes of eating or of being eaten, for nearly every spatial reference throughout "Desire and the Black Masseur" is equated with the mouth — an image which figuratively reinforces the allegorical parody of the Last Supper, but which also raises more literal white fears of black mobilization.(29) For example, in an attempt to hide from his desire, for "Desire is something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being [. . .]" (CS 217), Burns "had betrayed an instinct for being included in things that swallowed him up" (CS 216). Even his jacket "should have been cut into ten smaller sizes" (CS 217), since it too absorbs him into its folds. And just as he once enjoyed losing himself in the darkness of the movie cinema, which swallows him "like a particle of food dissolving in a big hot mouth" (CS 216), he now frequents the steam baths, with their "blank walls heav[ing] and sigh[ing] as steam issued from them [. . . ,] enveloping him in a heat and moisture such as inside of a tremendous mouth" (CS 219). Even during the closing lines of the story, when the black Mass climaxes in its frenzy while the black masseur was "completing his purpose with Burns" (CS 222), the room itself where the cannibalism takes place is described as a hungry mouth whose window curtains flap like "little white tongues" (CS 222). Though Williams couches homoerotic allusions to fellatio within those of recognizable Christian consubstantiation, both are rendered insignificant in light of the more visibly shocking image: that of a black man literally eating a white man's body.