IV

If Williams's "Desire and the Black Masseur" is about anything it is about the process of othering, a process from which Williams himself cannot entirely escape in writing the story. What Williams demonstrates best here is that each Other is inextricably bound to each other, including the Self, be it the protagonist of the story or the creator of that protagonist. Therefore, we cannot accept a given Self/Other binary because the complexities of human desire deny a one-to-one correlation between sexuality, race, and creed. Williams would continue to explore [p. 138] this theme for the next decade and a half, including many of his signature works like A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Baby Doll, and Sweet Bird of Youth, culminating finally in the violent Christian allegory Suddenly Last Summer, where his use of homoerotic tropes and Christian consubstantiation would once again be countered by the presence of a hoarding black mass with cannibalistic intentions.

While much good scholarship has already appeared concerning the play's treatment of religion and sexual economics, surprisingly little commentary has discussed the racial implications of Sebastian's offering up his gay body as Holy Communion to the hungry children of Cabeza de Lobo.(30) And yet, as with the story "Desire and Black Masseur," we find obvious images of blinding whiteness in contrast to the blackness of the skin that, when combined with homoerotic, religious and cannibalistic tropes, reconfirm a consuming Africanist presence in the play different from the one Williams openly solicits. In fact, devouring could be understood as the play's main theme, be it the literal consumption of the organism reflected in the symbolic Venus flytrap or the carnivorous birds on the Encantadas; the materialist consumption of Sebastian's fortune by his opportunist aunt and cousin George; or his poetic legacy by his megalomaniacal mother/surrogate wife Violet Venable. Even the psychiatrist Dr. Cukrowicz, in pandering to Violet to secure her money for an endowment to continue his research into lobotomies, cannot avoid contributing to the play's quid pro quo leitmotif.(31) All are, in fact, vivid [p. 139] tropes of consumption that Williams uses antithetically to the taking of the Eucharist and that are actualized in the play's climactic, cannibalistic scene.

By itself, the trope of consumption is purely thematic and dramatic. Set during the heart of the Depression in 1935, when lobotomies (like the one performed on Williams's sister Rose) were beginning to be used when shock therapy proved ineffectual, Suddenly Last Summer is ostensibly all about money — the contrast not between those who have and do not but rather between those who had and those, like the Venables, who still do. At a time of Social Realism, when Williams the playwright began cutting his own teeth, the true cannibal was perhaps capitalism itself; thus, the starving of the Venus flytrap, which dramatically opens the play, is one of Williams's most poignant criticisms of the laissez-faire politics responsible for the 1929 crash and its aftermath. But Violet also refuses to keep the insectivorous plant alive because it reminds her too much of the way in which her beloved Sebastian died, consumed by everyone, including herself, for his beauty, grace, and illicit desire. Alone, then, the multiple references to consuming merely replicate the play's main theme of predatorily social politics. Once that theme becomes mixed with the play's religious and homoerotic tropes, however, the idea of consuming takes on greater racial significance.(32)

Unlike the homoerotic beginning to "Desire and the Black Masseur," Williams first establishes the play's religious context with Violet's story about her and Sebastian's voyage to the Galapagos Islands, "looking," as she says, "for God."(33) That cruel or indifferent God that Sebastian finds is represented in the horrific story of the "flesh-eating birds" (3:355) which ravage the baby sea turtles during their flight to freedom on the volcanic black-sand beaches of the Encatadas.(34) The parable, of course, is repeated in Catherine's story about how the poor [p. 140] children from whom Sebastian has solicited sexual favors kill and eat him out of ritualized retribution for his failing to uphold his end of their economic exchange. When the starving children do devour parts of Sebastian's body, having cried out "Pan, pan, pan!" (3:415) moments before the attack, Sebastian becomes the Holy Eucharist — the bread of life and the Bread of Life — whom these "featherless little black sparrows" (3:422) literally ingest, just as the others before had done so metaphorically.

These multiple tropes of consumption which emerge from the play's religious and homoerotic content, however, evoke a blatant dichotomizing of race into its black and white components of which Williams is perhaps only liminally aware. Just as he had done in "Desire and the Black Masseur," Williams first establishes a black/white binary so as to deconstruct it. To be sure, the "good" Sebastian is frequently describes as being dressed all in white, donned in his "spotless white silk Shantung suit and a white silk tie and a white panama and white shoes, white — white lizard skin — pumps! (3:414). But the nasty Sister Felicity who "chaperones" Catherine is also dressed in her starched "sweeping white habit" (3:370), to which Williams draws our attention more than once.(35) And yet, if the white presence in Williams is never wholly "good," the black presence is never anything but antagonistic.

For instance, in relating the story to Dr. Cukrowicz, Violet describes how the carnivorous birds, soaring over "the narrow black beach of the Encantadas," which earlier she had said was the "color of caviar" (3:355), had "made the sky almost as black as the beach!" (3:356). As innocent as Violet's description first appears, once those hoards of black birds are translated into the hoards of those dark naked children with "little black mouths" (3:415) many summers later, [p. 141] and the sea turtles' flesh into that of Sebastian, Williams's Holy Eucharist becomes less a tale about misappropriated consubstantiation or misrepresented homoeroticism and more one about the voracious appetites. To be sure, Sebastian too equates desire with eating, evidenced by his rendering his rough trade in culinary terms:

Fed up with dark ones, famished for light ones: that's how he talked about people, as if they were — items on a menu. — "This one's delicious-looking, that one is appetizing," or "that one is not appetizing" [. . .]. (3:375)

His language, though, is purely metaphorical here (to be more accurate, they are not even his words but those that Catherine says that he said), just as words and actions are of all of the other characters Williams portrays as "white" in the play. Only the "black" elements — first the carnivorous birds and then the children — turn idiom into action.

That action takes place during the scorching, "blazing white hot heat" of a Spanish summer, one that "blazed so bright it was white and turned the sky and everything under the sky white with it!" (3:420). In fact, Williams repeatedly references whiteness in this climatic passage of the play so as to accentuate the red of Sebastian's blood, but blackness is the instrument that draws out that redness. For instance, though he sees himself in Christ-like terms and was searching each summer for a way to satiate his homosexual desire and atone for it at the same time (like Anthony Burns), Sebastian's final sacrifice (a sort of "Completion! — a sort of! — image! — he had of himself as a sort of! — sacrifice to a! — terrible sort of a — [. . .] cruel [God]" [3:397]) — is achieved by offering his white flesh up for communion to "the band of naked children" (3:421) who made "gobbling noises with their little black mouths, stuffing their little black fists to their mouths and making those gobbling sounds, with frightful grins!" (3:415):

I heard Sebastian scream, he screamed just once before this flock of black plucked little birds that pursued and overtook him halfway up the white hill. [. . .] They had devoured parts of him. [. . .] Torn or cut parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with, they had torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs. (3:422)

In one final apocalyptic image, with homosexual quid pro quo being expressed in terms of actualized fellatio and religious performativity, Williams equally dichotomizes saintly white [p. 142] and satanic black, where the white body/politic is being torn asunder and eaten by the savage and encroaching masses of little hungry black mouths.

Though Williams's cannibalism here is meant to be symbolic — the culmination of all of his previous uses of the consummation metaphor — it cannot entirely avoid a racial reading either. As such, Sebastian's uncharacteristic social critique of Spain just moments before his death only loosely camouflages his racist ideologies: "Don't look at those little monsters. Beggars are a social disease in this country. If you look at them, you get sick of the country, it spoils the whole country for you . . . ." (3:415, Williams's ellipses). If we recall Toni Morrison's comment earlier about the need to "contextualize" the images of "impenetrable whiteness" found in 19th-century American writers, however, what we discover in Sebastian's comment is perhaps a larger 20th-century concern with black mobilization in America. We should remember that, while Suddenly Last Summer is set in 1935, it was penned in 1957, a seminal year in the U.S. for the push for Civil Rights. Fallout from the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, saw the 1957 signing of the Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under King's presidency. It equally witnessed Arkansas Governor Orval Rubus's attempt to derail desegregation by ordering the National Guard to block the entrance of nine black students to the all-white Central High School in Little Rock. Over the next few years, repeated dynamiting of Southern black churches and black schools offered frightening testimony to the realities America would face in enforcing Brown's overturning of Plessy in 1954.(36)

The year of Suddenly Last Summer's release as a popular film in 1959 also saw Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun become the first Broadway play by a black woman. Ostensibly about the assimilationist/separatist debate within the black community, not in terms of Civil Rights per se (though Beneatha does provide plenty of examples of black activist rhetoric), but rather in terms of class ascension, Hansberry's play would also allay white fears of black mobilization. If Lena Younger's purchasing of a modest house in the all-white, middle-class [p. 143] suburb of Clybourne Park is met by Karl Lindner's sugar-coated, racially-motivated attempts to keep the black man from spilling over its urban boarders and into his suburban arcadia (or, as Beneatha puts it, to keep the spreading black mass from "eat[ing] 'em"(37)), it is less to criticize white America and more to show them that black America understands its fears. At the moment the Younger's show Clybourne Park and its Improvement Association that is shares their moral values such as hard work and family unity, and thus poses no real threat to their suburban havens, Hansberry seals her own racial contract with her predominantly white Broadway audiences. To be sure, black emancipation was imminent, and neither a northern black liberal playwright, nor a southern white one, could entirely escape from its inscription in her/his imagery. Simply put, if Suddenly Last Summer's surtext is about predatory economics and religious determinism, then its subtext is about how those two issues are realized in racial terms — for Morrison, that "dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing."(38)

Conclusion

At the end of Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison calls for an academic agenda to reread the black characters of white literary America, not to point racist fingers at knowingly or unwittingly xenophobic writers but rather to expose how those black characters reveal the author's construction of Self and the fears of the Other which help define it:

Such studies will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and to order external and internal chaos. Such studies will reveal the process by which it is made possible to explore and penetrate one's own body in the guise of sexuality, vulnerability, and anarchy of the other — and to control projections of anarchy with the disciplinary apparatus of punishment and largess.(39)

What such a reading about Tennessee Williams reveals is that, despite having always praised African Americans and having frequently said in interviews and elsewhere that he believed [p. 144] America would only achieve its national project through the mixing of its black and white bloods, he never aggrandized racial issues convincingly in his work nor created sympathetic black character.(40) Though racial issues simmer behind the plots of his Cold War plays (Sweet Bird of Youth, Kingdom of Earth, and Suddenly Last Summer), they serve only to haunt his altruistic critique of white (heterosexual) social power structures since the final image of white society slowly being consumed by blacks through miscegenation effectively redirected national attention away from the homosexual as Other and onto its more visible one.

As Eric Savoy has convincingly argued, the most effective representations of American Gothic need be allegorical in nature, for its interpretative nature allows the reader to inscribe a national history within a text which is not there, especially given "the thinness, the blackness of the American historical past and much of the American landscape" necessary to gothic representation: "allegory [. . .] provided a tropic of shadow [. . .] in which the actual is imbued with the darkly hypothetical, a discursive field of return and reiteration."(41) With Williams's two allegories intending to demonstrate that the "communion" of race is one based not on creed, color, or sexuality, but rather on human desire, he too cannot but help reproduce the national fear of the predatory black race in presenting that message of brotherhood, since the "American historical past" and its landscape have relied upon the myth of black savagery to define its national self. So when the giant masseur devours a bar of chocolate while daydreaming about Burns, social cannibalism becomes implicit, just as Ned's consuming his gingerbread Jim Crow [p. 145] in Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables suggests how Brahmin abolitionism was not without its predatory desires: whether it is white society devouring the blacks via the spectacle of Jim Crow in the minstrel show, or black society consuming the white race through sociopolitical advancement or interracial marriage and breeding, in one way or another we are all just eating one another up.

1. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1957), 241; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, London: Paladin, 1970), 135.
2. Eric Savoy, Introduction, American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998), vii.
3. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), 45.
4. Studies which have begun deciphering the Africanist presence in Williams have concentrated on other works. See, for instance, Philip C. Kolin, "Civil Rights and the Black Presence in Baby Doll," Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996): 2-11; George W. Crandell, "Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire," Modern Drama 40 (Fall 1997): 337-4; and Rachel van Duyvenbode, "Darkness Made Visible: Miscegenation, Masquerade and the Signified Racial Other in Tennessee Williams' Baby Doll and A Streetcar Named Desire," Journal of American Studies 35 (2001): 203-215. Those studies which have examined these two texts together have focused generally on their homosexual content. See, for example, Annette J. Saddik, "The (Un)Represented Fragmentation of the Body in Tennessee Williams's "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer," Modern Drama 41.3 (Fall 1998): 347-54, but especially John M.Clum, "The Sacrificial Stud and the Fugitive Female in Suddenly Last Summer, Orpheus Descending, and Sweet Bird of Youth," The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams, ed. Matthew C. Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 128-46, where he explores how "Christian notions of guilt and atonement" make Anthony Burns and Sebastian Venable "blasphemous Eucharist[s]" (131, 133).
5. Numerous critics, including myself, have thoroughly tackled this subject. Among them, see especially David Savran, Cowboys, Communists, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Works of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992); Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham: Duke UP, 1997); and Steven Bruhm, "Blackmailed by Sex: Tennessee Williams and the Economics of Desire," Modern Drama 34.4 (Dec. 1991): 528-37, where he locates Williams as a "threat to national security" for McCarthy because, being a homosexual, "he harbors a secret which is linked to economic imbalance, and which makes his behavior transgressive" (529).
6. Thomas P. Adler did recently write in his entry on "Religion" for The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (Westport, CN, and London: Greenwood P, 2004) that "Occasionally, the Christian liturgy is inverted in a kind of black mass culminating in cannibalism that signifies a predatory world, as in 'Desire and the Black Masseur' and Suddenly Last Supper" (213). Yet he does not elaborate on his astute comment any.
7. Leslie Fiedler, 378, 493, xxii.
8. Toni Morrison, 44.
9. Toni Morrison, 5.
10. Toni Morrison, 66. For further reading on "whiteness studies," see the complete volumes of "The White Issue," The Minnesota Review 47 (1996) and "The White Issue," Transition: An International Review 73 (Spring 1998), both
11. Tennessee Williams, "Desire and the Black Masseur," Collected Stories (New York: Ballantine, 1986), 217. All subsequent references to this, or any, story within the collection will appear parenthetically and denoted CS.
12. In a 1974 interview with Cecil Brown, Williams said,

    "Well, the Blacks and the Irish are my two favorite people," and it infuriated him [an Irish journalist in Chicago] because I put Black first. He gave me a bad write-up. (hahaha) So, I've discovered now that one must think no race. I am crazy about the Blacks. And I must say I know people who ask, "Why don't you write about the Blacks?" I said because I would be presumptuous; you know, I don't know the Blacks that way.
    
    I am terribly involved in the Black movement because I think it is the most horrible thing (racism). I think that the White people in America, southern and northern equally — even more northern — have exercised the most dreadful injustices, historically, and even now, discrimination, and not just in terms of jobs. No, that's not where it's at. No, and I wouldn't blame any Black man for looking at me and saying, "There's a red-neck honky," and that he hates me. (Devlin 267)

    See Cecil Brown, "Interview with Tennessee Williams," Partisan Review, 45 (1978): 276-305, rpt. in Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson and London: UP of Mississippi, 1986).

13. Bruhm, for instance, sees the cannibalism as "a trope for the social anxiety surrounding homosexuality" (533), while Saddik argues that cannibalism, though used to eradicate homoerotic desire, represents the annihilation of the body and signifies the return to metaphysical wholeness.
14. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985), 90. See also her The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno, 1980), and René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972).
15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men 94.
16. Toni Morrison, 13.
17. For a study that explores how Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables rewrites "a masterplot of cultural authority and guilt" with the family's concealed history with slavery acting as a "synecdoche of the nation" (130), see Robert K. Martin's "Haunted by Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner," in Martin and Savoy, 129-42.
18. Sacvan Bercovitch claims in Rites of Assent (New York: Routledge, 1993) that Hawthorne was never much concerned with "Southern slavery [and] Indian genocide" (236).
19. Robert Martin informs us that slavery was "the mainstay of the Salem economy and the bartering of human bodies the origin of most New England wealth" (Martin and Savoy, 134).
20. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches, ed. Hyatt H. Waggoner (New York: Rhinehart, 1964), 118. All subsequent references to this story will appear parenthetically and denoted STS.
21. Pierce would later uphold the Fugitive Slave Law by returning the escaped-slave Anthony Burns to his owner Charles Suttle in Virginia. James R. Mellow notes in Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980) that the Fugitive Slave Law was the only thing that finally incited Hawthorne to oppose slavery, on which he repeatedly offered conflicting views (409-10). Pierce would later enforce the Fugitive Slave Law upheld by Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw (Herman Melville's father-in-law) two years earlier, by returning the slave Anthony Burns to his owner George F. Suttle in Virginia.
22. Anthony Burns, a slave turned preacher obsessed with freeing the soul from the body, boarded a ship in Richmond, Virginia, where he was working for a pharmacist on loan from Suttle, bound for Boston. Captured on 24 May 1854 by Suttle on trumped-up charges of theft, Burns was held in a federal courthouse, while Boston abolitionists, led by white minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, struggled to free him. See Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998).
23. For example, when the Negro breaks Burns's leg during one of their sessions, he lets out a cry so loud that it draws in the proprietor, who says appropriately, "Christ, [. . . ] what's been going on here?" (CS 221). Then, when they are both thrown out of the establishment at "the end of the Lenten season" (CS 221) as a result of their sadomasochistic behavior, the Negro carries the crippled Burns to his room "in the town's Negro section" (CS 221) where for "a week the passion between them continued" (CS 221, emphasis added).
24. Toni Morrison, 17.
25. Such visual poetics were exploited in the recent French film adaptation of the story, Noir et blanc, dir. Claire Devers, starring Marc Berman, Francis Frappart, Joséphine Fresson, and Jacques Martial. Films du Volcan, 1986.
26. Toni Morrison, 33.
27. For two studies of this story, see Philip C. Kolin's "Tennessee Williams' 'Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll' and Race Relations," Arts and Letters 20.2 (1995): 8-12, and his "'No Masterpiece Has Been Overlooked': The Early Reception and Significance of Tennessee Williams's 'Big Black: A Mississippi Idyll,'" ANQ 8.4 (Fall 1995): 27-34.
28. Nicholas Moschovakis, "Tennessee Williams's American Blues: From the Early Manuscripts through Menagerie," The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 7 (2005): 21.
29. John M. Clum rightfully points out how Burns's final thoughts before death — "Yes, it is perfect, he thought, it is now completed" (CS 223) — are "a parody of Christ's last words on the cross, 'Consumatum est'" (132).
30. In addition to Bruhm's and Clum's articles, for example, see Robley Evans's essay on the trope of eating in the South to undermine identity, "'Or else this were a savage spectacle': Eating and Troping Southern Culture," The Southern Quarterly 30.2-3 (Winter/Spring 1992): 141-49; Andrew Sofer's study of theatrical production and the (absent) human body, "Self-Consuming Artifacts: Power, Performance, and the Body in Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer," Modern Drama 38.3 (Fall 1995): 336-47; and Lincoln Konkle's examination of the Calvinist influences over Sebastian, "Puritan Paranoia: Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer as Calvinist Nightmare," American Drama 7.2 (Spring 1998): 51-72, which examines how Williams exploits Calvinism as Hawthorne had done in "Young Goodman Brown." For two studies that examine these issues as well but with respect to the Joseph L. Mankiewicz film version, see Kevin Ohi's essay on the erotica of baiting and on the film's use of madness, cannibalism, sodomy, and lobotomy for visual structure, "'Devouring Creation: Cannibalism, Sodomy, and the Scene of Analysis in Suddenly Last Summer," Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, eds. Matthew Tinkcom and Amy Villarejo (London: Routledge, 2001), 259-79, and D. A. Miller's assessment of the "hetero-structuration of the visual field" (109) in the film, "Visual Pleasure in 1959," Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, ed. Ellis Hanson (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 97-125.
31. Williams also told Cecil Brown in 1974 what the metaphor of cannibalism meant to him: "Man devours man in a metaphorical sense. He feeds upon his fellow creatures, without the excuse of animals. Animals actually do it for survival, out of hunger. Man, however, is doing it out of, I think, a religious capacity. I use that metaphor to express my repulsion with this characteristic of man, the way people use each other without conscience" (Devlin 274).
32. John M. Clum has already noted the homoerotic and Eucharistic overtones of the "imitation Christi" (132) here and in the short story, but he glosses over the racial implications in both texts and, if anything, sees black and white as coming together in "an allegory of race relations where perfection, communion, can only come through ritual violence, where cultures meet and atone" (132).
33. Tennessee Williams, The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (New York: New Directions, 1981-1992), 3:357. All subsequent references to this play or any other in the collection will appear parenthetically with a colon separating volume from page number.
34. As noted, Morrison has quite a bit to say about the racial encoding of Melville's work, which is subsequently imported into Williams's play through the intertextual references to his allegorical sketches, "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles":

For while no spectator can deny their claims to a most solemn and superstitious consideration, no more than my firmest resolutions can decline to behold the specter-tortoise when emerging from its shadowy recess; yet even the tortoise, dark and melancholy as it is upon the back, still possesses a bright side; its calipee or breastplate being sometimes of a faint yellowish or golden tinge. Moreover, everyone knows that tortoises as well as turtle are of such a make that if you but put them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides without the possibility of their recovering themselves, and turning into view the other. But after you have done this, and because you have done this, you should not swear that the tortoise has no dark side. Enjoy the bright, keep it turned up perpetually if you can, but be honest, and don't deny the black. Neither should he who cannot turn the tortoise from its natural position so as to hide the darker and expose his livelier aspect, like a great October pumpkin in the sun, for that cause declare the creature to be one total inky blot. The tortoise is both black and bright. But let us to particulars.

See Herman Melville, "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9 (Evanston: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1987).

35. Catherine notably passes from white to black as she moves from procurer to companion, wearing the transparent "one-piece suit made of white lisle" (3:412) to a "decent dark suit" (3:413) after Sebastian has made his homosexual connections.
36. In an interesting side note, as Brown v. Board of Education celebrates 50 years of age, not only has Central High School become 40 percent black to the 55 percent white student body, the 2000 U.S. census has reported that the Little Rock School District is becoming predominantly black; while white racists might see this increase as proof of black mobilization, the recent publication of the Harvard University's Civil Rights Program points to the fact that the numbers account for an increase in white private school education. Still, segregation is returning to Central High School but in an inverted form that repeats the discrepancies between black and white economic (dis)advantages.
37. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: New American Library, 1958), 101.
38. Toni Morrison, 33.
39. Toni Morrison, 52-53.
40. In a comment to documentarist Harry Rasky (and to C. Robert Jennings during their Playboy interview in April 1973), Williams said:

    I think whatever indigenous culture America has produced has come from the blacks. Our music, our humor mostly, our dancing. The great body of entertainment seems to me to have a black origin. I think that ultimately when the two races, the white and the black, when their blood is mingled, through the passage of time as has already been accomplished to some extent, I think it would produce the handsomest race on earth, and perhaps the strongest. (70)

    See Harry Rasky, Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986). Williams even added that he "always felt that [he] was black" (70), which could account for why he called himself an octoroon, if even in jest (cf. C. Robert Jennings, "Playboy Interview: Tennessee Williams," Playboy Apr. 1973: 80, and Williams's essay "'Happiness Is Relevant' to Mr. Williams," New York Times 24 Mar. 1968, sec. 2: 3).

    Williams deals with black/white miscegenation frequently in his drama and fiction: Cassandra in Battle of Angels is run out of town for having "intimate relations" with a black man; Boss Finley will not let the black blood "adulterate the pure white blood of the South" (4:73); Chicken in Kingdom of Earth has "some black blood in him" (5:201); and the title character of "Miss Coynte of Green" takes it upon her self to begin the "great new race in American" which will inevitably come from "the total mixing together of black and white blood [. . .]" (CS 528-29). Even Lance, the only black ice-skater on the circuit, in Williams's novel Moise and the World of Reason admits to being "a product of miscegenation" (99).

41. Eric Savoy, "The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic" in Martin and Savoy, 6