Anxieties of Black Manhood: Race and Homosexual Masculinity in Ernest Gaines’ “Three Men”

Abstract

Ernest Gaines has been generally touted by scholars who make a point of registering his unique achievements in distinction from the protest literature that has been prominent in African American men’s literary corpus. There is admittedly something inspiring and invigorating about Gaines’ black male characters who defy their reducibility to the extremes of either tragic victims or militant revolutionaries. Gaines veers away from one-dimensional portraitures of black men, also dislodging dominant society’s embodiments of black men as emasculated and feminized Uncle Toms, or as violence and crime prone predators. And yet, despite the fact that Gaines’ fiction is constructed around everyday people in the intricate and varied networks of family and community, they also trace the ongoing challenges for black men who inhabit a society in which, historically, the categories of race and gender have been mutually defining, and thus incompatible for black men. Gaines’ black male characters struggle to reconcile the contradiction of being “men” and “black.” This essay reads “Three Men,” the third story in Gaines’ short story collection Bloodline (1968), to explore the possibilities and the constraints of black manhood, as played out in black heterosexual relations and on black men’s self-perception and their relationships with other men. In so far as manhood grounds black racial identity and vice versa, I argue that the anti-gay sentiments unabashedly harbored and expressed by the black male characters Procter Lewis and Munford Banzille evolve not just from their limited understanding of manhood, and concomitantly their attempts to obtain black manhood, but from their restrictive understanding of valid black racial identity. The struggle to be a man in the story is thus coupled with and overlaps with the struggle for a legitimate black identity: to be a man and not “a nigger.”