From Eros to Agape: Reconsidering the Chain Gang's Song in McCullers's "Ballad of the Sad Cafe." (Carson McCullers)
1996; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0039-3789
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoCarson McCullers closes her Ballad of the Sad Cafe with the chain gang--Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this county. Just twelve mortal men who are (66)--singing out on the Forks Fall highway. Throughout her works, McCullers uses music as a substitute when the intensity of the moment is too powerful for words. In a conversation, McCullers stated clearly her awareness of the inequities that permeated her home region: There is a special guilt in [Southerners], a seeking for something had--and lost. It is a consciousness of guilt not fully knowable, or communicable. Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just--when all along we knew it wasn't. (McGill 217) At the end of the Ballad, McCullers's literal integration of the singing chain gang in a segregated South is her way of conveying the message that this novella has less to do with Eros--the passionate, individual love that exists between humans and controls the actions of Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy--than with Agape, the brotherly love of God. McCullers must have known from the world as it existed around her in Columbus, Georgia, in the first half of this century, that the chain gangs, those groups of men in black and white striped uniforms who worked the roadside swinging picks, digging ditches, laying pipes, picking up trash, were rare visual examples of integration in an otherwise segregated South. The irony that McCullers suggests through the men's song--that they must be chained to be together to find harmony--was not lost on her. Although the Southern prison system was segregated, the chain gang from its inception was integrated. According to Statistical Abstracts of the United States: 1951, Georgia did not submit information about received or discharged between the years 1938-45 (141), although a 1946 government document (Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories) indicates that 50.3% of new felony convicts in the South were black (29). In Georgia, there were 1,062 white men to 1,710 black men received in the prison system during this year of statistical gathering (30). It is safe to conjecture that black men outnumbered white men on most chain gangs throughout the first half of the century. In My Memoirs of Georgia Politics, Rebecca Felton relates many disturbing memories that date from the turn of the century, including the story of a black man who spent 15 years on a chain gang for stealing a shotgun, and that of a 12-year-old black boy who was given 12 years on the chain gang for borrowing a horse to go for a short ride (658). In the case of Johnson v. Dye (1949), an escaped black Georgia prisoner was held by a federal court because of the horror stories about inhumane treatment--that it was the custom of the Georgia authorities to treat chain gang with persistent and deliberate brutality [and] that Negro were treated with a greater degree of brutality than white prisoners (Goldfarb 373). Georgia authorities could offer no testimony to the contrary, and the runaway escaped extradition. In a 1932 bestseller, Robert E. Burns, a white man, documented the treatment he experienced in his I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, available during McCullers's teenage years in the Muscogee County Library in Columbus. A second book in that same year, John Spivak's Georgia Nigger, called the public's attention (and, in all likelihood, that of the 15-year-old McCullers) to the atrocities in McCullers's home state. Both books were widely reviewed with the aim of reforming the penal code. In World Tomorrow, E. Y. Webb notes that Georgia Nigger has relatively few new facts brought to light here, [but it is] . …
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