More than Thought

To Be Ida: Young, Gifted, and Black

Nancy Ann Fox

University of Washington, Seattle

(Download PDF)

Introduction

Ain’t gonna hush. – Saffire, The Uppity Blues Women

In her anthemic “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” blues singer Nina Simone invites Black America to “open your heart to what I mean/ We must begin to tell our young/ There’s a world waiting for you/ This is a quest that’s just begun.” Simone‘s powerful lyrics, recorded in 1970, speak directly to Ida Scott’s “quest” as the central female character in James Baldwin’s Another Country, written a decade earlier. Ida Scott is a “young, gifted, and black” singer who moves from the sacral songs in the context of her family’s religious practices to the secular genre of nightclub jazz. She echoes Simone’s 1959 recording of “I Loves You Porgy” – a song whose complicated origination includes a white songwriter (George Gershwin) delivered by a Black singer[1] and sung in the novel by Ida “puttering inefficiently about the kitchen” as Vivaldo, her white lover, wonders, “To whom, to whom, did she sing this song?” (Baldwin 312-313). Ida in fact reveals through the lyrics (“Don’t let him take me/ Don’t let him handle me/ With his hot hands”) the paradoxical but tragically true story of her deeply conscious subjugation in her desire for success.  For Baldwin, music seems to function in this novel as authorial commentary on the scenes, and it may be that he signals a possible future for Ida through her enactment of Simone’s hit record (“There she was, up on the stand, and unless all the signs were false, and no matter how hard or long the road might be, she was on her way” [254]).

This artistic success in the marketplace, the “economic glitter of the American dream” (Harris 125), entails profound personal cost of which Ida herself is conscious and describes:

‘I felt that I couldn’t fall much lower … There’s always farther to fall, always, always. … It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’ She gestured aimlessly with her glass, tried to drink from it, dropped it, and suddenly fell on her knees beside the table, her hands against her belly, weeping. (426)

The “fall,” for Ida, defines the rise, and Baldwin uses those precise words to describe the predicament of the ambitious and talented Black American female artist. In this paper I will locate Ida’s awareness of and resistance to this paradoxical position in the form of articulated anger that is often not legible to her audiences. I will then theorize that her anger is conscious and is, in fact, constitutive of her agency in this novel, and discuss the ways this agency can be usefully limned by the “outsider within” model of feminist standpoint theory designed by Patricia Hill Collins. My ultimate purpose here is to resist a reading of Ida that reduces her as a fully human subject, and re-examine Ida through a lens designed to view a Black female speaker as conscious agent and reveal her otherwise hidden knowledges and acts.

Ida’s Anger as Resistance

There is no definitive place in 1950’s middle-class America, despite its code of liberal humanism and ideographs such as “liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” for a Black woman who is not domesticated or sexualized, and thus her position might be defined most accurately as an indeterminate one. Indeed, “the ideological apparatus approves a very narrow range of identities” for her (Blair 581). Within this context, the character Ida – a Black professional woman locked in the power of a deceptive liberal context – articulates her conscious resistance through her anger. But the indeterminacy of her position does not allow her anger to be construed easily, or even heard within the American liberal code. Nonetheless, this powerful force both defines and drives her language and her silences, as she contends with the kind of compromise required by the cold politics of capital that objectify and sexualize an ambitious Black female artist in exchange for a future success she is determined to achieve. Baldwin positions Ida in a consciously discursive space in which she refuses to function as a docile source of musical amusement a place where anger is a force that drives much of her speech and behavior. She notes specifically: “I was going to get through the world, and get what I needed out of it, no matter how” (417).  Indeed, Ida has been presented as “the personification of Baldwin’s rage” (Harris 101). The specific anger performed in this novel by Ida, the Black female jazz singer, is consciously and specifically focused on the small circle of bohemian artists to which her brother Rufus, a drummer, is connected – all white, a cultural mix of aristocratic or monied American bloodlines (Cass of the North; Eric, the South) and cultures that would, at the time of this novel’s composition, be labeled “ethnic” and therefore themselves remaking the game of liberalism that ostensibly values the individual voice (the novelists: Irish-Italian Vivaldo “Danny” Moore and Polish Richard). Ida’s act of speaking within the code of American discourse the truths that the code itself cannot decipher subtends the melodies she sings and the talk she has learned to talk; it is covered by her assertions of love for Vivaldo which quickly fall away to reveal the sounds of Black anger beneath the surface of Black America.

Baldwin himself hears and knows the anger that surges within the indeterminate position well. In the 1963 Kenneth Clark interview, he says, “The Negro has never been as docile as white America wants to believe. That was a myth” (“James Baldwin” Interview).  In Ida, he gives this kind of subversion a consciousness and a voice – Ida’s voice – and fixes its source in the suicide of her beloved brother Rufus: “Rufus had always been the world to me. I loved him. … I’d counted on Rufus to get me out of [Harlem] – I knew he’d do anything in the world for me… And I had been robbed – of the only hope I had” (413-417). It is the timbre of this agonized voice that Baldwin heard at the start of his project, and its power was both clear and problematic:

Ida was important, but I wasn’t sure I could cope with her. … I couldn’t find a way to make you understand Ida. Then Rufus came along and the entire action made sense. … From the moment Rufus was gone, I knew that if you knew what had happened to Ida, you’d equally understand Rufus, and you’d see why Ida throughout the book was so difficult with Vivaldo and everyone else – with herself above all, because she wasn’t going to be able to live with the pain.  The principle action of the book, for me, is the journey of Ida and Vivaldo toward some kind of coherence [italics added]. (“James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction”)

Baldwin makes us always conscious of Ida’s voice, as it travels from standard to Black English from song to speech, blues to gospel to jazz, likely at any moment to collapse its “You’ve done wonders. You been wonderful” (123) to Rufus’s friends at his funeral, and uncover the anger always molten there. The strategy Baldwin employs to convey the depth and complication of this voice is his depiction of Ida through her speech alone  : “The only time Ida is revealed to us directly is when she speaks; otherwise, she is seen through someone else’s vision and in someone else’s space” (Harris 107).  However, while some readers consider that Ida is therefore “hidden from us” (Sylvander 108), Kevin Ohl remarks more persuasively that “she confronts her audience with a knowable, namable, localizable grief” (271). I further suggest that this “grief” is the medium through which Baldwin signals the presence, and subversive power, of Ida’s anger. Ida asserts: “I’m going to make it…. I’ve just about had it, down here among the garbage cans” (320). Ida does not sing “toothless Negro spirituals” (261). I see in this assertion Ida’s fierce and always-conscious determination that the ruthless biopolitic that made her brother’s life disposable will not erase and silence her. And Ida will always point out the obvious fact that her white liberal friends, particularly Vivaldo, will gloss over: “You’re white … You don’t know where I’ve been. You don’t know what life is like for me” (324-325).

Ida’s Anger Constitutes Her Agency

            For this strategy to succeed, however, it is crucial that Ida be read as a character with agency, i.e., the “powerful sense of self” that Ohl asserts and with which I agree. It is useful to mention in this respect that a strong critical consensus l    imits Ida as more “placeholder” than character, “an embodied repetition of Rufus [who] continues his foreshortened life as a musician” (Bell 582)..,. ..  Indeed, Ida has been viewed as “[functioning] as an extension of Rufus’s centrality … and becomes corrupted and is nearly destroyed by her desire to punish Rufus’s friends” (Lynch 11). This reductive view of Ida as mere extension of her brother Rufus and whose story is exclusively played as revenge drama does not sufficiently consider her as agent in the way that Baldwin suggests. Nor does it explore the agency through which she attempts to connect with the circle of Rufus’s white friends and, at the same time, “hit the A train” out of Harlem (418) and “(press) on the upward way” (313), “make it” (320). This narrow reading also serves to narrow her own focus to revenge for her brother’s death – and she is so characterized in much of the critical literature as “ever-vengeful” (Harris 116) who “enters the novel to accuse” (100) and “degenerates into a whining self-conscious adolescent” (124).

It seems these various readings of Ida conveniently veer from the message that Baldwin intends to convey through the multivocality of this gifted singer – a powerful argument intrinsic to Baldwin’s thought that “attempts to keep the conversation focused on Black experience unmediated by white misunderstanding of it” (Ryan 112).  Baldwin’s specific focus can be discerned in Ida’s repeated and conscious signaling (and, I would argue, subversively and wittily “signifyin”) her Black identity: “I’m just a poor, ignorant black girl, trying to get along” (409) … “black and funky, like myself” (414) …“I’m black” (415). To ignore Ida’s agency is to persist in considering this direct and deeply-knowing statement to be illegible and therefore incapable of being construed within the code that gives it its context, language, meaning – here, what it means to be “young, gifted, and Black.”

Standpoint and Ida’s Agency as a Gifted Black Woman

           It seems instructive, then, to re-examine Ida through a lens that is intentionally designed to view a Black female speaker as conscious agent, and through an analysis of her agency, or method by which she functions within the constraints of her limited sphere, reveal her otherwise hidden knowledges and acts. The concept of “outsider within” developed by Patricia Hill Collins as an extension of feminist standpoint theory is intended to “clarify a standpoint of and for Black women” (Collins 105) which permits them to defy externally-created images of Black femininity whose purpose is to keep Black women “in their place.” This self-definition is one that white power might call “uppity” in a persistent attempt to control and dominate this group whose assertiveness is a threat to the status quo. I think it is clear that Baldwin positions Ida as “outsider” Black female “within” the white ostensibly liberal circles of her brother’s friends and the entertainment business – and more largely in the power domain of a white America that marks and marginalizes her. Ida’s awareness of her movement between spheres is evident in the ease with which she changes the register of her speech: when it serves her purposes, she uses standard English; when she’s being “noisy” in white company, she speaks “Black”:  “Now if you-all going to make fun of me” [139], and thus prevents her own invisibility in that context.[2]

It is clear from the start that Ida – like the Uppity Blues Women whose lyric serves as the epigraph to this paper – “ain’t gonna hush” (Saffire), Her resistance is shown in the “noise” of her anger and her resilient presence within the circles that seek to define her in terms that serve their purposes. Baldwin’s Ida insistently places in question “nearly everything unquestionable to members of the dominant group” (118); her specialized knowledge enables her to critique the ways that power inscribes the body and marks her as “outsider,” Black in white America, on the lower side of bell hooks’ “dichotomous oppositional difference” that reifies the white/Black binary in American life (Collins 110). Thus she embodies the first element of the “outsider within” model, which places in bold relief the Black woman’s self-definition and self-evaluation. As noted previously in this analysis, Ida is the character acutely aware of her own race, and states emphatically, “I’m the same old color all over” (175).  She consistently insists on her own right to assert this identity, thereby signaling the “power dynamics that underlie” racial classification (Collins 106). In this respect she serves as reluctant instructor to her white friends, particularly Vivaldo, and she knows it: “I always think of you as being much younger (than I am). I always think of you as being a very nice boy who doesn’t know what the score is, who’ll maybe never find out. And I don’t want to be the one to teach you” (412).By placing their whiteness under scrutiny, which despite their liberal views they haven’t actually done (“You people think you’re free” [413]), Ida successfully places the spotlight[3] on her power to define them in terms of her. She informs Cass, “What you people don’t know … is that life is a bitch, baby. It’s the biggest hype going. You don’t have any experience in paying your dues and it’s going to be rough on you baby, when the deal goes down” (350). That “baby” is ”cool lingo” for “beat times,” certainly – it is also, I suggest, used intentionally by Ida to signal her own maturity in the face of Cass’s (white) naïveté. But awareness of the limited viewpoint of the white elite is part of the specialized knowledge of the “outsider within,” able to “replace externally-derived images with authentic images” (Collins 105) and resist continuously an Anglo-normative story.

It is here, I think, that Ida – again, consciously – validates her own power: she is the voice of Black America “telling it like it is” – not as an extension of her brother Rufus, but “telling the story her own way” (McClish and Bacon), thereby exposing what Baldwin later called “the vast ruthless machinery” that “can’t accommodate us and can’t get rid of us” (“James Baldwin” Berkeley). The fact that she refuses to be “written” or made legible by others is clear in the strength of that voice: the songs she sings: “Trouble in mind, I’m blue/ But I won’t be blue always, ‘Cause the sun’s going to shine / In my back door someday” (313), It is cleare in her forcefully asserted ambition: “I’ve got to make it” (320). And it is clear in the fact that she challenges any attempt to devalue or erase her: “You think I’m nothing but a whore. That’s the only reason you want to see me…. All you white bastards are the same” (169).  I would argue that Ida is in fact developing a language in which to talk about race that is not a white-created and white-focused discourse: it’ is wholly argumentative (“You don’t know what life is like for me” [325]); sassy – an element of Black female language that Collins emphasizes particularly; and Black in its focal point: when Ida speaks, so, too, does an entire network of “gifted and Black” women.

The second and final element that signals the “outsider within” and serves to establish agency for Ida is her position at the intersection of three forces in American society – gender, race, and class – which empowers her to reveal the “interlocking nature of oppression” (Collins 103). Ida is female, Black, and poor – the simultaneity of these hardships in a white America that has no stake in her survival, let alone her success, allows her to speak and sing specifically of this complex experience as only she has the power to reveal authentically (which others do discern in her: her audience is captivated by “a quality so mysteriously and implacably egocentric that no one has ever been able to name it. This quality involves a sense of self so profound and so powerful that it does not so much leap barriers as reduce them to atoms” [254]). It is a signal of her confidence and force that she alone articulates this story:

If any one white person gets through to you, it kind of destroys your – singlemindedness   … Wouldn’t you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here?… Kept you here, and stunted you and starved you, and made you watch your mother and father and sister and lover and brother and son and daughter die or go mad or go under, before your very eyes? And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but every day, every day, for years, for generations. (350-351)

And then it seems to me Ida nails the structures of domination that she, from her position privileged by her standpoint, knows entirely too well: “Shit. They keep you here because you’re black, the filthy white cock suckers, while they go around jerking themselves off with all that jazz about the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with that same music, honey, only keep your distance” (351.In this heart-breaking depiction of Black American life, Ida is given absolute authority – a paradoxical one, perhaps, derived entirely from her indeterminate position in “a country (where) powerful white males define themselves as subjects with agency and classify Black Americans and women in terms of their position vis-à-vis the white hub” (Collins 108). Nonetheless, that difference and distance she keenly knows and experiences gives her this privileged access to patterns and structures (hidden by the ideographs of the American creed) that “established insiders” – her white circle of friends; Baldwin’s white audience – cannot see.

Conclusion

            Ida Scott’s consciousness of the indeterminate position of gifted, young Black women – and I would argue, the anger that accompanies it and makes it ever more acute – is heightened by what she has needed to do to (“the A-train”) to lift herself “above the garbage.” In this respect some readers view her situation as a tragic one (Lynch 11). She reveals to Vivaldo, at the story’s close, a history of prostitution as “dues” she pays for her career: “God, they were so solemn about it, sweating yellow pigs” (423). Yet I think it is possible in the end to link the idea of Ida’s anger at powerful forces that seek to define her in terms of gender, race, and class to the kinds of resistance that Collins’s theory makes possible. Indeed, Collins emphasizes that for Black women in harsh environments – such as a white America that does not  recognize let alone accommodate gifted Black women like Ida – the word “No” in the face of oppression can be resistance enough (114). Nor does Collins mean refusal in the form of active confrontation: “Black women may overtly conform to societal roles, and covertly oppose them” (114). Refusal can consist of everyday resistances that befuddle or confuse the networks of power without directly opposing them. For Black women in impossible circumstances (as Ida says, “the prison here”) the anger itself can be enough. That hegemonic white America does not “read” this message must be beside the point, for Collins (and for Ida, too, who does not want to “teach” it). Its purpose is to assure the Black woman – Ida – of her own identity (as Baldwin continuously notes in every interview, that she “exists”).

          That Ida succeeds in further articulating her point of view signals her powerful sense of self and conviction that she can succeed in making her story legible, if only to herself. With the words “I’m black” she both particularizes herself (the “I”), and contextualizes within an American category (“black”) that instantly conjures a cluster of associated terms (“jungle” … “whore” … “garbage”) to which her anger might be considered the reasoned and sane response. And at the time of Baldwin’s writing, Ida was not only gifted and Black, but young, when anger can also indicate hope.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Another Country. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

     Print.

Bell, Matt. "Black Ground, Gay Figure: Working through Another Country, 

     Black Power, and Gay Liberation." American Literature 79.1 (2007): 577-

     603. Print.

Blair, Carol et al. "Disciplining the Feminine." Contemporary Rhetoric: A

     Reader. Eds. John Lucaiteset al. New York: The Guildford Press, 1999. 563-

     590. Print.

Cohodas, Nadine. Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone.

      New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. Print.

Collins, Patricia Hill. "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological

     Significance of Black Feminist Thought." The Feminist Standpoint Theory 

     Reader:Intellectual and Political Controversies.  Ed. Sandra Harding. New

     York: Routledge, 2004. 103-126. Print.

Dunning, Stephanie. "Parallel Perversions: Interacial and Same Sex

     Relationships in Another Country."  Melus 26:2 (2001): 95-115. Print.

Harris, Trudier. Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. Knoxville:

     University of Tennessee  Press, 1985. Print.

"James Baldwin: The Art of Fiction." The Paris Review Interviews: Vol 2.

     Web. 7 March 2010.

"James Baldwin." Interview with Kenneth Clark.  Screen interviews from "The

     Negro and the American Promise," produced by Boston public television

     station WGBH in 1963. Web. 7 March 2010.

"James Baldwin." Speech at Berkeley 1979. Web. 5 February 2010.

Lynch, Michael F. "Beyond guilt and innocence: redemptive suffering and love

     in Baldwin's Another Country." Obsidian II 7.1-2 (1992): 1+. 1992. Print.

McClish, Glen, and Jacqueline Bacon. "Telling the Story Her Own Way: The

     Role of Feminist Standpoint Theory in Rhetorical Studies." Rhetoric

     Society Quarterly 32:2 (2002): 27-55. Print.

Ohl, Kevin. "I'm not the boy you want: Sexuality, Race, and Thwarted

     Revelation in Baldwin' Another Country." African American Review

     (Summer 1999). Web. 5 February 2010.

Simone, Nina. "I Loves You Porgy." Audio recording. Web. 5 March 2010.

Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. "’Making Love in the Midst of Mirrors': Giovanni's

     Room and Another Country." Ed. Harold Bloom. James Baldwin: Bloom's 

     Critical Views New York:  Chelsea House,  2007. 81-96. Print.

Zaborowska, Magdalena. James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile.

     Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Print.