Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

In “The Last Black Hero,” Bell uses fiction to counter the idealistic belief that love across racial lines can end racism. It can’t because even love must contend with deeply ingrained attitudes about the significance of racial difference and gender.

At the center of the narrative is an all-too-human Jason Warfield, a man whose heroism is in part built on his championing of African American women as the ideal partners for African American men who want to protect their communities and people. Bell goes beyond Jason’s public face and pronouncements to show a man shaken by the trauma of a near-death experience and by the disconnect between his pro-African American ideals and the realities of an emotional connection that violates racial norms he has established for himself and others.

Jason is a fictional figure, but his hypocrisy, flaws, and failings as a man and leader echo the reality of many important historical figures whose public personae made them necessary symbols of African American excellence but whose relationships with their partners were far from ideal. To varying degrees, historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., and—a more extreme contemporary example—Bill Cosby did not always align their personal lives with those ideals. The lives of African Americans as a whole would be measurably diminished without the political leadership of King and Cosby’s trailblazing in entertainment and philanthropy to historically African American institutions of higher education, but their personal relations with women ranged from uncaring to abusive, with King widely believed to have been unfaithful to his wife and Cosby accused by multiple women of having drugged and assaulted them.

Rather than paper over that contradiction, Bell turns a critical eye on it by undercutting the notion of an African American hero and by placing the discussion of African American heroism in the context of real life and relations between African American men and African American women. Neva’s solution—that Jason and Sheila will need to dedicate themselves to Quad A to counter any blowback about their romance—is a strategic one that shows how accepting the reality of the situation can lead to more effective political organization. Jason’s acceptance of her solution also shows his ability to use racial realism to achieve political aims, especially when he recognizes that his relationship with Sheila may disarm white people who fear racial militance. The upsides of the relationship between Sheila and Jason are rooted in the real world rather than vague ideas about the power of love.

Bell includes dialogues between Neva and her mother to show that these calculations are not without cost to African American women, however. Neva is clear about her priorities—protecting Quad A’s ability to be effective politically—even as she struggles to reconcile herself to personal disappointment in Jason. There is some ambiguity in Bell’s representation of just what the relationship between Jason and Neva was, with Neva’s ambivalence about romance with Jason coloring her sense of outrage about his choice of Sheila. The conversations with her mother reveal the kinds of pressures she faces as a quietly heroic African American woman. She faces pressure to partner up with a man and to support her community even when that community or African American men do not always treat her as an object of love and reverence despite lip service to the centrality of African American women to cultural wholeness.

Bell’s attention to the multiple lenses Neva must bring to bear on her decision on how to manage Jason’s relationship with Sheila is a good example of how African American women navigate multiple identities and oppressions, a concept called “intersectionality,” one advanced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the inspirations for Geneva Crenshaw. This same attention to multiple lenses also explains how Jason both owns a love of African American culture but feels that identifying with a culture cannot take the place of his need for companionship and security. The messiness of Neva, Sheila, and Jason’s entanglements with each other all show that human relations frequently do not line up with our ideals.