Ingram's spare design, though, maintains a quiet dignity for the figure, rescuing Hughes' Christ from the poet's own irony. The featureless face atop the poem substitutes for Christ's uniqueness the ubiquity of black suffering. College Literature , 1995. It thus describes a figure that does not pivot on white women, banish black women, or even successfully triangulate among its three parties. Though a hushed black mother is placed between lines devoted to her white lover and her black son, she is no go-between.
Unresolved tension clamps each member of the poem's trio into isolated stances and stanzas.
Instead of a homosocial alliance clinched over white women scorned, we end with a black Christ on the cross and the three-way standoff of a frozen family romance, unable to speak its interracial name. Copyright 1999 by Columbia University Press.