Manhood in the Balance

Nothing But a Man

In October 1969, just after the baseball season ended, the owner of my favorite team, the Saint Louis Cardinals, traded two all-stars, Gold Glove outfielder Curt Flood and catcher Tim McCarver, to the Philadelphia Phillies for the much-troubled, troublemaking, and immensely talented first baseman Dick Allen. There were a few other players in the mix, but that was the heart of the trade. Flood and Allen were black.

Allen, who had grown up in the more tolerant working-class suburbs of Pittsburgh, underwent one misery after another, trying to play in Philadelphia for racist and notoriously unforgiving fans. Flood, whose early career had been stalled by a racist manager in Saint Louis, did not want to leave his team and his city. The Cardinals had recently gone to three World Series, winning two, led by Hall of Famers Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Flood himself, all of them black. He held out and sued Major League Baseball for its infringement of his right, and every player’s right, to negotiate contracts on his own. He said he wanted to be treated not as a piece of merchandise, not as chattel, but “as a man.” He lost the suit, but it would not be long before the principle he fought for would carry the day.

“As a Man”

It is hard now to remember that the male leaders of the Civil Rights movement spoke in such powerful and straightforwardly masculine terms. They wanted their manhood to be honored and to be given full freedom in the workplace and in other areas of civil life. To duck and shuffle and put up with a hundred indignities every day, without a chance to let a good sock in the jaw clear the air and perhaps forge a friendship across the racial divide, was to agree to be less than a man. But then, there were plenty of other ways to be less than a man, ways that have nothing to do with race but that racist indignities set as a snare before your feet, or embittered you if you did fall into them. And here we come to the most remarkable film about race and manhood that I have ever seen. It is not the gritty and justly celebrated In the Heat of the Night and certainly not the sentimental and embarrassing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?—the latter a terrible vehicle for Sidney Poitier’s brilliance; for that brilliance, and for the subject of racial conflict and hatred, see No Way Out or The Defiant Ones.

No, the film I have in mind is Nothing But a Man (1964), starring Ivan Dixon—handsome, quiet, as a smoldering fire is quiet. Dixon was as talented an actor as anyone of his day, but roles for black actors were only beginning to loosen up. You may know him as the radio operator Kinchloe in that zany and campy World War II sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, where his talents were mostly wasted. But perhaps my glance at World War II is apropos. The director of Nothing But a Man, Michael Roemer, who was also one of the two writers of the screenplay, had escaped as a Jewish boy from Nazi Germany, where he had witnessed how racism there prevented his father and his grandfather from providing for their family, and that was before the mass murders. He eventually came to the United States, where he was a professor of literature at Yale University, passing away several weeks ago as I write these words. He and his co-writer Robert M. Young went to the South to live with black families in order to try to experience life through their eyes, while being themselves objects of hatred, contempt, and threats of deadly violence.

To Be a Man

The plot avoids every cliché, every easy answer to the problems besetting the black man. For the title of the film is also a challenge: to deserve treatment as nothing but a man, you must first be a man. Duff Anderson (Dixon) is a worker on a railroad gang. That’s how the movie begins, with that hard work on the railroad, as one man sets the spikes to secure the new track and hammers them in so they do not move, while another man follows with a hand-held diesel-powered spike driver to pound them all the way down. The workers are black. Your first assumption will be that it’s a chain gang from a southern prison. It isn’t. The men are free, at least in a legal sense. But freedom without virtue is just another snare, and Duff’s fellow workers fall for it, spending their idle time and their good but idle wages on drink, gambling, and cheap women.

So one night Duff walks to the nearby town, wandering over to the black church, where a revival is being held—and Roemer secured the services of one Reverend Marshal Tompkin to play the part of a visiting revivalist minister, leading the congregation in a charismatic frenzy filled with singing and shouting and the swaying of heads and shoulders unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Duff, who says he isn’t religious but who admits that he does sort of believe in God, isn’t moved by the words, if you can make them out, but by one of the singers in the choir, Josie (played by jazz singer Abbey Lincoln). Josie is intelligent and very pretty, and she has noticed Duff, too. She is also the daughter of Reverend Dawson, the pastor of the church, a man who represents one way of dealing with racism, the strategy of waiting things out, not making waves, building up self-contained and self-sufficient communities. It has worked, modestly so. They haven’t had a lynching in town in eight years, he says. They’re getting their own school.

Reverend Dawson and his wife do not want Josie to go out with Duff, and there’s good reason why not. Duff has openly admitted to Josie that he’s not interested in marriage at all, but in having a good time with her. That attitude is seconded by the men, half-men, he has been working with. It is also seconded by Duff’s father, Will Anderson, whom he hasn’t seen since he was a small boy—and lest we get sentimental and view Duff as merely a victim, we find out that he himself has had a son whom he hasn’t seen since he was a baby. That little boy has no words in the film. He’s been cared for by a woman, not his mother, who doesn’t give a damn about him; it appears that it may have stunted his intellectual and emotional development.

At this point, we see that the film can go in one of two predictable ways. Either Duff is converted by the Dawsons, or Josie Dawson is corrupted or brought down into the gutter by Duff. The film avoids both. Things are not so easy. Duff hunts his father down, an intelligent but worthless man, hopelessly alcoholic though loved by the woman he lives with and does not support. “Is she good in the hay?” asks old Will Anderson about Josie, when Duff mentions her. “No point marryin’ her just to find out.” The film doesn’t present that as bawdy and jocular advice. We have seen in the opening of the film the dreadful results of that way of life: a black woman named Doris, debauched, broken-spirited, and ugly, hanging about the bar to sell for a beer or two what nobody wants. When Will dies, Duff and Will’s woman Lee manage to get him buried decently, and all he has in the world is what’s in his pockets, which isn’t much.

Nor are we to accept Reverend Dawson’s way, even granting its strong and mostly beneficial influence upon Josie. For Josie keeps both her counsel and her virtue, resisting Duff’s irresponsible advances, till finally she breaks free from her father’s house. They go to the City Hall and get married. It will not mark any rapprochement between the two men. Duff must give up the good wages he was making as an itinerant on the railroad, but when he gets a job at the local sawmill, he finds he can’t get along with the whites, even when they treat him in what they think is a friendly way; he will not be bullied by the obnoxious, or patronized by the smug. He loses that job straightaway, and Reverend Dawson tells him he knew it was going to happen. But Duff won’t take that from him, either. “You been stoopin’ so long,” Duff says, “you don’t even know how to stand straight no more! You just half a man!” A slight tremor in the lips gives us to know that the sword has struck home.

A High Aspiration

“Nothing but a man,” that’s all Duff wants to be, but that’s also a high aspiration, something we in our time have largely forgotten. The boy does not simply and effortlessly grow up to be a man. There are dragons to be slain along the way, and those include the dragons within. The love between Josie and Duff is warm and real; they can tease each other and laugh; their relations as man and wife are as hot as iron in the furnace. Soon, Josie is carrying his child, and she’s already told him she wants to adopt that abandoned son of his. Reverend Dawson, meanwhile, manages to get Duff a job at a local gas station, making not as much money as when he was at the sawmill. But when Duff bristles at the foul treatment he gets from the imbecilic white boys who stop for 38 cents’ worth of gasoline, who really just want to needle him, and who even say some threatening things about his wife, Duff refuses to answer them, and when the sympathetic boss at the gas station asks him to apologize, he refuses to do that too. So the job is gone.

Can Josie bring him round with a pep talk? Not at all. Duff must find his manhood, which in his case will require loyalty and suffering. I won’t spoil here the ending of the film.

It’s not clear to me whether Ivan Dixon was a religious man, nor do I know whether Michael Roemer practiced the Jewish faith of his fathers. I recommend Nothing But a Man for its excellence as a work of art, for its honesty, and for an implicit message to Christians. We must live in the world, such as it is. But it is too easy, in our habits, to let the world do the dictating, and to have Christ sit quietly in a corner somewhere, or to let him out now and again in a revival for the emotions but not for concerted action. It is also easy, especially now that one sort of conformist Christianity has been swept aside, that which was characterized by Reverend Dawson and which was criticized by Martin Luther King, to embrace a different sort of conformist Christianity—for example, the conformism of several notable bishops in my own church, the Roman Catholic, who have not learned the lessons of sexual breakdown that this film in 1964 already had to teach. But compromises with the world come in many guises, not only in the mock liberal.

We need men. Those communities and nations that get them will be dominant in the world to come. I don’t know if that was one of the things that Ivan Dixon wanted to get across. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. Nothing But a Man shows it nonetheless.