"Same Question, Many Answers" by Hawa Allan
“The bigot says the Negro is all bad,” yells Barnabas, the main character in Bill Gunn’s All the Rest Have Died. “The liberal says he’s all good.” Here, Barnabas—or “Barney” as he is often called— is drunkenly shouting at the well-heeled hostess of an apartment party somewhere in Manhattan his writer friend Bernard dragged him to. “[B]ut not one of you will admit that you don’t know what the hell he is because you refuse to grant him individuality!” The hostess made the mistake of trying to privately continue a conversation Bernard had drawn Barney into and from which the emerging theater actor had also ceremoniously exited: a debate on whether “the Negroes’ expression in art” was “purely racial.” Barney’s outburst at the hostess rebukes her accusation that he was “anti-Negro” and “had the desire to be white.”
Barney is then escorted out of the party by Bernard, who is laughing hysterically. Once outside, Barney confides in Bernard about his ambivalence toward his own artistry: “All I really care about is success and money.” Bernard asks Barney if he thinks he is really not an artist. “I’m an opportunist,” Barney responds. “Who would believe that about a nice noble savage. I want money; maybe I want art. I won’t know that until I get the money. Then I’ll see.”
First published in 1964 by Michael Joseph Ltd. in Great Britain, Gunn’s All the Rest Have Died narrates Barney’s dramas as he strives to assert his talent in New York City’s theater industry. Gunn was an actor himself, as well as a playwright and filmmaker, and much of his own writing was induced by his frustration with scant quality roles for Black actors. Averse to how the industries he worked in at the time regularly trafficked in stereotypes, Gunn was inspired to create his own productions, including the vampire horror film Ganja and Hess, and the partly improvised ‘soap opera’ Personal Problems, which infiltrates the goings-on of black middle-class residents of New York.
Since Gunn’s death of encephalitis in 1989 at age fifty-nine—the day before one of his plays was to debut at Public Theater in New York—his independent films have received renewed critical attention, regularly appearing in curated retrospectives and steadily gaining new audiences in numbers that have eclipsed their prior cult following. (Incidentally, or not, this phenomenon has also coincided with the posthumous resurgence of interest in his contemporary and one-time collaborator Kathleen Collins, author of the short story collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love, and director of the film Losing Ground, co-starring Gunn.)
However, Gunn’s two novels—All the Rest Have Died and Rhinestone Sharecropping, the latter of which follows the travails of a Black screenwriter—have not received similar retrospective interest. Both autobiographical, they are literary explorations of the pride, plaudits, and pitfalls of being a Black artist. While Barney in All the Rest Have Died was righteous in his anger at having to contend with the “debate” about “the Negroes’ expression in art,” this is a question that is inevitably asked of a Black artist regardless if they want to answer it or not.
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In All the Rest Have Died, the question is answered at the edges of the narrative, in abrupt intrusions into a coming-of-age story of a young man who navigates finding his artistic purpose and falling in love. The novel’s first part largely explores Barney’s relationship with Taylor, his cousin and best friend who is so fair-skinned he could pass as white. An aspiring actor himself, Taylor effectively abandons Barney when he leaves Philadelphia to enroll in the military and, later, for New York to pursue his own thespian dreams. The novel nonchalantly circumvents the drama that is expected to ensue solely from Taylor’s apparent whiteness, making it clear that Taylor “was completely unaffected by his features.” It was everyone else who had the problem. Barney conveys that he would “watch people go into shock as [Taylor] would explain to the twentieth thousandth person that he was of Negro parentage, whatever that meant in his case.”
Even Taylor’s eventual decision to formally pass as white in order to reap the benefits of the discriminatory G.I. Bill is handled casually. (“I’m going to pass,” Taylor informs Barney. “You’re going to what?” Barney asks. “I’m going to pass.” “Good luck,” Barney conclusively responds.”) Instead, any dramatic contention in Taylor’s story is grounded in his own ambitions and how he will fail or succeed to realize them, as it would be within any hero’s journey.
The details of Taylor’s aspirations are for the most part told in his own words, through monologue—one of several illustrations in the novel that the script, whether for the stage or screen, was the form in which Gunn was most adept. In that vein, settings change suddenly without any expository transition, akin to a scene cut in a film, and dialogue among multiple characters is sometimes challenging to follow because Gunn does not routinely identify who is speaking. However, the richness of the content makes up for the intermittent misalignment of the form, as the dialogue alone does exceptional work at developing character.
Once Barney reaches New York, he and his chosen family of beatniks volley back and forth in playful banter, which is amusing regardless of whether or not it moves the story forward. (Ergo the drunken exchange between Barney and a friend as they lie on their backs and look up at the Empire State Building: “’Do you think they ever wash that building?’ ‘I doubt it.’ ‘I wonder how much they pay the window washers.’ ‘About a buck a window.’ ‘Let’s wash every window and retire.’”) Such repartee takes over the novel when Barney’s social life finally gets going—an abrupt departure from exposition detailing his lonely stalking through the city. Such first-person narration is either infused with awe (“the squalor, the pain, bad skin, bad air—all of it somehow marvelous, new, like a good movie”) or a stark depiction of his early poverty (“when you’re hungry and […] you have brought eating down to a science, like the improvised 25-cent meals at H and H or drinking gallons of water […] you begin to believe that this is the entire world”).
In fact, apart from the immediate pain of hunger upon first arriving to the city and the intensity of his relationships, (whether platonic or romantic), Barney approaches life with youthful insouciance, including the very acting career he came to the city to pursue in the first place.
You become aware of studied insincerity in the theatre. One develops a veneer of unfriendly friendliness, tragic joy, and some of the most unsophisticated sophistication seen anywhere on earth. The goal is not to be, but to seem, which can be achieved in six easy lessons as opposed to a lifetime of experience and curiosity. Donning a sort of mental falsie, shutting out the fresh air of human experience, this to them is all safe and sure. And if you are truly of a desire to get ahead you must pretend, along with this group of manikins [sic], that they are really human beings, and that the American theatre today is really in its highest form.
Barney’s goal, as it eventually turns out, is not to become an actor, but to be authentic. He doesn’t arrive at this authenticity, ultimately, in his chosen profession but in his interactions with those he loves fiercely—like Taylor, his lover Maggie, and his friends. If “all the world’s a stage,” then, All the Rest Have Died spotlights Barney’s attempt to live offstage and shine in the light of his own and his loved ones’ true essence.
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Again, because the “Negro Question” is always asked of a Black writer, it’s noteworthy to consider how Gunn goes about answering it in All the Rest Have Died. Of course, race has concrete effects on Barney’s ambitions, as he is, here and there, reminded both of his great talent and the shame that he is not a white actor who could thereby audition for this or that role. However, this is a reality Gunn doesn’t dwell on in his depiction of Barney’s affairs. The question of race is an unwelcome incursion into his story, an interruption of an otherwise traditional coming-of-age tale.
Taylor’s passing, for one, is presented matter-of-factly, without the anticipated hand-wringing of his family or inner turmoil of the purported “race traitor.” As for Barney’s interracial relationship with Maggie, who is white, the narrative only addresses it as an issue for their silent observers. “Why is he watching us?” Barney asks Maggie of her doorman when they are exiting her apartment building. “You might be described as exotic around here,” she answers, laughing. “Oh,” Barney says, thereafter noting that he forgot, as he often does. The notion of making an interracial relationship an inherent subject is even mocked later on in the novel, when Marty, another one of Barney’s writer friends, says “miscegenation stories are a bit below my involvement.” When Barney asks Marty to elaborate, he responds: “When I write a book about love and all my people are not of one complexion, I would insist that it not be analyzed as a book about racial folderol and miscegenation.”
The question of race is also answered through Barney’s friendship with Bernard (from the party)—an acclaimed and well-remunerated fiction writer whose fancy car and multiple lavish abodes clash with the scrappy bohemian digs of Barney’s other aesthete friends. Bernard, however, is erratic, restless, and prone to impulsive bouts of rage that, in and of themselves, prove suspenseful. The son of uncertain paternity and a mentally ill mother who is rumored to have committed suicide, Bernard certainly has his reasons for suffering. And yet, as it turns out, at thirty-something years old, he also feels trapped by the weight of his achievements and preceding literary reputation. Where is there to go, Bernard seems to continually be asking, when you’re already up? When Barney asks him “[w]hy the hell are you so sad,” Bernard responds:
Well, I’m very unhappy, that’s why. I’m rich, that’s not the answer. I’m handsome, that’s not it. I’m popular. I’m successful. So what the fuck. I know more about being despondent than anyone I know. Only thing is I’m not a minority. You see I rule this Goddamn country. I’m Protestant, white, American, and I want to tell you it’s not the answer either. I’m illegitimate, but I’m white and Episcopalian; I’m an atheist. […] You can make history by just joining the New York Athletic Club. I join it doesn’t mean a Goddamn thing for Christ’s sake. I have to run for President for Christ’s sake. There’s a long line of white, Protestant Americans waiting to be unique. I write very bad books, I’m a pain in the ass.
Defying convention, it is Bernard, a white man, who is the only character in the novel who is tortured by his identity and the implications it has had for his professional advancement. He is the only character who expresses frustration about being trapped by his race, which—the story makes clear—feels suffocating to him. Bernard inevitably acts as Barney’s foil, a comparison that is also found in their names, which can get mixed up easily. Bernard and Barney are not foils merely on account of the mundane fact that one is white and the other Black, but also in the way Bernard, a white man, expresses his own racial anxiety while Barney, a Black man, blithely brushes his off (unless confronted by the uninvited projections of other random characters). So, the conventional roles for Barney and Bernard, in this regard, are reversed.
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The answer to the “Negro question” is a mix of sermon and jeremiad, calling attention to the gap between a desired moral universe and disastrous present reality, as perfected by James Baldwin. Another answer is to imagine race as a house, as, perhaps, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison have done—the pre-fabricated structure in which the characters live, architecture that forms the backdrop of an inevitable reality that is not always the focal point of characters too busy going about the business of living their lives. The question might also be answered by representing racial difference as an eccentric foible or quirk, as Zadie Smith has done, providing an answer that serves as comic relief for a heartwarming tale about what ultimately unites, rather than divides, us all. These are, of course, only a few examples. The question is always the same, and the answers are many.
Moreover, the answer is a matter of craft, not solely of content. As Morrison elaborated in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, although the question is often asked of non-white writers and hardly ever put to white writers, the question is always being answered in a literary text whether its writer, regardless of race, is aware of it or not.
As Morrison acknowledges:
“There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States.”
However, in re-reading works by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway, Morrison concludes that the “contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of [American] national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.” The unacknowledged portrayal of “whiteness,” Morrison argues, is unavoidably informed and shaped by a latent awareness of “blackness,” even if subconsciously so.
I would offer that any writer’s obliviousness to this question is not simply a privilege but also a deficit in craft. Any writer materializing his literary imagination would be better served to develop a conscious approach to addressing this question in their work, rather than letting an unconsidered answer inevitably betray itself through the writing. Critics, of course, can answer the question themselves, whether through close reading and insightful consideration of an author’s work, or through the myopia of their own prejudices.
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Alternatively, Gunn’s Rhinestone Sharecropping provides a much more explicit answer to the question through the portrayal of Sam Dodd, a Black screenwriter aiming to one day hit it big enough to earn a one-hundred-thousand-dollar payout and retire to Mexico with his wife Cleola.
“I did not invent the Hollywood Negro,” Sam discloses in the novel’s first-person prose, “but I have had to reproduce him some five hundred times at least.” Sam is “writing Race for money,” and not for the artistry. Published in 1981 by Reed Books, an imprint of a publishing house run by writer Ishmael Reed, this autobiographical novel betrays a kind of jaded resignation that was absent from All the Rest Have Died, which was published seventeen years prior. Indeed, as Gunn is quoted in his New York Times obituary: "I’ve liked every single script I’ve written,” and “I’ve hated every movie made from them.”
Dodd seems to suffer from a similar predicament, as he forces himself to take a gig offered to him by British film producer Carl “Cubby” Steinbeck, who is seeking a Black writer to draft a script for a biopic about a famous Black American football player. The narrative evolves from the conflict between Sam’s aversion to depict the “[b]lack man in black face” and his resolve to mine his profession in order to uncover a rhinestone—or its monetary equivalent—during his otherwise chronically underpaid labor. As one producer informs Sam, (in an aside during a debt-collection call), he “writes the best goddamn dialogue in Hollywood today.” In the next breath, the producer warns Sam: “You gonna be highbrow, you gonna be left out.”
In line with Gunn’s own gift for writing through the words of his characters, a significant monologue given by Sam’s father recounts the Chicago “race” riot of 1919 in graphic detail, presenting a vivid oral and alternative history of a violent conflict spurred by white mobs after a Black teen inadvertently waded into a whites-only swimming area at a segregated beach. Sam’s other interactions with Hollywood bigwigs are similarly absorbing, especially amid his escalating distress at a climactic meeting with producers of the football movie. The novel questions whether Sam will maintain his composure as the producers distort his script to appeal to a white audience, or capitulate to his artistic integrity.
Perhaps the answer also can be found in a conclusion Gunn had come to “for reasons too private to expose to the arrogance of white criticism,” as he wrote in a 1973 letter to The New York Times, in which he stated that it is “a terrible thing to be a Black artist in this country.” In the letter, Gunn decried the paucity of Black critics to assess his films and plays beyond the mere fact of his identity and that of the Black actors who appear in them. Thankfully, the treasures of Gunn’s creative output have had the opportunity to outlive this conclusion, and can now be appreciated with new eyes.
Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared, among other places, in The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Lapham's Quarterly, and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Insurrection, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
