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Empathic Representations of White Racists
in Two Contemporary African American Novels
This paper explores the role that empathy plays in two contemporary African American
novels inspired by historical events from the civil rights movement in the United States: Bebe
Moore Campbell‟s 1992 novel Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine and Anthony Grooms‟s 2001 novel
Bombingham. Campbell‟s novel revolves around the fictional lynching of fifteen-year-old
Armstrong Todd in Hopewell, Mississippi, in 1955. This fictional lynching parallels the historic
1955 lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. In each case, a teenage
black boy from Chicago visits relatives in a small southern town. When the northern black youth
violates southern racial taboos by speaking playfully to a white woman in the business her
husband owns, the white husband and his kin seize the boy from his relatives‟ house and murder
him. Although the white killers in the novel and in the actual Till case are tried for murder, in
both instances an all-white jury finds them not guilty. Grooms‟s novel Bombingham opens in
1970 during the Vietnam War, with eighteen-year-old African American soldier Walter Burke
lying in a rice paddy outside a Vietnamese village. After his fellow soldier Haywood Jackson is
killed by enemy fire, Walter must fulfill a promise he made to his friend: to write a letter to
Haywood‟s parents in the event that something happens to him. As Walter struggles to think of
the appropriate words, his thoughts drift back to his childhood in Birmingham, Alabama where,
as an eleven-year-old, he participated in the famous civil rights marches led by Martin Luther
King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1963 and where, later that year,
the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing killed four little black girls.
By setting their works during the civil rights movement, Campbell and Grooms invite us
to revisit King‟s empathic philosophy. Writing about fictional representations of the movement,
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Richard H. King argues that the “whole point of [Martin Luther] King‟s political theology was to
begin the long work of transforming „others‟ into brothers and sisters through the process of
mutual self-recognition,” and he suggests that “fiction might further [this] mutual selfrecognition.” Although Richard King does not include Campbell‟s and Grooms‟s novels in his
analysis, both do further Martin Luther King‟s goal of mutual self-recognition. The most
striking manifestation of King‟s theology in each novel is the author‟s determination to
empathize with white characters who respond violently to black demands for equality. Campbell
bases her characters Floyd and Lily Cox on Roy and Carolyn Bryant, the white couple
responsible for Till‟s lynching. Grooms alludes to a nameless white teenager who shoots and
kills Walter‟s best friend, Lamar Burrell, on the same day as the Birmingham church bombing,
and this fictional murder is based on the historic murder of thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware, who
was also shot and killed by a white boy, sixteen-year-old Larry Sims, on the day of the bombing.
Rather than demonize the white racists, each novelist uses narrative point of view to force
readers to empathize with the murderers, to recognize their essential humanity, and to consider
their motivations. In Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, Campbell, rather than relying on an omniscient
third-person narrator, or narrating the story from the limited third-person point of view of a
single character, shifts the third-person point of view among a diverse cast of characters so that
readers can imagine what it feels like to live inside their skin. She implies that creating multiple
points of view proved challenging: “I had to become each of the characters I created. I had to
get inside the heads and under the skin of characters who were racist and/or weak. By
pretending to be each one I began to empathize with all of them” (Letter).
Campbell takes great pains to empathize with Floyd and Lily Cox, to understand why
they behave as they do. Throughout the novel, Campbell stresses that one‟s family background
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shapes the kind of person one becomes. Floyd‟s killing Armstrong derives in part from his
hateful family background. As Campbell states, “this kind of violent racism has more to do with
a dysfunctional family than it does with hating people who don‟t look like you. Or at least it has
as much to do with it” (qtd. in Jane Campbell 961). To emphasize the family‟s role in racism,
Campbell departs from the historical account of Till‟s lynching by inventing a villainous father
figure who incites and participates in Armstrong‟s murder. For Floyd, the lynching clearly
serves as a long-awaited opportunity to prove his manhood and win the approval of his father,
who has long favored Floyd‟s older brother. In the end, Floyd‟s fear of disappointing his father
proves even stronger than his fear of killing Armstrong. Although Floyd ultimately loses his
business and experiences social ostracism because of his crime, he continues to draw comfort
from the memory that murdering Armstrong pleased his father. But for his father‟s provocation,
Campbell implies, Floyd would not have murdered Armstrong. To be sure, Campbell does not
minimize Floyd‟s personal responsibility for the crime. However, she does prod the reader to
look for traces of human frailty beneath the inhuman exterior of someone whose own father
drives him to murder.
Campbell also considers family background in her characterization of Lily Cox. Just as
Floyd corresponds to the historical Roy Bryant, Lily corresponds to Carolyn Bryant, the white
woman Emmett Till allegedly addressed. In fact, as Campbell explains, “It wasn‟t Emmett Till”
but a desire to understand Bryant that initially “drew me into the story” and compelled her to
write a novel about it (qtd. in Jane Campbell 961). Campbell remembers that as a child, she
“hated Carolyn Bryant. … I think most black people did” (Letter). Yet Campbell recalls that
newsreel footage of Bryant‟s elated response to her husband‟s acquittal prompted her to wonder
why such a woman would be attracted to a murderer:
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I saw the trial on the PBS series, Eyes on the Prize, and I was struck by the
woman, Carolyn Bryant … and how the husband—the guy who killed Emmett
Till—kissed his wife when the jury found him innocent. It looked very erotic to
me. She looked fearful, but at the same time she looked like, I got a man who‟d
kill for me! I was interested in her. I thought, “Whoa! This woman! Why would
she need to feel this way?” I was going with what I saw in her face. I wanted to
know what kind of life someone who needs [that] would have. Where did this
woman come from? As I got interested in her, I began to get interested in the
whole story. (qtd. in Burke 3-4)
In a letter to me, Campbell explains the connection between her character‟s background and her
role in Armstrong Todd‟s murder:
When I created Lily Cox … I had to create a back story for why this character
was so weak. Lily Cox was a molested child, a product of a poor white family
and a sexist society in which she was powerless; she acted out those realities.
They trapped her. This explains her weakness, her passivity, her insanity. She is
as much a victim of the racist society she perpetuates as Armstrong Todd. The
difference is in degree. (Letter)
Defending her nuanced characterization of the Coxes, Campbell argues, “A few people have said
that I was sympathetic to white racists, but I‟m not. … How are we ever going to understand
racism if we don‟t explore it from both sides?” (qtd. in Karkabi).
Campbell‟s distinction between sympathizing versus empathizing with the Coxes reflects
Martin Luther King‟s own distinction between “liking” and “loving” others. Whenever King
speaks of the necessity of Christian love for one‟s neighbor, he explains the difference:
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When you rise to love on this level, you love all men not because you like them,
not because their ways appeal to you, but you love them because God loves them.
This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Love your enemies.” And I‟m happy
that he didn‟t say, “Like your enemies,” because there are some people that I find
it pretty difficult to like. Liking is an affectionate emotion, and I can‟t like
anybody who would bomb my home. … I can‟t like anybody who threatens to
kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that love is greater than liking.
Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men.
(Testament 256)
It is difficult to like Floyd and Lily Cox. Just as the historical record portrays Bryant as a
villain, an unrepentant white supremacist who brazenly confessed after his acquittal that he and
his half-brother had kidnapped and murdered Till, Campbell portrays Floyd as a vicious,
unsympathetic character who never takes responsibility for or shows any remorse for his crime.
Lily supports her husband. She knows that Armstrong did not harass her and had no intention of
harming her, yet she neither defends him to Floyd before the murder, nor seeks justice for him
during Floyd‟s trial or after his acquittal. But Campbell‟s goal is not to make us like the Coxes,
nor does she absolve them of personal responsibility for their crimes; she simply wants us to
think about the motivation behind their evil actions. Armstrong‟s last thought before Floyd
shoots him is a rhetorical question: “Where did all that hatred come from?” (42). Campbell
attempts to answer that question throughout the novel by delving into the Coxes‟ consciousness
to provide access to their weaknesses, insecurities, and fears.
In contrast to our familiarity with Floyd and Lily and their motivations, readers know
very little about the teenaged murderer in Bombingham. Indeed, Grooms mentions the youth
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only briefly toward the end of the novel. Whereas the continually shifting points of view in Your
Blues Ain’t Like Mine allow the reader to empathize with many different characters,
Bombingham focuses only on the first-person perspective of Walter Burke. The novel consists
of a frame narrative in which the Vietnam chapters narrated from the perspective of eighteenyear-old Walter in 1970 alternate with the Birmingham chapters narrated by eleven-year-old
Walter in 1963. In the final chapter, as Walter is lying in his bunk in Vietnam and struggling to
find the words to put in his letter to Haywood‟s parents, he begins to think about the white boy
who killed Lamar and reflect on his motivation: “[the boy] had a strange look in his face. What
emotion was it? Hatred? I have named it variously. From time to time, I think it was merely
curiosity—the same curiosity that had sent Lamar and me out on our adventures. At other times,
I call it confusion, a spinning in the head that made him act without thinking. Then again, could
it have been hope? That same thing my mother warned me against. Could he have been trying
to fulfill a dream impressed upon him by his minister, or his Scout master, or Governor
Wallace—some dream of a world in which he might be happy and secure. I know the dream”
(297). Walter realizes that as children, he and the white boy shared the same dream of happiness
and security. Another, more disturbing parallel that Walter draws between himself and the white
boy is that they are both murderers. As a soldier, Walter indiscriminately kills Vietnamese in
accordance with the misguided U.S. policy of making the world happy and secure, just as the
white boy kills Lamar out of a misguided desire to preserve his happy and secure segregated
world. By imagining a backstory for Lamar‟s murderer, Walter acknowledges his affinity with
the white boy and empathizes with him.
As Campbell and Grooms strive to elicit reader empathy for their white racist characters,
they advance many of the Personalist themes that shape Martin Luther King‟s thought. Exposed
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to the formal study of Personalism at Boston University, King identifies it as his “basic
philosophical position” (Stride 100). For King, the human “personality,” which is invisible, is
distinct from the human being, whose body and actions are visible. Personalist philosophy holds
that all human personality is merely a copy and physical manifestation of an ultimate reality, a
Supreme Personality understood as “God” among Christians. King bases his own belief in
humanity‟s divine origin on Genesis 1:27: “God created man in his own image, in the image of
God created he him; male and female created he them.” Because the image of God exists in all
men and women, each person possesses innate dignity and worth: “In the final analysis, says the
Christian ethic, every man must be respected because God loves him. The worth of an individual
does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin, or his social position. Human worth
lies in relatedness to God. An individual has value because he has value to God” (King,
Testament 122).
Throughout their novels, Campbell and Grooms challenge readers to expand what Rufus
Burrow Jr. refers to as their “moral sphere” to include white supremacists. In his study on
King‟s Personalism, Burrow alludes to white Personalists‟ and male Personalists‟ historical
“benign neglect” of blacks and women, but his comments apply to any marginalized group:
Those who are deemed invisible, and therefore left out, are frequently not
regarded as beings to whom moral duty or responsibility is owed. One does not
feel compelled to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of either groups or
issues that are not even within the range of one‟s moral sphere. Since it is not
acknowledged that they even exist, the tendency is to behave as if such persons
are not owed common moral decency. … Clearly we can see that part of what
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needs to happen is the broadening and deepening of persons‟ moral awareness.
(142)
The Coxes in Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine and the teenaged shooter in Bombingham fall far
outside our own moral sphere, yet Campbell and Grooms seek to expand our moral awareness of
these characters as fellow human beings. Rather than suppressing the characters‟ humanity by
stereotyping them as racist villains, the authors create characters whose personal responsibility
for the murders they commit is complicated by outside factors often beyond their control.
Of special note in Campbell‟s and Grooms‟s work is the authors‟ blurring of easy
distinctions between oppressor and oppressed to create characters in the unique position of being
both the victim and the victimizer. In Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, the one handicap that the
Coxes share with their victim Armstrong Todd is a lack of power. On the one hand, Floyd‟s
white skin allows him to lynch a black youth with impunity. On the other hand, as a poor white,
Floyd is denied any real power by the white elite in his community who hold all the economic,
political, and social power. Floyd‟s fate after his acquittal confirms his powerlessness. He is
rejected by both the black and the white communities, for Hopewell‟s black citizens successfully
boycott his business so that he has to sell it, and Hopewell‟s white citizens shun him because he
is a murderer. From Campbell‟s point of view, Floyd has almost as little control over the
circumstances in his life as Armstrong does over those in his, and his tenuous position bears out
King‟s observation that “[s]ometimes a class system can be as vicious and evil as a system based
on racial injustice” (qtd. in Jackson 246).
Lily is like Armstrong in that she is expected to assume a subordinate role in a society
dominated by white men. That is, sexism oppresses her much as racism oppresses Armstrong.
She accepts her powerlessness because her family and community place a high value on the
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subordination of women. Lily‟s brief encounter with Armstrong in Floyd‟s pool hall causes her
to forfeit her right to a respectable, albeit marginal, position in white southern society for two
reasons. First, she defies the gender convention of female obedience. By disobeying Floyd‟s
orders to stay in the truck and entering the pool hall, Lily steps out of her assigned place, literally
and figuratively. Second, Lily defies the racial convention of segregation. Mere contact with a
black man in an all-black pool hall makes her an outcast among Hopewell‟s whites, for her
family and neighbors hold her partially responsible for the interracial encounter and scorn her for
putting herself in such a position. Regardless of whether she lies in court, or tells the truth and
defends Armstrong against Floyd‟s false allegations, her family and neighbors will revile her for
violating the communal norms regulating relationships between the sexes and the races. By
breaching the same social codes that Armstrong does, Lily becomes as much a victim of white
southern society as the black youth.
Like Campbell, Grooms also blurs the lines between the oppressed and the oppressor,
between the victim and victimizer. What is different in Bombingham is that an African American
character plays the dual role of victim and victimizer. Whereas Walter the child protests the
oppression of African Americans in the Jim Crow South, Walter the soldier condones and
participates in the oppression of the Vietnamese during the American war. Whereas he
embraced nonviolence as a means to resolve domestic problems in Birmingham, he embraces
violence to resolve international problems in Vietnam. Whereas he mourns the senseless death
of his friend Lamar in 1963, he senselessly kills an old Vietnamese civilian in 1970. The
violence Walter witnesses in Vietnam is as senseless as the violence he witnesses in
Birmingham; the difference is that Walter has evolved from being the victim of violence in the
United States to being the perpetrator of violence in Vietnam.
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Bombingham thematically links the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in the
same way that Martin Luther King linked the two phenomena. Grooms acknowledges that
King‟s thought informs both the Birmingham and the Vietnam chapters of Bombingham:
King recognized morality doesn‟t stop at the state line. [The civil rights
movement and the peace movement] blend one into the other and it‟s really the
same issue. So finally that was the theme that I caught. Here you have Walter
Burke who marched with King and had learned some lesson in the Civil Rights
Movement. Now he‟s in Vietnam shooting people, so what has he learned? What
has happened to his sense of morality that he eventually described as being
“loose.” Somehow he‟s been shaken loose from his morality and from his faith.
Being moral is a day-to-day, minute-to-minute journey, and it requires standing
for something or somehow being engaged. You can‟t just float through. If you
do, you‟re going to find yourself floating over to Vietnam and getting involved in
what we can look upon now as a foolish war, if not an immoral war, and you will
do things that are ultimately immoral, things that cut against what you know is
right. (qtd. in Melville 88)
Walter‟s use of the term “loose” throughout the novel reveals his profound isolation from
others and his skewed sense of morality. Like Floyd and Lily‟s actions, Walter‟s looseness is
understandable. As an eleven-year-old in Birmingham, Walter loses not only his best friend
Lamar in 1963, but also his mother to terminal brain cancer. Walter‟s relationship with his father
and sister deteriorates in the wake of his mother‟s death, and he begins to perform poorly in
school. Walter thus identifies 1963 as the year his dream died: “I became loose. So loose that I
seemed to go in all directions at once, and nowhere at all” (12). Yet such looseness is dangerous.
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Walter the soldier concludes that “[w]hen you forget” the moral lessons that you learned as a
child, “you become loose and lost and you do things you regret” (184).
Grooms proposes that King‟s empathic philosophy is the solution to Walter‟s looseness.
The act of writing a letter to Mr. and Mrs. Jackson and trying to forge a connection with them
forces Walter to acknowledge that he is not, in fact, connected to anything or anyone, and that he
is blindly participating in the immorality of war. He acknowledges that he, “more than most,
ought to know right from wrong” because he has heard King speak (185). Although other
soldiers might behave immorally toward the Vietnamese, just as white racists behave immorally
toward blacks in the United States, Walter recognizes a crucial distinction between him and other
purveyors of violence: “they had never been to a civil rights workshop. They had never heard
Reverend King” (300). Reflecting on his callousness in Vietnam, Walter repents: “I wasn‟t
raised this way, and I have been in the civil rights workshops with Reverend King. I know
better” (300).
Throughout Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine and Bombingham, Campbell and Grooms prick
the reader‟s conscience to remember and reflect on Martin Luther King‟s empathic philosophy.
Like Walter, we know better, for we are also heirs to King‟s legacy of love and nonviolence.
Decades after King‟s death, his message about the importance of empathizing with all human
beings—black and white, male and female, poor and privileged, American and Vietnamese—still
resonates.