Black Mirror

Some thoughts on James H. Cone's memoir, "Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody"

Creatures, there’s this thing you may have heard about called “Catholic anthropology,” and I have at times struggled to understand why it’s here. A Catholic anthropology is an account of human personhood, I guess: distinctive features of being human, and/or a person, and because we’re made in the image of God, these distinctive features also tell us something about God. The Theology of the Body is maybe the best-known of these anthropologies right now? In TOB the distinctive features of human personhood include (it’s been a long time since I read it, so this is from memory) loneliness and longing—our incompleteness and our direction toward some other for whom we are made.

This is all true and evocative, poetic, the human body as a word spoken by God. TOB is both challenging and consoling in the way it takes some of our most confusing, embarrassing, or painful experiences—loneliness, sexual desire, embodiment itself—and shows us God working in and through these experiences. But TOB also emphasizes sex difference in a way that can make it a clumsy or inappropriate vocabulary for describing the possible purposes of love between women or between men. Even celibacy becomes the ultimate heterosexuality, because God is the ultimate Other to Whom one’s eros might be directed.

I’m working now, with colleagues, on a book project that will outline some possible Catholic anthropologies grounded in the experience of same-sex attraction. And this is all by way of walking slowly into the real subject of this newsletter, which is James H. Cone’s memoir, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, and how his account of becoming the father of Black Theology helped me understand what this project could be and why it matters.

I read Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree in summer 2020, in retrospect an especially good time to read it. And when I thought about it later, or told my partner about it, etc., I’d summarize it as, “It’s about how the experience of Black people in America reflects or embodies Christ on the Cross—a persevering faith in spite of humiliation and violent death.” And that’s true, that’s one thing that book is doing. In Said I Wasn’t, Cone makes clear that he sees Black self-hatred as one of the greatest enemies his theology sets out to confront and defeat. And seeing oneself in Christ—in God—makes self-hatred seem foolish, perverse, and even ridiculous.

But what I didn’t quite grasp until I read the memoir is how much Cross is a response to critiques of a Cross-centered theology, especially feminist and womanist critiques. Cone talks about that stuff, sure, there’s a chapter, but in the memoir he pretty strongly implies that these critiques drove him to the thinking that produced the book. There are a lot of ways to warp a cruciform theology: It can become a way to see yourself as the eternal victim, never acknowledging the ways you also abuse power; it can become a Job’s-comforters thing you say to other people whose suffering you’re unwilling to relieve or whose oppression you’re unwilling to confront; it can become, pretty specifically, a thing women tell one another to keep them from acknowledging how much of their suffering is caused by injustices inflicted by men they also maybe love. There are also arguments, though I don’t personally find these compelling and so probably I don’t understand them super well, that a Cross-centered theology makes violence an act of God, makes violence holy. “There is power in the Blood” is a claim that sacrifice has power: Jesus the Lamb, slaughtered on the altar, dies to redeem us, and so death and blood and killing are not only justified but central to our own justification. I think Cone feels the force of all these critiques and I suspect he saw them played out in real people’s lives. But—

—but he also saw the Cross in the life of the Black church. He saw that the Cross gave Black people strength to resist, to endure, to hope, and to love. On an intellectual level he grasped the critiques of his theology better than I do, for sure. But on a gut level… he had seen the power in the Blood.

And these are the two roles of a Christian anthropology. I hope it is not pretentious or arrogant to say that I saw my own project mirrored in Cone’s, and reading his memoir made me thrilled to dive into my work. Because a Christian anthropology is about the ways human experience and the inner life of God mirror one another. We see ourselves in God (yes, we are there too, no matter what “the world” may say about us). And we see God in the lives of those like us (yes, God is there too, no matter how the world may mistrust or try to tame Him). Cone learned how to live as a Black man surrounded by racist violence from the Gospels. And he learned the truth of the Gospels from the daily life of the Black church.

Said I Wasn’t is a fast, vivacious read. It’s an intellectual memoir, not a personal one—there are glancing mentions of a wife and family, but the story of the book is Cone’s work as a theologian. He’s plainspoken and fearless. He’s quite clear that he could not care less what white people think of his work: He’s not writing for us. And that isn’t said in a way that’s, I don’t know, self-impressed or posturing. Instead there’s a brash enjoyment in it, a kind of, “Do you think you can take it?” The urgency of his work carries a thrill, for him and for me as a reader.

Cone robed in majesty, though not as much as he perhaps is now, photographed by “Coolhappysteve” and used under a Creative Commons license.