Carnival geeks and Voudoun healing: the performance of white guilt and African American empowerment in Eudora Welty's "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden".(Critical essay)

IN "KEELA: THE OUTCAST INDIAN MAIDEN" (1940), A YOUNG MAN NAMED Steve appears in Cane Springs, Mississippi, and begins obsessively telling the story of his time as a barker in a traveling carnival show to a local juke-joint owner named Max. Steve claims that he drew spectators in to see an act in which a "little clubfooted nigger man" (48) was forced to play the role of Keela--to pose as an outcast Indian maiden in a red dress and red stockings, hold an iron rod, growl at anyone who came too close, and bite the heads off live chickens; in other words, Keela performed the role of a "geek." (1) While telling his story Steve asserts, "It's all me, see.... I know that. I was the one was the cause for it goin' on an' on and not bein' found out--such an awful thing" (51). Steve is particularly upset that he could not understand the horror of Keela's imprisonment, while an outsider who came to the carnival was able, after just a few viewings, to see through the disguise and free Keela/Lee Roy.

"Keela" has caused disagreement in the critical community around the issue of whether, as Robert Penn Warren suggests, "Keela" is an Ancient Mariner tale of white guilt, Steve the central character and Lee Roy the victim, or whether, as later critics led by Charles May and A. R. Coulthard have argued, it is a tale in which Lee Roy himself, although largely silent, figures as an empowered scapegoat king. (2) Because Lee Roy speaks only rarely and most of the narrative includes a heated debate between the two white men, those critics arguing on the side of Lee Roy have had to depend on limited symbolic and metaphorical evidence. As Matthew Martin states, "Lee Roy has in fact, never fit into easy categories, either as tortured victim or noble survivor"(23). Lee Roy does not fit into easy categories precisely because he is a performer moving between identity categories, a successful actor playing contradictory roles in a negotiated engagement with the violent codes of the segregated South. Likewise, Steve's and Max's words and actions are unstable performances rather than "true" stories. In her characterization of Lee Roy, Welty employs radically disparate cultural performance moralities from the deference of the conventional Uncle Tom to the iron-rod-wielding dances of the King of Voodoo. In all his performative complexity, Keela/Lee Roy throws the image of the tethered carnival freak/geek back on white liberal readers as an image of their own narcissistic racism.

The plot of "Keela" is seemingly straightforward. Steve, apparently out of guilt, has tracked Keela down in Cane Springs, Mississippi. He convinces Max to take him to see "the little clubfooted nigger man," who lives in a small house up the road from Max. When Lee Roy spots the two white men approaching, he grabs his crutches and begins to listen to Steve's story, answering only with a brief comment or a laugh--"Hee! hee! hee!" (53 passim). Throughout the confessional narrative Max does not believe Steve's story and ridicules him, calling him nuts. Steve ends up getting angry at Max and hitting him, and Max gives Lee Roy a few pennies and takes Steve to his place for a bite to eat. The story ends as Lee Roy's children call him Pappy and tell him they do not want to hear of his days with the circus. Welty describes Steve as young and very sunburned, talking constantly, and "making only one gesture--raising his hand stiffly and then moving it a little to one side" (48). Written during the height of violent segregation in the American South and the rise of Hitler's Nazi youth in Germany, Welty employs the racially charged textual markers of the sunburned youth (redneck) and the raised hand (Nazi salute) to alert the reader that this story is saying something much more complex about racism than the old platitudes of guilt and victimization.

Welty's characterization of Keela as a "geek" is also highly charged. Leslie Fiedler describes geeks as "absolute victims, driven to the black abyss of debasement by alcoholism or the accident of being born black, deformed, and not very bright"(344). (3) In African American slang of this period, however, geek did not mean debased or victimized. Geneva Smitherman in Black Talk defines geek as one "in a general state of exuberance, enthusiasm, excitement about something"(144). When Max takes Steve to visit Lee Roy, "the only little clubfooted nigger man ... ever around Cane Springs" (48), Lee Roy appears neither ashamed nor traumatized by discussions of his performance as Keela. "Little" Lee Roy looks "from one white man to the other, excited almost beyond respectful silence. He trembled all over, and a look of amazement and sudden life came into his eyes"(49). He acts as a "geek" in the African American sense of the term. The contradiction between the definition of "geek" as victim, a stagnant identity, and "geek" as a performer or type of performance serves as a perfect frame for the potentially contradictory readings embedded in the text of "Keela: The Outcast Indian Maiden."

That Lee Roy at times acts the victim has lead critics, from Ruth Vande Kieft to Alfred Appel to John Cooley, falsely to label him simple or even retarded. For Cooley this makes him an example of white writers' inability to portray African American characters who are "whole individual and complex personalities"(125), a valid charge against many white writers. But in this case there is no textual evidence that Lee Roy is either an imbecile or a victim and there is plenty that he is not. (4) Crossing over the race line for any writer means crossing into full, unfettered awareness of the domain of one's own projections, and at best it means actually trying to become the other if only for a fleeting moment. The only realm in which this becoming can occur is the performative. Welty embraces this becoming not only in this text but in most of her fiction. As she writes in The Golden Apples, "There were secret ways. [Nina] thought. Time's really short, I've been only thinking like the others. It's only interesting, only worthy, to try for the fiercest secrets. To slip into them all--to change. To change for a moment into Gertrude, into Mrs. Gruenwald, into Twosie--into a boy. To have been an orphan" ("Moon Lake" 435).

As Cooley so correctly points out, the nature of racism is to see the other as less than human, incapable of rational thought and lacking authority, a complex personality, and the ability to become anything but the victim of one's stereotype, positive or negative. Through a fluid adoption of performances, Lee Roy prevents the limitation of movement that would allow racist epitaphs, socially constricted roles, and limiting economic circumstances to define him, and instead becomes in his conglomeration of performances a "whole individual." He moves through the minefield of a racist society with "miraculous rapidity," putting on and off the costume of racist projections but not becoming those racist projections, dodging the limitations of segregation and bigotry.

Although there were white geeks, the racialized nature of the Keela role played by Lee Roy, as well as the fact that he is playing an Indian maiden, crossing both ethnic and gender boundaries, produces a racialized discourse. I think if we met the same character as white, we would not layer such a long list of epithets of victimization on the performer's head. No one could argue in some fanticized "real world" that a "real" life Lee Roy would probably have been forced or, even in the most limited economic sense of the word, have "chosen" to perform the role of Keela and that the role itself, taken at face value if we can even do this, is a terrible commentary on the complete perversity of racist society or in the case of the white performer spectator society; the actor, the subject's engagement with this perversity--is something much different. No prisoner is simply a prisoner; no slave is simply a slave. Each of these individuals is always a subject confined but not defined by his or her role. Only the constant negotiation of difference through performance can undercut the rigid paralysis or strictly delineated ...