Critical Studies in Media Communication

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Communities of Memory, Entanglements, and

Claims of the Past on the Present: Reading Race
Trauma through The Green Mile

A. Susan Owen & Peter Ehrenhaus

To cite this article: A. Susan Owen & Peter Ehrenhaus (2010) Communities of Memory,
Entanglements, and Claims of the Past on the Present: Reading Race Trauma through The�Green
Mile , Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27:2, 131-154, DOI: 10.1080/15295030903551017

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Critical Studies in Media Communication
Vol. 27, No. 2, June 2010, pp. 131
154

Communities of Memory,
Entanglements, and Claims of the Past
on the Present: Reading Race Trauma
through The Green Mile
A. Susan Owen & Peter Ehrenhaus

This essay examines published reviews of Frank Darabont’s 1999 film, The Green Mile,
as a lens for reading the legacies of American race trauma upon contemporary
sensibilities. Close analysis reveals three communities of memory, each defined through a
distinct relationship to slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy. Through a close analysis
of the relationship between each community’s readings of the film and preferred
meanings anchored in the film’s semiotic structure, we locate the key interpretive strategy
used by each of these communities: One strategy is structured through melancholia and
guilt for the sins of white supremacy; another is structured through mourning and
moving beyond victimization; and a third is structured through the ‘‘negative sublimity’’
of transcendent Christian salvation. We then explicate historic and ideological
entanglements among these three communities of memory. Points of intersection reveal
internal contradictions that call for critical self-reflexive conversation within each
community, and resources for communities to live productively with each other in
relation to the past.

Keywords: Memory; Communities of Memory; Race trauma; The Green Mile; Visual
rhetoric

Drawing upon their disparate readings of Barack Obama’s keynote address at the
2004 Democratic National Convention, David Frank and Mark McPhail (2005) urge
critics to explicate how ‘‘the color line has shaped not only the souls of black folk, but
the souls of white folk as well’’ (p. 589). This charge bears on a foundational challenge

The authors express their appreciation to Bruce Gronbeck for his comments on an earlier draft. A. Susan Owen,
Department of Communication Studies, University of Puget Sound, 1500 N. Warner, Tacoma, WA 98416, USA.
Peter Ehrenhaus, Department of Communication and Theatre, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA 98447,
USA. Corresponding author. Email: sowen@ups.edu

ISSN 1529-5036 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/15295030903551017
132 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

for the national community: how might the distortive legacies of this nation’s racial
traumas serve as a productive resource for learning ‘‘to live, not in the past but in
relation with the past’’ (Simon, Rosenberg, & Eppert, 2000, p. 4)? Although cultural
conversations about contemporary race trauma continue to be deflected or
proscribed in ‘‘respectable’’ venues (Frank & McPhail, 2005, pp. 572
573), trauma
finds its way to representation (Caruth, 1996; Huyssen, 2003; Zelizer, 1998, 2004).
The cultural impact of race trauma is sometimes revealed in mass-market
entertainment film and responses to it (Hoerl, 2008; Madison, 1999; Watts, 2005).
Print and electronic reviews of Frank Darabont’s 1999 film, The Green Mile, provide
such an opportunity. Our analysis of those reviews reveals three disparate and
apparently incommensurate positions of race consciousness in America. Each
position occupies a distinctive historical relationship to anxieties about white
supremacist race violence and its resulting race trauma, and each employs distinctive
rhetorical strategies for engaging representations and discourses about this nation’s
racial contract. Moreover, entanglements among these positions reveal both internal
contradiction and points of intersection; these contradictions and intersections can
potentially foster critical conversation within and across communities about race
trauma and race memory, and suggest to these communities of memory how they
might live productively in relation to those traumas and to each other.
We begin with an overview of The Green Mile and the historical context of its original
release. We identify three clusters of readings of the film that reveal differing positions
of race consciousness; these correspond to reviews in the mainstream white press, the
ethnic and minority press, and the Christian press. We then situate these three sets of
reviews, and the interpretive communities which they represent, within traumatic
memory of race violence in American society. Each interpretive community*each
community of memory*is constituted through a specific relationship to the traumas
of race violence and to the anxieties produced by confronting those traumas. We
explicate each community’s primary rhetorical strategy for managing those anxieties*
melancholy, mourning, and negative sublimity*and offer evidence of those strategies
through reviewers’ readings of key scenes in the film. Finally, we draw out
entanglements among these communities, noting their potential to serve as a resource
for productive conversation about the continuing hold of race trauma upon American
memory and identity.

The Green Mile: Text, Context, and Communities of Memory

Like other films in the late 1990s, The Green Mile can be read as a memory project.
The film’s interior narrative is framed by the present moment, and is accessed by
flashback editing. Following a series of fleeting introductory images that viewers later
learn are located in rural Louisiana of 1935, the story begins its narrative
development with the elderly Paul Edgecomb1 in a retirement home in the diegetic
present. Edgecomb’s memory is triggered by the televised image and sounds of Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing to Irving Berlin’s song ‘‘Cheek to Cheek’’ in Top
Hat,2 which transports Edgecomb (and viewers) back to the Cold Mountain State
 Reading Race Trauma 133

Penitentiary. The interior narrative tells the fictional story of a child-like, towering
black man with mystical powers of healing who is wrongly accused of and executed
for the rape and murder of two young white girls. During imprisonment while
awaiting execution, John Coffey is befriended by benevolent white prison guards who
come to believe in his innocence, yet are powerless to overturn his conviction and are
obligated to carry out his electrocution. The story is structured to align viewers’
interests with chief prison guard Paul Edgecomb, played by Tom Hanks,3 who carries
the burden of this execution through his own mystically extended lifespan.
The Green Mile was Darabont’s second prison film,4 released on December 10,
1999, a crystallizing moment in American cultural memory of race violence. On
January 14, 2000, the first gallery exhibit of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography
in America opened in New York. The collection of photographs of black lynching
victims shocked, horrified, and fascinated almost all who reviewed the exhibit of
photographs and postcards, and those who reviewed the book (Lacayo, 2000; Pyle,
2000; Smith, 2000; P.J. Williams, 2000). In a commentary in The New York Amsterdam
News, Harold Pope, former President of the American Bar Association and Chair of
its Committee on Racial and Ethnic Justice, linked these apparently unrelated events,
claiming that The Green Mile rekindled public interest in problems with the death
penalty, even as Without Sanctuary documented the horrific visual history of racial
bias in American criminal justice.5 Together, the two texts admonish American
citizens to remember ‘‘the bigotry that often precipitated both lynchings and death
penalty convictions’’ and that ‘‘still influences capital convictions’’ (Pope, 2000a,
p. 13).
As for The Green Mile, with few exceptions6 the ethnic and minority press praised
the film, urging readers to see it and offering cautionary notes about disturbing
content. Meanwhile, on March 17, 2000, feminist media scholar Tania Modleski
(2000) published a scathing review in the Chronicle of Higher Education, accusing the
filmmakers of using ‘‘offensive racial stereotypes,’’ and claiming that the film
‘‘enable[s] white people to indulge their most prurient and fearful imaginings about
African Americans . . . all the while allowing them to feel good about a black man’s
dying to preserve the status quo’’ (p. 9). Similar indictments, written primarily by
white critics, appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Nation.
By contrast, the mainstream Christian press offered a celebratory reading, aligning
the race politics of the story with spiritual transcendence and racial healing. For these
reviewers, the material traces of Jim Crow and contemporary race relations were of
scant interest.
Our interest in The Green Mile centers upon two related phenomena: (1) the
markedly distinct readings of the film by differently situated interpretive commu-
nities; and (2) the relationships of those communities to historic legacies of
white supremacy and race violence, as represented by those readings.7 We view
these readings as evidence of the entanglements of cultural memory (Sturken, 1997),
where memory is conceived as a site of struggle, a dynamic field of competing and
intersecting meanings and discourses, constructed by diverse publics, and articulated
through varied media and texts. The contours of cultural memory offer insight into
134 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

the dynamics of a society’s ideological contestation over ‘‘concepts of the nation,

particularly in events of trauma’’ (pp. 2
3). We posit that the three clusters of
readings of The Green Mile reveal lines of fracture that owe to the trauma of slavery,
Jim Crow, and white supremacy, and that continue to trouble American national
identity. Considered together, they reveal the fragmented and contested character of
American cultural memory.

Cultural Memory of Race Violence in Contemporary American Society

The three readings of The Green Mile suggest significant fractures in American
cultural memory of white supremacy and race violence. The sharpest contrasts reside
between mainstream negative reviews and positive ones in the ethnic and minority
press. The contrasts are revealing: One situated audience reads the film as distorted
and sentimental in its representation of the history of race violence in America; the
other audience reads the film as faithful to the history of racial inequality before the
law. One audience is morally outraged by the film’s claims to white benevolence;
the other assumes no responsibility for the burdens of white memory projects. One
audience sees the infantilization of black agency; the other audience sees grace,
dignity, and compassion under horrific conditions. The community of negative
reviewers is constituted through its problematic relationship to a white supremacist
past from which it continues to benefit, whereas the community of positive reviewers
is constituted by absence of responsibility for that past, and the ability to use the film
for counter-memory construction.
By contrast, the community of Christian reviewers is constituted by its grounding
in a transcendent, universalizing narrative that obviates considerations of historical
race violence by celebrating the redemptive power of blood sacrifice. For them, the
film evokes five elements of the Christ story: (1) an innocent man, touched by god;
(2) betrayal; (3) punishment of non-believers; (4) sacrifice of the innocent; and (5)
sorrow and redemption for believers. John Coffey instantiates the first, second, and
fourth elements; the gruesome fates of two morally corrupt white men*a prison
guard and a prisoner*enact the third; and Paul Edgecomb carries the burdens of the
fifth element.
Perhaps most significantly, all these reviewers constitute themselves as audience for
the film and, in so doing, reveal three communities of memory, each with differing
strategies for historical assessment, for reading film conventions, and for engaging the
past. These strategies are organized through each community’s lived relationship to
race trauma and through their responses to subjective memory constructed in
flashback editing. Flashback is a device of particular importance in cinematic
memory projects. As Turim (1989) explains, cinematic flashback ‘‘developed as a
means of mimetic representation of memory, dreams, or confession’’ (p. 6). Films
employing flashback deploy ‘‘their own versions of how memories are stored, how
they are repressed, how they return from the repressed’’ (p. 18). Building on Turim,
Hirsch (2004) argues that much as ‘‘archival footage calls up the image of the past,’’
and ‘‘footage of historical sites and testimony stimulate[s] spectators to recall or
 Reading Race Trauma 135

construct an image of the past, the flashback can actually mimic those acts of
recollection and imaging . . . [T]he flashback is the... most clearly marked cinematic
analogue of historical consciousness in fiction films’’ (pp. 88
89). The interior
narrative of The Green Mile is not only accessed by flashback editing, but flashbacks
are central within that interior narrative to the construction of the film’s ‘‘analogue of
historical consciousness.’’ The reading strategies that each community of reviewers
brings to the film offer insight into their own community’s historical consciousness
and distinct relation to race trauma. We now offer a theoretical framing of each
community’s reading strategies, and then turn to a detailed comparison of reviews of
The Green Mile.

Strategies of Reading: Melancholy, Mourning, and Negative Sublimity8

Melancholy
As we shall demonstrate, mainstream negative reviewers identify through
displeasure with what they read as the film’s failure to represent the ‘‘truth’’ about
the history of white supremacy. They rail at the portrayal of white supremacy as a
one-dimensional caricature of evil, the distraction of viewers from the horrors
to be inflicted upon the black body, and the film’s invitation to identify instead with
white liberal angst in the character Paul Edgecomb. Finally, these reviewers fault
the film’s manipulation of racist rape myths as self-serving, lurid, and ethically
irresponsible.
For this community, the litany of the film’s failures of representation raises the
question of whether any narrative representation can ever fully express that ‘‘truth,’’ a
concern which suggests anxiety about representation itself. In other words, negative
reviewers ground their criticism of The Green Mile in aporia, of which James Jasinski
(2001) writes: ‘‘Anxiety, as inscribed in a text or practice, is an inchoate expression of
the inadequacy of representation or of the inability . . . to make [the] subject fully
present to an audience . . .’’ (p. 489). Aporia concerns anxiety about the adequacy of
representation.9 Negative reviewers manifest ‘‘evidence of anxiety in the text*signs
that [they were] beset by doubts about the representative medium’’ (p. 489). In
this case, the doubt concerns whether narrative film is capable of portraying the
horrors of Jim Crow.
For trauma and memory scholars, a larger question concerns the implications and
entailments of reliance upon aporia. Of these, Dominick LaCapra (2001) writes that
‘‘aporia and the double bind might be seen as marking a trauma that has not been
worked through’’ (p. 21). Communities trapped in traumatic memory are ‘‘haunted
or possessed by the past and performatively caught up in the compulsive repetition of
[trauma] . . . in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically
caught up in a melancholic feedback loop’’ (p. 21).
Negative reviews of The Green Mile demonstrate compelling evidence of an
interpretive community mired in melancholy, victims of a double bind: Beneficiaries
of inheritance through the sins of white supremacy; aware that these sins demand
136 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

atonement; yet denied redemption because no atonement can suffice for the scope of
these sins. Unable to ‘‘work through’’ the trauma of white supremacy and its legacy of
race violence, and confronting it again and yet again, we encounter the condition that
Robyn Wiegman (1999) calls racial ‘‘hyper-consciousness,’’ which ‘‘simultaneously
exhibit[s] anxiety about racial identity and reproduces white power.’’10 Paradoxically,
even as whiteness seeks redemption from its historical burdens, it is always-already
narcissistic, pre-occupied with its own concerns. This community’s reasoning
privileges an inchoate white agenda, precluding the legitimacy of other readings by
devaluing other interpretive communities’ own claims on history and memory. As we
shall show, negative reviewers’ efforts to control the legitimacy of others’ readings
(i.e., to frame them as racist) is evidence of their own anxiety, particularly in the
construction of black masculinity. From this vantage, positive or pleasurable
engagement with the film equals hegemonic complicity with white domination.
Ironically and paradoxically, so does its antithesis.

Mourning
Conversely, ethnic and minority reviews demonstrate marked indifference to the
burdens of white memory and anxiety. Rather, as we will show, they read the film
through the lens of what one reviewer called ‘‘slave day flashback’’ (Bowling, 1999,
p. 14B) in which John Coffey is viewed as an historically authentic representation of
black experience during Jim Crow. Coffey is accused of rape and murder simply
because he is black and in proximity to a crime scene. He is poor and uneducated,
unable to afford or acquire adequate legal representation. Simultaneously, Coffey
represents the possibility of moral black agency in the face of white terrorism. He is
compassionate, he heals without regard for the color of a character’s skin, and he
discerns irredeemable human depravity and punishes accordingly. His death is an
historical entailment of Jim Crow, the inevitable outcome of injustice, poverty, and
failures of the American democratic experiment.
In this interpretive community, a counter-memory of past race and ethnic
oppression simultaneously organizes the film’s reading and celebrates this commu-
nity’s historical trajectory. The putative shortcomings of Jeffersonian democracy (the
source of mainstream white reviewers’ melancholy) are familiar to this community.
They have always ‘‘known’’ the failures through their embodied experiences as
contemporary American citizens, and through ‘‘the shared experience of white
oppression’’ (Gordon, 2003, p. 119). LaCapra suggests that communities which have
moved through trauma are able to articulate and accept loss, can ‘‘distinguish between
past and present’’ and ‘‘recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s
people) . . . while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the
future’’ (p. 22, emphasis added). These parameters define mourning. Positive
reviewers identify pleasurably with what they see as a cinematic representation of
‘‘truth’’ about the past, demonstrating an ability to look back from the vantage point
of cautious optimism about the possibilities for social justice.
 Reading Race Trauma 137

Negative Sublimity
As we will demonstrate, reviewers in the mainstream Christian press identify strongly
with the mystical (i.e., anagogic) themes in the film. Reading those themes
allegorically, they view John Coffey as a Christ figure. In response to negative
reviews, Christian reviewers reply that the ‘‘transparently Christian themes’’ of the
film negate accusations of racist representation (J. Williams, 2000, p. 16). From this
construction of Christianity, The Green Mile transcends history, and, hence, race
relations. The telling and re-telling of ‘‘the coming’’ reminds mere mortals of the
sacred and universal origin of humanity. The Christ figure allegory obviates the need
to deal with the materiality of race slavery and Jim Crow, since its purpose is to
encourage humans to strive spiritually for the divine.
Drawing again upon LaCapra, we illustrate how mainstream Christian reviewers
take refuge in one of the ‘‘relatively safe havens for exploring the complex relations
between acting out and working through trauma’’ (p. 23). Unlike negative reviewers,
whose relation to the traumas of white supremacy is acknowledgment resulting in
melancholy, mainstream (i.e., white) Christian reviewers stand in relation to those
same traumas through deflection to negative sublimity. Indeed, central to Christian
faith is ‘‘keeping faith with trauma [i.e., the Passion] in a manner that produces a
compulsive preoccupation with aporia, an endless melancholic, impossible mourn-
ing.’’ Moreover, ‘‘[t]he . . . death, or absence of a radically transcendent divinity . . .
makes of [material] existence a fundamentally traumatic scene . . .’’ (p. 23) in which
‘‘[o]ne’s relation to every other . . . may be figured on the model of one’s anxiety-
ridden [relation] to a radically transcendent . . . divinity who is totally other’’
(pp. 23
24). The trials of John Coffey are resonantly anagogic.11 Coffey’s execution
is another performative reenactment ‘‘in which victimization is combined with
oblation’’ (p. 24). The diegetic killing of this cinematic ‘‘J.C.’’ necessarily and
indexically signifies the one true Sacrifice above all others. Thus, in the reading
practices of this interpretive community the historical entailments and memory of
racism are simply, and obsessively, deflected through appeals to ‘‘negative sublimity’’
(LaCapra, 2001, p. 23).

Reading through Trauma: Historically-situated Interpretive Communities

Mainstream journalists, including black critics Elvis Mitchell and Michael Leslie,
resist and reject The Green Mile’s race politics. These reviewers center upon its
representation of race, race relations, and history. Objections concern the ‘‘white-
washing’’ of Jim Crow, and the infantilization of black agency.
Negative reviewers claim that the film whitewashes Jim Crow by concealing a
complex history of race relations in American culture. In particular, reviewers are
troubled by the characterization of white prison guards in a 1935 Louisiana
maximum security prison. Stephen Hunter (1999) argues in The Washington Post
that Tom Hanks’ characterization of a white prison guard strains credulity, because
‘‘in the Jim Crow South of the 30s*Faulkner’s South, after all, Penn Warren’s South,
138 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

Welty’s South*the reality had to be cruel and unusual’’ (p. C1). In The New York
Times, Elvis Mitchell (2000) argues that characterizing the white prison guards as
caring and humane ‘‘pushes The Green Mile across the boundary between a movie
about racism and a vaguely racist movie’’ (p. 13),12 a position echoed by Newsweek’s
David Ansen (1999). The Nation’s Stuart Klawans (2000) also is drawn to the film’s
erasure of past and present racial animosity. Concurring with Klawans, Michael
Leslie (2000) writes: ‘‘John Coffey represents a world as unreal, old and Southern
as the 1946 Walt Disney propaganda film Song of the South’’ (p. B2). For these
reviewers, the film whitewashes Jim Crow by effacing the white supremacy that
permeated American society during Jim Crow, and also by substituting individual
white characters’ moral conduct for institutional practices*a common Hollywood
tactic (Turner, 2006) that precludes acknowledging institutionalized racial
oppression.
A second problem for negative reviewers concerns the disempowerment of black
agency through John Coffey, a stereotypical black characterization that enables liberal
white soul-searching and spiritual healing. Richard Alleva (2000) of Commonweal
observes: ‘‘John Coffey [is a] white liberal’s fantasy of a black man and someone who
not only suffers the errors of the white man, but suffers for the white man, redeeming
his oppressors with his taciturn beatitude’’ (p. 11). Klawans (2000) concurs: ‘‘A
simple child of nature, J.C. really wants to die in the electric chair, so he can bear away
the sins of the white men who threw the switch’’ (p. 35). Leslie (2000) muses: ‘‘Does
Coffey save the lives of Black folks harassed by Southern lynch mobs or transform the
lives of sharecroppers, or ease the pain of Black men on chain gangs? No. Writers
King and Darabont forgot to add that part’’ (p. B2).13 For these critics, Coffey is a
throwback to ‘‘phony Hollywood religiosity like the most shameless of Cecil B. De
Mille’’ (Hunter, 2000, p. C1). Modleski sums it up tartly: ‘‘the main black character is
so passive and saintly that he makes Uncle Tom look like Stokely Carmichael’’ (2000,
para. 5).
These blistering reviews contrast sharply with positive assessments of the film.
With few exceptions, critics for the ethnic and minority press approve of the film.
Many report immense viewing pleasure and encourage their readers to see it, calling
the film the ‘‘best’’ of the year and predicting Oscar nominations for Duncan and
Hanks. For these reviewers, the film expresses their sense of black identity and
history; they identify with John Coffey, and find historical verisimilitude in the film’s
representation of the Jim Crow South.
Positive reviewers take enormous pleasure and pride in what they read as the
humanity, dignity, and integrity in Duncan’s portrayal of John Coffey. The New Voice
of New York summarizes: ‘‘He is respectful and reserved . . . gentle and genteel . . . he
possesses miraculous, mystical powers to heal and resurrect those in need of his help’’
(Louise, 1999, p. 20). Similarly, Kathryn Eastburn (1999) of the Colorado Springs
Independent observes: ‘‘Over the course of the film, we understand [Coffey’s] burden
of being a truly angelic man in a corrupt world, infected with evil’’ (p. 27). Nicole
Short (1999) of the Afro-American Red Star describes Coffey’s miraculous powers as
 Reading Race Trauma 139

‘‘a special gift’’ that empower him to ‘‘heal the sick, look into people’s minds, and
bring the dead back to life’’ (p. B6). Nakia Bowling (1999) of The Miami Times
praises the film as not a ‘‘typical movie where the great White hero comes and saves
the poor little Black victim,’’ although she warns viewers that ‘‘‘nigger’ is used more
than one would like to hear’’ (p. B14). Collectively, these reviewers praise Duncan’s
work (Pryce, 1999; Short, 1999). Bowling gushes, ‘‘if Michael Clarke Duncan doesn’t
get nominated for an Oscar, I’m calling the NAACP’’ (p. B14).
The second theme in positive reviews concerns how critics read the film for the
devastating entailments of American race slavery. Framing race slavery as commen-
surate with holocaust narratives, Pryce (1999) writes: ‘‘Reflective stories often tug at
the heartstrings . . . Except when the stories focus on the Holocaust in Germany or
slavery in America’’ (p. 23). The horror that Pryce sees aptly dramatized in The Green
Mile is that Coffey’s plight ‘‘could easily be a true story’’ (p. 23), echoing attorney
Harold Pope’s (2000a) position that the ‘‘hit movie’’ serves as a powerful vehicle for
public arguments about racial and class bias in the death penalty (p. 13). Bowling
(1999) finds the portrayal of racial bias so compelling that she cautions her readers
about experiencing ‘‘slave day flashback’’ (p. B14). Similarly, Short (2000) asks her
readers to ‘‘imagine . . . that it’s 1935,’’ and then to imagine themselves as Coffey:
‘‘extra dark,’’ surrounded by ‘‘an angry mob of men, armed with shotguns and
pitchforks,’’ and lacking education or adequate vocabulary to explain their innocence.
This dramatization of historical race relations is something Short’s readers ‘‘can’t
afford to miss!’’ (p. B6).
The third community of reviewers read the film through the lens of mainstream
(white) Christian theology. For them, the story is an allegorical rendering of the
Passion of the Christ, with John Coffey representing the maligned and sacrificial
Christ figure. From this point of view, the Coffey characterization is uplifting and
illuminating, portraying the innocent black man as martyr and savior.
Paul Zahl (2000) describes the film (and Stephen King’s original book) in
Christianity Today as ‘‘an imaginative and dense parable of the triumph of sacrificial
love over wickedness and false accusation. Christians should be thankful for such a
film being released just before Christmas in 1999’’ (p. 82). Craig Detweiler (2000) in
the Christian Century affirms that Darabont’s ‘‘portrayal of the spirituality of
suffering African-Americans [is] commendable’’ (p. 31), and Duncan ‘‘makes the
most of his role as noble savage and Christ figure (check the initials)’’ (p. 32). Julia
Williams (2000), writing for Human Events, directly challenges mainstream reviewers’
criticisms: ‘‘Some critics see Coffey’s passivity and simplicity as a racist caricature, but
the portrayal is actually just part of the childlike character and innocence Stephen
King was trying to convey’’ (p. 16). In fact, ‘‘the powerful hand of Coffey is the loving
hand of racial healing. That leaves us with its transparently Christian themes’’ (p. 16).
Williams chides negative reviewers as spiritually impoverished: ‘‘Rather than
simplistic, [the film] offers a view of the complexity of life and evil beyond perhaps
what some critics know’’ (p. 16).
140 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

Managing Anxieties: Concealing, Revealing, or Transcending Jim Crow

In reading The Green Mile, minority voices identify positively with race representa-
tions that mainstream (and mostly) white liberal reviewers denounce as racist.
Christian press readers circumvent the entire question of race, in favor of seeking
resonances with the sacrifice of their savior. These findings lead us to ask: what is it
about cultural memory of race relations in (mostly) white mainstream experience
that ‘‘troubles’’ their readings? Why do self-identified Christian reviewers assume that
a ‘‘black-man-on-a-cross’’ allegory is exempt from critical race analysis? More
importantly, what can these divergent readings of The Green Mile reveal about
cultural memory of race relations in contemporary American society? We now delve
into key scenes and themes that figure prominently in reviewers’ readings to explore
these questions.

Constructing White Benevolence

At the film’s outset, viewers and the elderly Paul Edgecomb are transported back to
the Cold Mountain State Penitentiary where the young Edgecomb works as a
supervising prison guard of the crew that runs the ‘‘Green Mile,’’ the cell block where
prisoners slated for electrocution are held and executed. Into this memory scene
enters a new prisoner, a seven-foot tall, 300-pound black man named John Coffey.
The scene’s visual composition emphasizes Coffey’s size; the dialogue establishes his
mental and emotional simplicity. This towering, barefoot giant in bib overalls is a
child-like innocent. His language skills are minimal and his dialect is of the deep rural
South. Coffey obediently accepts Edgecomb’s orders and instructions. Edgecomb
comes to learn that John Coffey has a gift: he sees and feels others’ pain and suffering.
He heals their pain and disease by laying on hands, and has the gift of restoring life.
However, Coffey’s gift wears upon him. As the narrative unfolds, he shares his
weariness with Edgecomb, and ultimately passes the gift of sight along to him.
Edgecomb is a consummately professional jailor. He and his three white assistant
officers are skillful, civil, and compassionate with their death row charges. These
guards’ humanity contrasts sharply with one-dimensional characterizations of
malevolent white men. ‘‘Wild Bill’’ is a psychotic killer and, as viewers later learn,
the person responsible for committing the crime for which John Coffey has been
sentenced to die. Percy Wetmore is a sadistic prison guard who takes pleasure in
tormenting the death row inmates, even to the point of sabotaging an electrocution.
The governor of Louisiana is coldly cynical and unfeeling about the miscarriage of
justice perpetrated against Coffey. Oppositional tensions between and among these
white male characters constitute a simplistic binary of white benevolence vs.
malevolence. The preferred structures of the film invite the audience to identify
strongly with Edgecomb and his associates and to despise the flawed white men.14
Benevolent white subjectivity dominates the scenes where John Coffey is
introduced. Coffey, in turn, is visually objectified through the gaze of the white
officers and other death row inmates. His first appearance is constructed through the
 Reading Race Trauma 141

subjective gaze of an in-take officer who stares in disbelief at the size of the prisoner.
Initially, viewers see a medium close-up of bare black feet, securely shackled in irons
and chains. As Coffey is led into the cellblock, medium close-up shots of other
inmates show them staring in wonder at his passing bulk. Viewers then see Coffey
from the top of the massive shoulders to mid-waist, his head and face literally out of
the frame; they see close-ups of the bare shackled feet several times. The scene’s
measured editing rhythm is calibrated to represent white awe, curiosity, and some
anxiety about the size and shape of the black body. A mobile frame on Hanks (a rapid
dolly-in) registers his minimalist double-take at the approaching prisoner. A series of
eye-line matches between and among Edgecomb and his associates represent their
shared interest in this unusual specimen.
The interior scene, where Edgecomb and Coffey enter the cell for the first time, is
tightly shot in an over-the-shoulder, shot-reverse shot pattern. Heightening the
dramatic intensity of the scene, the pattern is punctuated four times by reaction shots
of the in-take officers watching from outside the cell. At this moment, Edgecomb and
his men become mesmerized by Coffey’s childlike fear of the dark. Given Coffey’s size,
the white jailors are surprised when he asks them, ‘‘Do you leave a light on after
bedtime?’’ Before Edgecomb can answer, the giant black man admits, ‘‘I get a little
scared of the dark, sometimes, if it’s a strange place.’’ Edgecomb evenly explains that
the lights stay on all the time; Coffey registers relief and gratitude. More surprising to
the white guards than the question, however, is Coffey’s gesture of civility. He extends
his hand to Edgcomb for a shake. Non-diegetic music begins to play, marking the
dramatic tension of the moment. Edgecomb hesitates briefly and then accepts the
gesture.
As exemplified by this scene, the benevolent gaze of white masculinity is
controlling, yet wary, about black masculinity. The camera fragments, investigates,
and limits the movements of the black body. Moreover, the scene establishes the
narrative premise for white masculinity to investigate the paradox posed by Coffey’s
massive size and his docility and childlike requests. As the disparities between the
murder conviction and Coffey’s gentleness grow, the benevolent white men undertake
an investigation to discover the truth about Coffey.

Reviewer Engagement with White Benevolence

Most negative reviewers recognize and refuse the film’s invitation to identify with
white benevolence, claiming racial bias in its constructed gaze. In so doing, they reject
the preferred subject position. At the same time, their displeasure with the simplistic
construction of white benevolence constitutes a point of identification; negative
reviewers both occupy and refuse the preferred subject position on the grounds of
the film’s distortion of historical veracity. They read Coffey as a racial caricature and
are revolted by what they see*white narcissism and a re-inscription of what
Modleski (2000) calls ‘‘lurid’’ fantasies about the black male body. Moreover, they
read constructions of white benevolence as beyond credulity, even in a fictionalized
story about the Jim Crow South.
142 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

We interpret these reviewers’ responses as melancholic, exhibiting evidence

of anxiety over the representation of blackness through John Coffey. First, anxiety
arises as the desire to control the racial other, to manage the threat posed by that
other; this anxiety derives from the preferred subject position of this scene. Second,
although they ‘‘know’’ that this characterization is distortive, they are trapped by the
double bind of aporia, ‘‘knowing’’ that no representation can do justice to the
complexity of the ‘‘truth’’ of embodied blackness.
Positive reviewers also refuse the preferred gaze of white benevolence, exhibiting no
concern with white characterization beyond its function as plot enabler for Coffey’s
terrifying ordeal. They identify positively with the objectified spectacle of the black
prisoner falsely accused of rape and murder. For these readers, the visual
objectification of Coffey conveys helplessness in the presence of white terror. In
contrast to negative critics, positive reviewers give the film high marks for historical
veracity, claiming that it does justice to the memory of black citizens who endured
Jim Crow laws and the juridical bias of white supremacy. Specifically, the racial
injustices represented are interpreted as historically authentic entailments of race
slavery. As Pryce (1999) claims, the story of John Coffey ‘‘could have been true’’
(p. 23).
Appeals to relevant historical records offer little or no adjudication of this
bifurcated reading. The Green Mile is set during the peak period of executions,
1930
1939 (Harries & Cheatwood, 1997). This period reveals ‘‘a heavily southern
emphasis’’ across ‘‘extensive blocks of contiguous execution counties in the Carolinas,
Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas’’ (p. 22). These eight
states accounted for 40% (665/1,667) of all executions in the United States in that
peak period (Siegel, Foster, & Jacobs, 1990). Between 1930 and 1982, 60% of all
executions took place in the South. The vast majority were for homicide. Despite
being a numerical minority, African-Americans accounted for half of all those
executed for homicide. When the conviction was for rape*the most common
excuse for lynching along with homicide (Patterson, 1998) and a narrative factor in
the death of the two white girls in The Green Mile*African-Americans accounted for
90% of all executions. Additionally, from 1930 to 1982, 98% of all executions for rape
(443/453) took place in the South (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1982, p. 9). Across
the South, the most consistently applied reasons for execution were homicide and
rape (Johnsen, 1939; Vandiver, 2006; Zimring, 2003).
This historical record highlights another point of contestation among reviewers’
readings of the film. They respond differently to the film’s representations of rape
myths (black male predation on white femininity), the oft cited justification for race
lynching (Brundage, 1993; Fuoss, 1999; Hall, 1979; Howard, 1995; Litwack, 1979,
1998; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, rpt. 1969;
Wiegman, 1995). We turn now to two key scenes where The Green Mile manipulates
visual conventions of rape and race lynching in American cinema: the white mob
(with guns, dogs, and farm tools), and the threat of black male predation upon white
femininity.
 Reading Race Trauma 143

Reading the Specter of Rape and Race Lynching

Coffey’s imprisonment is explained through a flashback re-enactment of his alleged
crime and conviction for the brutal murder and rape of two young white girls. The
scene is edited with cross-cuts between the diegetic present, in which Edgecomb reads
Coffey’s trial transcript, and flashbacks to the past crime scene. Viewers encounter
again the fleeting images from the film’s beginning, but now see that a group of white
men is moving rapidly through fields, carrying guns and farm implements. This posse
overtakes John Coffey, who is collapsed on the ground, leaning back against a log
with his legs stretched out before him. Cradled in each massive arm is the lifeless
body of a small blonde girl. Coffey weeps. He utters almost inaudibly and apparently
incoherently that he ‘‘can’t help it’’ and that he ‘‘tried to fix it, but it’s too late.’’ After
an establishing shot of the pursuers looking down at Coffey, the camera pans slowly
across the lifeless and bloody head of one blonde girl, continuing slowly across the
crotch of Coffey’s bloodstained overalls, to the lifeless and bloody head of the other
blonde girl. The scene emphasizes the admirable restraint of the white posse through
the warranting association of black male sexuality (the panning crotch shot) with
bloodied, dead white female children. Rather than being lynched on the spot, Coffey’s
alleged crime is ‘‘adjudicated’’ through the courts, which culminates in his transfer to
the Green Mile for electrocution.
The mythology of the ‘‘black beast rapist’’ is reprised in a second scene. By this
time Coffey’s mystical powers of healing have been demonstrated and deemed
authentic; he has reanimated a dead mouse and cured Edgecomb’s urinary tract
infection. Because Edgecomb is convinced of Coffey’s special gift, he violates prison
policy and escorts Coffey to the deathbed of the white warden’s beloved wife, who is
dying of brain cancer. In an inversion of the mythic white supremacist rape narrative,
the white guards escort the black man to the bedroom of the white woman.
Audiences are sutured into the scene to look with the physically imposing black man
through the open doorway to the woman’s bed. This editing pattern emphasizes the
power of Coffey’s gaze and the potential of his power. Coffey approaches the sick,
deranged woman, and, over her hostile objections, he sits next to her body. Through
a series of over-the-shoulder shot-reverse-shots, the audience is sutured into the
viewpoint of the four, armed white male guards who watch anxiously as John Coffey
slowly moves toward her mouth and covers it with his own. In this frame Coffey’s
huge black form entirely obscures her frail white frame, and in this moment he draws
out her disease; the house lights flicker, the grandfather clock stops, the building
shakes violently. As Coffey pulls back, the warden’s wife is revealed in soft focus,
angelic and at peace.
Restored to physical and mental health, the warden’s wife rises from her bed to
thank Coffey for his healing gift. In a balanced composition shot, juxtaposing the
woman’s diminutive scale with Coffee’s immense size, she speaks softly and earnestly:
‘‘I dreamed of you . . . I dreamed you were wandering in the dark. And we found each
other, found each other in the dark.’’ She gives Coffey a St. Christopher’s medal and
tells him it will keep him safe from harm.
144 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

Coffey’s jailors return him to his cell. As the sadistic guard Percy walks by, Coffey
grabs him, and breathes the white woman’s disease into him. Moments later, a
zombie-like Percy guns down ‘‘Wild Bill,’’ the psychopathic white prisoner. Once
Percy is restrained, Edgecomb turns to Coffey and asks why he initiated this chain of
events. Coffey extends his hand through the cell bars and has Edgecomb grasp it. By
taking Coffey’s hand, Edgecomb receives Coffey’s gift of sight. Through a series of
fragmented flashbacks, viewers and Edgecomb now witness the truth of the girls’
murder. ‘‘Wild Bill’’ was a white transient worker on their father’s farm; he molested
and murdered the girls. Coffey stumbled upon their dead bodies, but, unlike the
mouse whose life he restored, this time even though he ‘‘tried to fix it,’’ he was ‘‘too
late.’’ A disoriented, speechless Percy is sent to the hospital for the insane to suffer a
slow death from brain cancer. Coffey tells Edgecomb, ‘‘I punished them bad men, I
punished them both.’’ Both Edgecomb and the viewing audience now know that
Coffey is innocent of the crime for which he is to be executed.

Reviewer Engagement with Historical Rape Myths

Within the context of the film’s diegesis, the white woman’s emotional embrace of the
black healer signifies a spiritual communion, a dramatic and transcendent
rapproachment between iconic characters in historical lynching narratives; they
are visual signifiers historically linked in a manner that cued white community
violence against blacks. Coffey was wrongly convicted of raping and murdering white
female children; beset by dementia, the warden’s wife lies dying in her bed. Coffey
heals her, and she gives him a talisman. Both of them, she says, have wandered in the
dark; now they have found each other in a moment of transformative reconciliation.
Not surprisingly, contemporary viewing audiences differ in how they read the visual
juxtaposition of the potent black man and the fragile white woman.
Mainstream Christian reviews align their readings with the preferred structures of
the film. As Human Events saw it, this scene is where Coffey extends the ‘‘loving hand
of racial healing’’ (J. Williams, 2000, p. 16). Christianity Today reads Coffey’s healing
of the white woman as a ‘‘triumph of sacrificial love’’ (Zahl, 2000, p. 82). For the
mainstream Christian press, John Coffey represents a sublime ‘‘Christ figure’’ who
healed his enemies and submitted to an unjust and painful death. Even the Christian
Science Monitor reads the film as a story about ‘‘spiritual healing’’ (Sterritt, 1999,
p. 15). For these reviewers Coffey indexically cues the iconic story of the Hebrew
healer and spiritual leader who sacrificed himself in order to redeem humanity.
Negative reviewers uniformly reject reading Coffey as a Christ figure. The
Washington Post’s Steve Hunter (1999) decries the film’s mystical premise as ‘‘a
combination of bunkum, hokum and upchuckum all mixed together and set to
chords of phony Hollywood religiosity . . .’’ (p. C1). Negative reviewers either sneer
or bristle at the intimate exchange between the white woman and the black man,
played out under the watchful gaze of armed white men. For reviewers mired in
melancholy, there is little to admire because the possibility of inter-racial reconcilia-
tion is structured through white dominance of the scene (armed white men, the
 Reading Race Trauma 145

charitable graciousness of the white woman, the docile obedience of the black man).
The Nation’s Stuart Klawans (2000) dismisses the scene as utterly ludicrous, ‘‘But
look*the scary Negro isn’t bad!’’ (p. 35). Modleski (2000, p. 5) reads the scene as
evocative of ‘‘the troubling psychosexual dynamics’’ of white cultural fetish regarding
the sexuality of the black male body.
Significantly, the scene between Coffey and the warden’s wife is of no particular
consequence for members of the ethnic and minority press. Rather, John Coffey’s role
as healer captures their attention, as illustrated by a glowing endorsement in The New
Voice of New York: ‘‘[H]e possesses miraculous, mystical powers to heal and resurrect
those in need of his help’’ (Louise, 1999, p. 20). Also important is Coffey’s fate, which
resonates with this community’s memory of historical race relations. As Pryce (1999)
observes, ‘‘the fact that a black man in the South is framed for murder is not unusual’’
(p. 23). For readers who have moved on to mourning, the film enables a counter-
memory of American democracy, forged in the aftermath of slavery and reconstruc-
tion (Gordon, 2003, p. 119). Like citizens of the historical period in which the film is
set, the fictionalized Coffey is vulnerable to the prejudices of the white community.
He is poor, uneducated, and itinerant. He is subject to white scrutiny, violence, and
judgment. Spared the horror of the lynch mob, he is (we assume) hustled through the
justice system in a sham trial with little or no competent legal representation.
Ultimately, he faces the terror of the electric chair. No one will save him from his fate,
not even the well-intentioned white men who are literal and spiritual recipients of his
gifts of healing.
For these positive reviewers, the film aptly characterizes the plight of many black
male citizens during Jim Crow. For them, the logic of the film narrative is consistent
with extant historical records, which make abundantly clear the direct lineage
between extra-legal race lynching and the institutional legitimacy of state-sanctioned
executions, endorsed by the due process of all-white juries rendering guilty verdicts in
capital cases (Ogletree & Sarat, 2006; Wypijewski, 2000). Writing in The New York
Amsterdam News, Harold Pope (2000a) reminds readers that The Green Mile aptly
represents the historical relationship between race and the death penalty, noting that
not until 1977 did the Supreme Court rule ‘‘that the imposition of the death penalty
in rape cases, the most racially discriminatory use of capital punishment, was
unconstitutional’’ (p. 13).
Finally, within this group of reviewers Coffey is read as powerful, despite his
vulnerability as a black man living within a culture of white supremacy. His gift of
‘‘sight’’ enables him to intuit moral character because he ‘‘sees all and knows all’’
(Pryce, 1999, p. 23). Moreover, he is willing to assert his agency, as his punishment of
two violent white men makes clear.

Entanglements and Implications for Critical Memory

These interpretive strategies reveal ‘‘the taken-for-granted frames of reference that
orient’’ these three communities of memory (Simon et al., 2000, p. 5), and establish
the parameters for thinking about, learning from, and living in relation to cultural
146 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

memory of race trauma. Simon et al. (2000) write: ‘‘[D]ifferent forms of

remembrance carry different conceptions of what might be taught, what might be
learned (by whom), and how this learning/teaching is to be accomplished within
engagements with the traces of traumatic history’’ (p. 2). This principle is of
pedagogical value to all three communities. Particularly germane to those mired in
melancholy is this challenge: ‘‘[I]f the repetition of terrible stories provides no
guarantee of a redeemed society, are we not compelled to rethink what it means to
remember and what practices might constitute its pedagogical character?’’ (p. 4). In
response, Simon et al. (2000) propose a ‘‘politics of relationality,’’ which compels us
to examine how ‘‘each of us listens, learns, and responds to those whose identities,
bodies, and memories have been fundamentally [shaped] by such violences*impacts
that cannot ever be reduced to versions of our own troubles and traumas’’ (p. 6,
emphasis added). Resources for living with memory of race trauma are not located in
the mythic illusion of unified memory and identity, but in the process of critical
learning across ‘‘identities, bodies, and memories’’ whose histories are interwoven and
entangled.
To that end of ‘‘critical learning,’’ we draw upon two closely related ‘‘technologies
of memory’’ (Sturken, 1997, p. 9) to explicate key entanglements among these three
communities of memory. One is the homologic resonance of The Green Mile’s
narrative structure (Brummett, 2004) with nineteenth century cultural expressions of
the ‘‘suffering servant’’ (Jasinski, 2007). Another is the black community’s appro-
priation of white Christianity’s crucifixion icon, a strategy of resistance against
lynching practices (DuBois, 1969; Ehrenhaus & Owen, 2004; Henkes, 2003).15

The ‘‘Suffering Servant’’

The antebellum idiom of the ‘‘suffering servant’’ is located in the ‘‘tradition of
nonresistant slave stoicism’’ (Jasinski, 2007, p. 33). Here, black agency is imagined as
‘‘fortitude, self-denial, tranquility, patience, perseverance, pacific attitude and
principles’’ (p. 34). Two features of this idiom are particularly resonant with The
Green Mile’s narrative development. ‘‘Virtuous suffering’’ is the product of
‘‘obedience and submission.’’ It ‘‘provide[s] the servant with a mode of agency
through which he reclaims his civic identity and Christian manhood’’ (p. 33). Second,
‘‘the servant’s Christ-like suffering induces an emotional transformation in the
slaveholder’’ (p. 33). Thus, black agency and influence over white domination is
constituted by and through simply doing what is ‘‘right’’ in the sight of god.
The characterization of John Coffey echoes the ‘‘suffering servant.’’ Throughout the
narrative he does ‘‘right’’ by his benevolent white captors, who are transformed
through his actions. Coffey uses his gifts to heal and comfort the redeemable, and to
punish the incorrigible. The ‘‘suffering servant’’ idiom infuses the film’s entire
narrative arc; one scene in particular reveals its potency.
In the denouement following John Coffey’s execution, the narrative returns to the
diegetic present. The elderly Paul Edgecomb tells a female friend that he is 108 years
old, and shows her the mouse, still alive after 64 years. Edgecomb explains that his
 Reading Race Trauma 147

punishment for helping to execute John Coffey, ‘‘for killing a miracle of god,’’ is to be
kept alive and burdened with memory of his own moral failure. Moments before
young Edgecomb leads Coffey to his death, he asks, "On the day of my judgment,
when I stand before god, and he asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles . . .
what am I gonna say? That it was my job? My job?" Coffey replies, ‘‘You tell god the
father it was a kindness you done.’’ The suffering servant returns to god, leaving his
white jailor to struggle with guilt and melancholia, the intractable moral problematic
of redemption.
The homology of the ‘‘suffering servant’’ with John Coffey helps explain negative
reviewers’ displeasure and active resistance to identifying with Edgecomb’s moral
burdens. They were repulsed by Edgcomb’s characterized benevolence and Coffey’s
cooperative passivity, deeming the structural relationship a racist relic, an ‘‘Uncle
Tom’’ stereotype (Hamilton, 2002; Modleski, 2000). The ‘‘suffering servant’’ idiom
informs this interpretive community’s melancholic loop. Through their unwilling
identification with Edgecomb, mainstream reviewers were positioned to share
Edgecomb’s shame and humiliation. Further, since Edgecomb was authorized to
administer the will of the state and execute Coffey, reviewers were not only positioned
with Edgecomb, but, homologically, with the master, the slaveholder who held literal
sway over the life and death of his ‘‘servant.’’ This is the historical legacy of white
supremacy’s absolute power that haunts this community of memory, from which
there is no escape, and no imagined resolution. As descendants of white supremacy, as
inheritors of its privileges, there is no apparent sanctuary for members of this
community, mired in melancholy and hypersensitive to reminders of their legacy.
Positive reviewers, unburdened by the moral obligations of white memory of race
trauma and its legacy, could identify with Coffey as the ‘‘suffering servant,’’ and find
moral uplift in the character’s grace, goodness, patience, and transformative power.
Even as they imaginatively engaged this ‘‘slave day flashback,’’ Coffey’s stoic goodness
and grace mitigated the emotional burdens of revisiting memory of historical
injustice, yet again. As LaCapra (2001) explains, mourning is the ability to remember,
to represent and accept loss, and to distinguish between then and now.
But what one embraces in representations of ‘‘then’’ has political implications for
‘‘now.’’ The ‘‘suffering servant’’ idiom presumes the servant’s need for redemption, an
irony that places responsibility for the servant’s condition on his own deficiencies
(Jasinski, 2007). In the resonances of John Coffey with the ‘‘suffering servant’’ are
echoes of Booker T. Washington ‘‘casting down buckets,’’ of Plessy’s ‘‘separate but
equal,’’ of ‘‘states’ rights’’ and the ‘‘tranquilizing drug of gradualism.’’ By embracing
the valorous qualities of John Coffey, positive reviewers become entangled with the
historically-grounded pernicious assumptions against which that community has
long struggled.16
For Christian reviewers, the ‘‘suffering servant’’ functions as deflection, which
always already points to the negative sublimity of the Passion. Transported beyond
obligations to offer redress for past injustices in this life, in this world, reading
strategies attend to the sublimities of the next. As LaCapra notes that ‘‘the
valorized . . . basis for [Christian] identity lies in its founding trauma; here it is the
148 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

totalizing allure of negative sublimity’’ (2001, p. 23). Similarly, Orlando Patterson

(1998) argues that ‘‘[white] Christianity is quintessentially a sacrificial creed,’’
premised upon the necessity of perpetual sacrifice (p. xv). Obscured by this obsession
with transcendence is white Christianity’s deep entanglement with the performance
of ritual lynching as an affirmation of a sacred order that privileges whiteness
(Ehrenhaus & Owen, 2004).
But the Passion is not only available for deflection from worldly concerns and
historical obligations. Indeed, advocates of racial justice, particularly during Jim Crow,
appropriated the Christ-on-the-cross icon as a representational strategy to juxtapose
against widely circulating images of white-on-black race violence, particularly in
lynching photographs (Apel, 2004; DuBois, 1969). In this entanglement, the
transcendent icon of Christian faith was used strategically to advance a national
anti-lynching campaign, a program of political advocacy entirely consistent with the
worldviews of both negative mainstream and positive ethnic and minority reviewers.

Appropriation of the Iconic Suffering Christ

Through appropriation of the central white Christian symbol for political resistance,
the figure of a prostrate or dead black Christ became a common visual trope in anti-
lynching art (Smylie, 1981). This graphic device appeared regularly in The Crisis. In
Figure 1, we juxtapose a postcard of lynching victim Jesse Washington (1916) with a
Prentiss Taylor (1932) lithograph to illustrate the enthymematic relationship
(Finnegan, 2001, 2005) between the visual grammar of white supremacy and its
appropriation as black resistance. The lithograph responds to the grammar of
objectification and spectacle in the postcard by transforming the black(ened) object
into a human subject with kinship ties (the figure of the woman) and a cultural
context of economic oppression (the cotton stalks).

Figure 1. Without Sanctuary, Postcard circa 1916 ‘‘Christ in Alabama’’ Prentiss Taylor
(World Wide Web Library of Congress).
 Reading Race Trauma 149

White artist Prentiss Taylor originally created this lithograph for his friend,
Langston Hughes, to use in his book on the Scottsboro ‘‘boys,’’17 claiming that it
represented the costs in human misery and suffering brought about by slavery, King
Cotton, and the failures of reconstruction (Haller, 2000).
Taylor’s ‘‘Christ in Alabama’’ claims for the lynched black man a humanized
representation of the desecrated body, and a connection to the divine.18 It foregrounds
the costs to all African-Americans of the founding American economic institution of
slavery. And, through inverted representation of abjection*from profaned lynch
victim to sacred icon*it claims a sacred legacy of suffering and sacrifice, in response to
the abjection produced by race slavery as ‘‘social death’’ (Huggins, 1991).
The different, yet entangled, responses to John Coffey reveal each interpretive
community’s recognition of represented racial abjection: Coffey has to ‘‘go to
the cross’’ alone, forsaken by community and god; he is utterly desolate as he faces the
‘‘sanitized’’ system of white supremacist criminal justice. Whether read as a martyr
touched by the divine, a courageous healer in the face of terror, or as a shameless
stereotype, John Coffey is recognized by all as a condensation signifier of race
slavery’s entailments. Yet despite this shared recognition, and despite their entangle-
ments, these communities’ relationships to race trauma appear incommensurate, and
potentially irreconcilable.
Criticisms of The Green Mile demonstrate a tendency among white progressive
allies of black citizens to reassert control of cultural production of meaning.
Melancholia for lost innocence/ethos produces hyper-consciousness and narcissism,
and a tendency toward racial paternalism. For this community of memory,
relinquishing the ‘‘lost object’’ will require deconstructing the myth of an idealized
political culture, ‘‘rendering impossible any final stable assimilation’’ (Simon et al.,
2000, p. 5) into a Jeffersonian ideal, and abandoning the illusion of white agency’s
pre-eminence in the liberation of blacks (see Savage, 1997). Butler (2004) urges that
these ‘‘narcissistic and grandiose fantasies . . . be lost and mourned,’’ because ‘‘from
the subsequent experience of loss and fragility . . . the possibility of making different
kinds of ties emerges’’ (p. 40). The challenge for this community, as Mark McPhail
(Frank & McPhail, 2005) aptly observes, requires ‘‘people of European descent . . . to
talk openly and honestly about America’s long and troubling legacy of racism’’ by
setting aside ‘‘the abstractions of the social contract’’ and confronting ‘‘the realities of
the racial contract’’ (p. 588).
Having achieved productive mourning (LaCapra, 2001), ethnic and minority
voices may embrace the pleasures of centering themselves in relation to The Green
Mile’s narrative, yet challenges exist here, too. Identification with John Coffey’s
‘‘suffering servant’’ carries its own entanglements. One inadvertent political
consequence of embracing that idiom is to provide comfort (if not ‘‘proof ’’) for
those who resist the loss of white privilege, or who refuse to confront historically-
based structural inequalities, or who continue to harbor racial animus. Casting off the
burdens of ‘‘double consciousness’’ (DuBois, 1903) need not foster indifference to
how one’s community is read by others. Insofar as all political projects are
cooperative ventures, communal self-reflexivity remains essential.
150 A. S. Owen and P. Ehrenhaus

Mainstream religious responses to The Green Mile work rhetorically to circumvent

critical examination of white supremacy’s legacies. There are no uplifting short-cuts
on the road to healing from race trauma. Indeed, the young rabbi from Nazareth was
a social and political activist, ever concerned with the welfare of the material as well
as spiritual conditions of the most vulnerable in his community (Patterson, 1998). To
embrace ‘‘Christ on the throne’’ and reject the materially engaged Jesus reproduces
the white Christianity so deeply implicated in historical white supremacist race
relations and race violence (Ehrenhaus & Owen, 2004).
Since Without Sanctuary’s (Allen, 2000) release, ‘‘the history of lynching is in the
midst of a renaissance’’ (Baker, 2004). Whether in the flickering images of The Green
Mile or in the faces that stare out from lynching photographs, we are surrounded by
ghosts (Barthes, 1981). To critically interrogate ‘‘the claim the past has on the
present’’ (Simon et al., 2000, p. 4), all communities of memory that enter into dialog
must have ‘‘a reflexivity rooted in a recognition that the historical character of [their]
partial and mediated remembrance is contingent and thus can always be otherwise’’
(p. 7). As critics we can foster such dialog by articulating the frames of remembrance
that constitute communities of memory, by mapping their entanglements, and
explicating how communities are implicated in each other’s memory*by design or
default. The potential success of such ventures will demand a reckoning, ‘‘not only
with stories of the past but also with ‘ourselves’ as we ‘are’ (historically, existentially,
ethically) in the present’’ (p. 8).

Notes
[1] The elderly Paul Edgecomb is played by character actor Dabs Greer.
[2] As viewers learn late in the film narrative, the benevolent white prison guards fulfill John
Coffey’s ‘‘last request’’ to see a ‘‘flicker show.’’ Coffey watches the elegant Rogers and Astaire
dance and sing the Cole Porter lyrics, ‘‘Heaven, I’m in heaven,’’ while he is visually framed
from below, with the rays of light from the film projector radiating from behind his head.
Coffey, entranced and ethereal, remarks: ‘‘Why, they’s angels. Angels, just like up in heaven.’’
[3] By this point in his career, Hanks had established his screen persona as an accessible and
unthreatening ‘‘everyman’’ through films such as Philadelphia (1993), Forrest Gump (1994),
Apollo 13 (1995), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
[4] Although The Green Mile was not as successful as Darabont’s previous prison film, The
Shawshank Redemption, it was nominated for several honors and won the Political Film
Society’s Human Rights award.
[5] Pope’s commentary was reprinted in at least three other African-American newspapers:
Detroit’s The Michigan Chronicle (Pope, 2000b), The New York Beacon (Pope, 2000d), and
The Philadelphia Tribune (Pope, 2000c).
[6] See Hill (2000), K. Williams (2000), and ‘‘Hanks’ Oscar-winning talent’’ in La Voz (1999).
[7] Throughout this essay we will use the phrase ‘‘interpretive community’’ when discussion
centers upon reading practices, and ‘‘community of memory’’ when discussion centers upon
the resources from which specific readings arise.
[8] Butler’s re-reading of Freud’s ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’ (1989) has been helpful
to our understanding of key conceptual terms. See Butler’s (2004) Precarious life:
The powers of mourning and violence. We thank Peter Campbell for recommending this
source.
 Reading Race Trauma 151

[9] Jasinski notes that its traditional and narrower meaning concerns real or feigned doubts
about a rhetor’s (or a text’s) ability to respond adequately to a rhetorical situation, as in the
phrase, ‘‘Words fail me . . .’’.
[10] Cited in Watts (2005, p. 192).
[11] Yet another example of the compulsive search for the absent divinity is the cultural
phenomenon of sightings of the Virgin Mary in the irregularity of surfaces and colors of
potentially all physical objects.
[12] Mitchell’s objection to the film is that it falls into the category of prison films about black
male characters. He wonders why black masculine leadership can only be imagined from
within the walls of institutional incarceration.
[13] Others remark on Coffey’s characterization as ‘‘infantile’’ (Aleva, 2000), ‘‘noble savage’’
(Ansen, 2000; Hill, 2000, p. A15), ‘‘dull witted’’ (Hill, 2000, p. A15), and ‘‘simple’’ (Klawans,
2000, p. 35).
[14] The techniques through which these preferred structures are constructed include character-
ization contrasts, cinematic suture, and visual composition. A detailed discussion of film
technique is beyond the scope of this essay.
[15] We have taken some liberties with Sturken’s concept, here. She defines technologies of
memory as ‘‘objects, images, and representations . . . through which memories are shared,
produced, and given meaning’’ (p. 9). Her point is that memories do not ‘‘reside’’ in objects;
rather, rhetors actively produce memories which may or may not be organized around or
through objects. We see the resonances of the suffering servant and the appropriated Christ
icon as productive technologies of memory.
[16] See Gordon (2003, pp. 101
123) for a detailed treatment.
[17] See Hughes (1932).
[18] Other white artists producing images of a black Christ, in relation to themes of the anti-
lynching campaign, include Julius Bloch (‘‘The Lynching,’’ 1932), and Bernard Brussel-Smith
(‘‘Lynching,’’ 1939). See Apel (2004). For a written treatment of a black Christ and black
lynching victim, see DuBois’ (1969) essay, ‘‘Jesus Christ in Texas,’’ originally published in
1911 in The Crisis as ‘‘Jesus Christ in Georgia.’’ This essay was later re-titled and published in
1920 in DuBois’ Darkwater: Voices from within the veil. The opening line of the 1920 version,
‘‘It was in Waco, Texas,’’ alludes to the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco.

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