Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

58 // WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN
episode in which Margaret is visited by "a dark man, / Who did not look like a
Christian / But was blacker than an Egyptian" (11. 310-12). Asked his name, he
replies,
"They call me Beelzebub,
And rightly so.
I am the king and lord of all the devils.
I never cared for goodness,
Loving only the worst of sins." (11. 332—36)
Margaret will not be the loser in her encounter with the "dark man., .blacker
than an Egyptian," and in the course of their conversation and struggle where she
overpowers him physically (with God's help), she will reveal him as loathsome,
savage and bent, though unsuccessful, on her deflowering.
"Ha!" she says, "mad and evil man,
Despicable and foul creature,
Beast full of iniquity,
Threat to my virginity,
Be careful not to harm me,
If you ever want to get up!" (11. 367-72)
In various versions of the story, the dark man thereupon vanishes or is banished
to the underworld. 26
The routine depiction of the Black man as devilish and full of vice ("loving
only the worst of sins") responded to the allegorical and moral levels of interpretation
and can also be seen in the visual arts. There in paintings of the crucifixion
of Jesus, for example, one can see misshapen and hideous torturers. Like artists in
all times the variety of ways to show the evil imputed to these tormentors was
wide, but, as we might expect, an available and instantly understandable choice
was depicting one or more of the crucifiers as swarthy or Black. The spongebearer,
the oft distorted figure whom the Gospels record giving vinegar to Jesus on
the cross, appears from time to time as a dark man with what scholars have called
"negroid" features. 27
The most learned discourses of the Middle Ages also contain material that
emphasizes the allegedly unappealing or immoral characteristics of Black people.
Take, for instance, the so-called Quodlibets or topics for university debate in the
arts faculty of Paris in the thirteenth century. The question, "Are white men
bold?" appears as one of these Quodlibets. No doubt intended for humorous
(though learned) reflection among the professionally pacifist white doctores of the
university, the orthodox and self-congratulatory answer was never in doubt. All
one had to do was look up the matter in a good encyclopedia. A book by one of
the most gifted encyclopedists of the High Middle Ages, the Dominican friar