I Yam What I Am: Evolution of the Narrator's Black Southern Identity in Invisible Man

Throughout the course of Invisible Man, perhaps one of the most marked changes in the narrator’s critical consciousness is his relationship with of his Black Southern heritage. Even before he leaves his home in the South, he begins to feel the pressure to distance himself, both internally and in others’ perceptions, from other Southern Black people. In particular, he falls back on his respectable education and what he believes to be his superior intellect to justify the assertion that he’s different from characters like Trueblood, the other boys who attend the battle royal, the supposedly insane vet at the Golden Day, and even some of his college classmates (he says of his roommate, for example, “I looked at his confident mug; he was going to be a farmer.”). At this point in the story, it seems that one of his primary motivations for defining himself in opposition to people like these is rising to the pressure placed on him to represent his entire race in a positive light. He seems to hope that by becoming more “visible” to people like the white trustees as an exemplary model of a Black man (essentially, someone who accepts the injustice he faces, and is willingly “kept running” in pursuit of success despite it), rather than someone who threatens this image like Trueblood or the vet, he’ll set a positive precedent in these individuals’ minds for how people of his race are viewed.

The inclination to distance himself from his Southern roots only grows when he arrives in New York City, hopeful that he can use the anonymity (or, one might say, invisibility) that the huge metropolis offers to forge himself a new identity as a respectable, well-off career man. Despite the narrator’s optimism, however, he soon begins to find that echoes of his past follow him into his new life. To his resentment, the strangers he encounters seem to recognize instantly that he’s a Southerner, despite all his best efforts to blend in with the environment of the city. Perhaps most irritating to the narrator is his encounter with the counterman at the drugstore, who, even before the narrator speaks to him, assumes he’ll enjoy the Southern food in the special. At this point in the book, the narrator is so determined to bury his Southern-ness, and so irritated that the counterman immediately assumes it of him anyway, that he refuses the special, despite the appeal of the food itself, to prove his point. A somewhat similar dynamic plays out in the narrator’s interaction with the Southern man he meets on the street, Peter Wheatstraw. Here, however, he uses their shared Southern identity as a point of connection, underscoring the similarities between him and the narrator, rather than making him feel out of place as the counterman does. However, Wheatstraw seems to represent the type of less “respectable” Black Southerner that the narrator doesn’t want to be associated with, and despite the nostalgia Wheatstraw stirs in him for his home, he is reluctant to acknowledge their similarities.

A critical turning point in the novel comes when, after being released from the factory hospital and staying for some time at Mary’s house, the narrator comes upon an old man selling yams on the street and is hit by a wave of nostalgia. As he eats one, walking down the street in broad daylight, he suddenly feels the joyful freedom of breaking the “respectable” mold he’s tried so hard for his entire life to fit. He comes to the understanding that Black Southern culture has become something inherently shameful to any Black person trying to work their way up in society, and reflects that the simple act of exposing Dr. Bledsoe for eating chitterlings (a dish made of pigs’ intestines that’s historically associated with Southern soul food) would be enough to cut his reputation down to nothing in the eyes of white society. Determined not to continue to delude himself into accepting the same fate, the narrator vows to “continue [life] on the yam level,” identifying openly the pleasures his home and the people who originate from it, and begins to consider seriously which of the attitudes he holds are truly his, and which have been ingrained in him by the prejudice he has internalized.