Assignment 7

Etheridge Knight: “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” (pp. 603-04)

The term “bad nigger” is an *archetype in African American life and literature. The term, no doubt coined by whites, describes one kind of black man (another is “Uncle Tom”) American racism has produced: tough, mean, often violent, doomed by his unwillingness “to take no shit / From nobody” (lines 1-2) to prison or an early death or both. Whites use the adjective “bad” in its ordinary sense; but what is bad for whites can be good for blacks and thus, by a simple and ironic reversal, the adjective has taken on the opposite meaning among African Americans–the very best.

Hard Rock (in black slang the adjective “hard” is similar in meaning to “bad”) is legendary even to his fellow-prisoners, who are themselves “bad niggers.” The scars on his body are eloquent testimony to his indifference to physical intimidation and pain, to his refusal to submit to the standards of a racist society. Impervious to fear, Hard Rock has been defeated by the technique of surgical lobotomy. The guards (“screws”) and the “hillbilly” can now taunt him with impunity. The effect on the speaker and his fellow inmates is crushing, representing, as it does, the loss of hope and possibility. At the same time, conceivably, the speaker is warning himself and the other men against the dangers of hero-worship; they must resist and fight for themselves, rather than live vicariously in the legendary toughness of someone like Hard Rock.