It should come as no news that contemporary art lacks an idiom appropriate to heroism. We know our heroes too well, we are too intimate with their interior lives ever to allow them to re-assume the epic pedestal. And even the hero of romance—a man like us only more so—has long been a problematical figure. The anti-hero is still the man—although the woman is now allowed to step into the shoes vacated by the romantic hero. She has so much catching up to do since the days when she was only a heroine.

Perhaps no one would miss the old-fashioned male hero if it weren’t for the needs of minorities not yet blasé with heroism—the sort of minorities for whom we prescribe, condescendingly, “role models.” Back in the days when we English speakers were a small and threatened community on the outskirts of Europe, constantly in danger of being overrun by idol-worshiping Viking pirates, we had role models. Beowulf and Byrhtnoth and even Jesus Christ and the other heroes of the Christian religion towered above us and acted as our hedge against melancholy contingency. We also had a home for these heroes in an epic tradition that remained vigorously alive.

It is not the least of the dilemmas confronting black Americans that, while they continue to see themselves as a separate and to some extent a threatened community in need of heroes, they share with the larger cultural entity of which they are a part artistic forms