Funkiness

Funkiness is the unruly force of passion, nature, and human feeling that a system of imposed respectability seeks to discipline out of Black life. The novel presents its suppression not as a matter of individual taste but as a learned social lesson: the same practices that teach thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners also teach people to regard their own vitality as something dangerous to be corrected.

Definition and Social Training

The passage places this training in a history of instruction directed at Black children, beginning in houses marked by porch swings and bleeding-heart plants. Music, it observes, had served to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul; the lesson continues beyond that setting as a curriculum in behavior. Its respectable virtues—thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners—are therefore shadowed by a second purpose: to make people abandon what the narration calls funkiness.

That term gathers together passion, nature, and the wide range of human emotions rather than naming a single feeling or style. The narration makes the concept expansive and bodily. Funkiness may erupt, crust, drip, flower, or cling; it is not simply an idea but a force that appears in forms that institutions and individuals try to wipe away, dissolve, or fight. Its natural imagery makes suppression look like a campaign against growth and life itself.

The Discipline of Respectability

The struggle against funkiness extends across the body and everyday behavior. A laugh must not become a little too loud, enunciation must not become a little too round, and a gesture must not become a little too generous. People hold in their behinds lest their movement sway too freely. When wearing lipstick, they avoid covering the entire mouth for fear that their lips will seem too thick, and they worry repeatedly about the edges of their hair.

These are not isolated cautions: their accumulation shows respectability operating as constant self-surveillance. The repeated fear of excess turns features and gestures into potential evidence against the person who bears them. A body’s natural expressiveness is measured against a social standard that demands restraint, making the effort to appear acceptable an ongoing fight rather than a settled accomplishment. The passage says that the battle continues all the way to the grave.

Resistance and Meaning

The language used to describe funkiness also exposes the violence hidden inside its supposed correction. Where vitality appears, it is wiped away; where it takes hold, it is dissolved; wherever it persists, it is fought until it dies. The contrast between these acts of eradication and the life-bearing verbs—dripping, flowering, clinging—gives the idea its central tension: what the discipline labels improper is also what makes human feeling vivid and various.

Funkiness thus names both what the lesson of good behavior seeks to eliminate and what that lesson reveals about the force it fears. The passage does not treat natural passion as a defect that respectability successfully repairs. Instead, its relentless account of policing laughter, speech, movement, lips, and hair makes the price of that training visible. The struggle is not only over manners; it is over whether people may inhabit their bodies and emotions without treating their own life as something to be subdued.