Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel, Song of Solomon, paints a stunning portrait of Black communities. Her characters, shoved to the margins by white culture, nevertheless live robustly. We meet Macon Dead (the Third), known universally as Milkman; his father Macon Dead whose fortune came from his wife’s father, a doctor, and from his own pennypinching as a landlord; Milkman’s mother Ruth, daughter of the doctor, thoroughly unhappy in her circumstances; Milkman’s aunt Pilate, younger sister of Macon, who lives with her daughter and granddaughter. Macon is not on speaking terms with these women. But when he and Pilate were children, they watched white men shoot off their father’s head as he sat on the fence of his own prospering farm awaiting their attack. 

Milkman and his best friend Guitar explore the boundaries of their world as boys, as young men, as full-fledged adults. And as those limits pinch, they push further, Milkman into his family history, Guitar into acting on behalf of their race. The WWII vets at the barbershop share their experience. “And you not going to have no ship under your command, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three.” 

Pilate is a social outcast – after her umbilicus dropped off, she healed with no navel. “Even a traveling sideshow would have rejected her, since her freak quality lacked that important ingredient – the grotesque. There was really nothing to see. Her defect, frightening and exotic as it was, was also a theatrical failure… Finally Pilate began to take offense... she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair… Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?” 

The novel really sings when Milkman, in search of a fortune found and abandoned by Macon and Pilate on the run from their father’s killers, travels south from Michigan, eventually to a village in Virginia where he is invited on a coon hunt. After tramping through dark woods, falling behind his partner, he sits against a tree and just listens to the dogs and hunters off somewhere in the night. “.. the dogs spoke to the men… and the men agreed or told them to change direction or to come back. All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeeee’s of a cornet, the unh unh unh bass chords. It was all language… No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them."

This is a beautifully written story about remarkable people – take time to read it!

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage, by Tayari Jones

Barely over a year into their marriage, Celestial and Roy, a rising Atlanta couple, visit his parents in rural Louisiana. Knowing his mother’s discomfort with his choice of a city girl, independent and artistic and ambitious, he opts to lodge with Celestial at a motel not the house. Which proves fateful: he is accused of raping another guest, and we watch the well-greased skids as an African American man is in quick succession accused, tried, convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated, with little concern for due process, legal subtleties, or opportunity to assert his innocence.

This novel is told in first person, in the voices of Celestial, Roy, and Andre, Celestial’s childhood friend and confidante, who introduced her and Roy.

Through an exchange of letters we watch the couple’s relationship devolve. Celestial’s prosperous family gladly foots the bill for appeals, but her visits dwindle as her business, hand-sewing fabric doll-babies, takes off. Roy supported her dream before his own was derailed, but the incongruity between her life and his becomes an intolerable burden. Celestial writes:

“At your mother’s funeral, your father showed what the connection is between husband and wife. If he could have, he would have gone into the grave instead of her. But they lived under one roof for more than thirty years. In some ways they grew together and grew up together, and had she not died, they would have grown old together. That’s what a marriage is. What we have here isn’t a marriage. A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.

I blame it on time, not on you or me. If we put a penny in a jar for each day we have been married, and we took a penny away every day we’ve been apart, the jar would have been depleted a long time ago... The last three times I have visited, we said almost nothing to each other. You can’t bear to hear about my days and I can’t bear to hear about yours.”

Her friend Andre claims more ground based on their lifelong kinship, and Celestial finally stops waiting for the end of her husband’s twelve-year sentence. These young men are careful in how they treat each other - both want Celestial, but both respect her career, her choices, her needs. And they respect each other, which doesn’t make it any easier when they finally face off as rivals.

These characters remind us of what “civilized” means: having a highly-developed society and culture; polite, urbane, refined. In our current climate of polarization and intolerance, such characters might seem quaint - yet it is their conviction that civility is essential that makes their dilemma so striking. It would be easy to put a gun in the hand of Roy, maybe Andre as well, but Jones has greater range than to settle for the predictable solution. She dives deep into her characters’ love and anger and loneliness, and doesn’t let anyone off the hook as their desires collide.

She offers us different versions of marriage: Roy’s mother, pregnant at 16 and abandoned by the baby’s father, meets Roy Hamilton who not only marries her and adopts the boy but loves him as a son, honoring him with his own name, fathering no other children who might displace his love for the boy. Celestial’s mother divorced, and her second match was for love. Andre’s father left his mother, marrying another woman and raising children with her - at which point Celestial’s father positioned himself as a father to Andre.

These families disapprove of the affection they observe blooming between Celestial and Andre - “Aren’t you still married?” - but in Roy’s absence, she discovers in her oldest friend a deep understanding she cannot push away. Jones doesn’t take sides - she gives as much weight to Roy Sr. and Celestial’s parents as to Celestial and Andre. All their convictions are heartfelt, and utterly at odds. Someone has to lose.

Here’s a sample of how she puts it:

Gloria [Celestial’s mother] said, “I raised her to know her own mind.”

My father [said], “What is all this stuff about love and her own mind?... What did Roy do to deserve any of this? He didn’t do anything but be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Though this is a story about marriage, it is also inescapably a story about what it is to be black in America. Roy’s college degree and rosy future mean nothing in prison - he is reduced to a man without agency. And it’s clear that if this can happen to him, it can happen to any man of color. When white people complain about the term ‘white privilege’, it is without experience comparable to a black man’s that demonstrates what that really means: the ground of assumption that one is dangerous, even criminal, regardless of one’s circumstances. ‘White privilege’ means one is not automatically at risk of suspicion or arrest or death for wearing a hoodie, browsing in a store, driving a car, renting an AirBnB ... anything you might do in the course of your life. I recently watched a YouTube video called “Birdwatching While Black,” a droll but not funny guide about how to avoid getting arrested or shot while in the field identifying birds, if you happen to be black.

Thank you, Tayari Jones, for making a world real, for plumbing the hearts of people who mean each other no harm, but who in the end lack the choice.

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This brief book, winner of the National Book Award, consists of what a man tells his fifteen-year old son about the world, and how he may prepare himself for what lies ahead. The author is Ta-Nehisi Coates, an African American journalist who grew up in the ghettos of Baltimore and Philadelphia. His subject is the Dream, by which he means white America, and the primordial threat it represents to the African American's body:

Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre-eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society, and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white...The new people were something else before they were white - Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish - and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again... The elevation of the belief in being white was ... achieved through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. 

Coates reviews his life, from his childhood in which If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.

But he finds freedom in the library, where he can read what he wants and learn in ways that fit his experience and curiosity. He goes on to Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, DC, where truly the best and brightest of black culture are assembled. He meets students from other cities, other countries, other world-views, and his eagerness to learn takes him to Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where every day he requests three books, and from them absorbs history, culture, philosophy. He meets, among other young people, his wife. But even within this cultural elite, the inescapable fact of their status in America is brutally present.

Prince Jones was an accomplished handsome young man, a paragon of what Howard University meant to Coates. But one night Prince Jones was murdered by a Prince Georges County, Maryland, police officer. What facts we know seem incomprehensible: Jones was driving from PG County through DC into northern Virginia to see his fiancee, and during that journey was pursued by a lone PG County undercover cop in drug dealer's clothes, through three jurisdictions, then shot in his car a block from his destination. The cop confronted Jones with his gun drawn and no badge. The cop's quarry was a drug dealer whose physique was not even remotely similar to Jones'. He claimed Jones tried to run over him with his jeep. During the inquiry, it was learned: The officer was a known liar. A year earlier he had arrested a man on false evidence. Prosecutors had been forced to drop every case in which the officer was involved. The officer was demoted, restored, then put out on the street to continue his work...[after the inquiry into Jones' death, the officer] was charged with nothing. He was punished by no one. He was returned to his work... 

The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies - the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects - are the product of democratic will... The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

Coates delineates an unbridgeable gap between white America and the lives of black people. He traces this schism to the roots of our country, in which slave-holders prevailed in keeping slavery legal in the new nation. He is not wrong about the peril of being black in America, where no matter who you are, if you're black you can be shot down by a police officer - or citizen - so blinded by fear that imagining a weapon in a black man's hand is sufficient cause to kill him - and be exonerated for doing so.

Coates does not believe in God. He believes that body and soul are one, and that this life is all we have. He knows he is living in the cross-hairs, vulnerable at any moment to have his body taken from him by someone he does not know, who sees in him only a threat. He conveys this danger to his son, hoping it will not keep him from expressing his vitality.

Given the outcome of our recent election, what can people he identifies as white do?
We can challenge the militarizing of police departments: using armored vehicles and body armor and automatic weapons reinforces the attitude that they are at war, constantly under threat, patrolling for enemies, ready for combat.
We can challenge the justice system that allows murderers to walk free if those they killed were black.
We can challenge the penal system, in which for-profit prisons create a demand for cells to be filled.
We can challenge our own assumptions and fears, which form the basis of this deadly system.

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

Harper Lee completed Go Set a Watchman in 1957, and her agent shopped it to publishers. J.B. Lippincott wanted to know what else she'd written, so she worked on what was published as To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. This earlier-written novel, set fifteen years later, was only published in 2015. Harper Lee died in February 2016 at the age of 89. The merits and shortcomings of this new book have fed an argument about Ms. Lee's state of mind when she agreed to pursue publication - was she senile? Was she pressured by her heirs, who stood to make money off sales of a book sure to be (as it has been) a best-seller?

It is the subject, race, and her approach to it, that have caused this schism: some critics have praised the novel highly, while many others have condemned it sharply. Race, segregation, and inequality are - should be - much on our minds these days. Atticus Finch, embodied for many in Gregory Peck's august, sensitive and upright performance in the wonderful film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, is a man of courage who stands up for right and justice, defending a black man on trial for the rape and murder of a white woman in a small southern town. His lawyerly pleading wins our hearts: "Here," we think, "is a man intent on righting wrongs, unafraid of those who oppose him!"

Spoiler Alert - I'm going to discuss the entire book. If you want to read it without knowing what happens, stop reading this now!

For the first half of Go Set a Watchman, that's the Atticus Finch we see - older now, afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis but still at 72 a lawyer at work, an honest and straightforward man. Then Jean Louise (Scout), his daughter, home on a visit from New York, listens in on a meeting of all the notable white men in the town as they discuss methods of maintaining segregation. And there is Atticus, introducing the out-of-town bigot who leads the way. Atticus stands beside this hateful small-minded man, giving him respect and attention.

Jean Louise spends the rest of the book wrestling with questions not only of justice and race but also, closer to home, of her sense of betrayal at her father's abandonment of everything he taught her to believe. How could he support these rabid race-baiters? How could he lend his imprimatur as a respected member of the town, to this loathsome campaign?

It's hard not to think of William Faulkner's novel Intruder in the Dust, in which a black man is jailed and narrowly avoids being lynched for the murder of an up-county (white trash) man - a murder he did not commit but will not unbend to address his accusers to deny. Faulkner riffs on repudiation, on the bravery of an old white woman and a pair of teenage boys, one white and one black, who save the imprisoned man because they have to, as honest people. They take on themselves the duty to repudiate the lies about Lucas, because he will not come to his own defense but such lies must not stand, must not be allowed to destroy him. Hate and ignorance must be resisted.

Atticus justifies his support of the segregationist cause by claiming that black people in the south are more backward than whites, that the Supreme Court decision (presumably Brown vs. Board of Education) is pushing them ahead too fast, that the NAACP are meddling outsiders forcing their will upon ignorant locals, that black people are not ready to have equal stature with whites. Jean Louise rejects his arguments and rages against him, but in the end Ms. Lee frames Jean Louise's push-back as a step toward maturity: Atticus has been Perfect, and finally she can see he is not, and bash him off the pedestal he's been on all her life. This liberates her, but leaves unresolved the question of whether, if even fair-minded Atticus has joined the lockstep racist movement, it is either acceptable or inevitable to push for a society in which African Americans must remain an underclass.

Harper Lee has pulled a bait-and-switch on us - she lays out the arguments for and against segregation, and racism itself, but at the last minute reduces these to the catalyst by which Jean Louise gains an adult view of her father.  She gives us a southerner's view of the Civil War by differentiating the social structure of the slave-holding states from the rest of this country, and using that to justify - and excuse - racism, Klan activity, Jim Crow.

How you feel about this book will depend heavily on how well you can compartmentalize: writing skill and vivid characters, separate from the world in which they live, and their attitudes. I admired Harper Lee's writing more before I compared her willingness to rationalize the racist structure of small-town Alabama, to Faulkner's solid repudiation of it in rural Mississippi.

Fruitvale Station

Fruitvale Station all the time

This rumpled sky, rough worthy of Van Gogh,
a hundred colors graying into dusk
a palette mixed of white in black to mimic coming dark.

At Fruitvale Station New Years Eve (2008-9) a young black man was jumped then
    policed to death
      subway crowd recording pictures under threat
         till the train moved out.
Fear, hysteria, chaos, reactions under duress -
      we have divided our nation into warring camps while
Justice, head in hands,
      catches the action too late for
              calm,
                      consideration,
                          the weighing and balancing for which we turn to her after, torn,
                          we have berserked.
We grieve an instant before the next bad-news pulse
     beats away this alarm.
Shrug or shout later, how change that fraught interface between
        what we fear and
        those anointed as our bulwark,
                            frail tho they be,
                            not up to correct swift determinations,
                            just jumping at noise, struggle,
         a young man harmless till they thugged him?

It's coming evening now, and for now
    crickets,
    locusts,
    cicadas soundtrack the time -
sirens,
helicopters
pop of guns come later
    - Friday night in America
           young men and cops are cruising armed,
                   looking for a hair out of place,
                   trigger to take offense.
How do we collectively learn to draw a breath,
     three,
          ten,
             to see past the fear-paintings that debase our nature,
             to prove we are the homo sapiens -
              the thinking beings -
 we are named?

Fruitvale Station again and again -
      why are young men of color the enemy?
      why are police an occupying army?
Life is a wink between waking and gone -
       why do we invest in damage and defense
       when the door to the stars yawns near and cold?
When we lie in ashes, my atoms and yours rejoin once more.

Start by remembering:
   this is who we are:
       bits of one whole
           so soon to return
    having learned -
  nothing?

9/4/2015