Rick Moss
Trillin is that rare journalist with a novelist's eye for character motivation and irony. He is also able to make historical details fascinating and give you greater respect for relentless research.
The most unnerving aspect of these stories that date from 1964 is how little we've progressed as a society. Race in America is still the schism responsible for our greatest injustices. Those crimes may get greater airplay today, but we use the same corrupt, systematic processes to assure they're left unresolved in order to protect the status quo. Read these stories and ask yourself what we've really accomplished since 1964.
James Baldwin's words, not the least bit diminished after 55 years, cut the American dream — which is by necessity and consequence of history the White American Dream — down to the bone. He was a man who could easily be seen as bitter and merciless but was in fact simply and courageously after the truth.
Baldwin's letter to his nephew serves as an emotional and gripping preface for the book. The letter of warning and advice one can only assume served as inspiration for Ta-Nehisi Coates' nearly as powerful “Between the World and Me.”
In the book's main essay, through personal reminiscences, historical examples and analysis of current events (the book was published in 1962), Baldwin dispels the illusion that African Americans can expect to be afforded equal rights and exposes the reality — that laws, amendments and court rulings made for political expediency are powerless to institute change as long as we hold on to our false perceptions — and by we, I mean liberals and conservatives alike.
Baldwin was acquainted with virtually every major civil rights figure of the time, including Malcom X, Martin Luther King and Elijah Muhammed, the founder of the Nation of Islam. (Seek out the Oscar-nominated documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro” as a terrific introduction to Baldwin.) He describes in fascinating detail a meeting he had with the controversial religious leader. The author excoriates Black people in America who see their African and Islamic heritage as the foundation for a better future. He sees only false hope in that school of thought. In explanation, he says Black Americans are unique, having been torn from their history in Africa, enslaved and branded as less than fully human in this country, a state that continued to his day and we can easily argue continues on.
Further, he accuses the Nation of Islam and other well meaning movements designed to instill Black pride of inventing false histories. “In order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is. ... An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”
Baldwin's plea is to study history and understand where the truth and falsehoods lie. The reality, is hard for us to take — impossible for most:
“The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors. ... It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is — kidnapped, pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one, who was once defined by the American Constitution as ‘three-fifths' of a man, and who, according to the Dred Scott decision had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.”
At the same time, he warns Black people against causing suffering in ways that they themselves have suffered. “Whoever debases others is debasing himself,” he writes.
Baldwin's answer is to face reality. The institutionalized crime against Black people is not just a civil rights issue; it's a fault line in the foundation of our society that will ultimately pull us all down if not addressed. If we all accept the truth and face these tragic injustices, at least we might have a start. When we all accept the truth, at least we all stand on common ground.
This is a successful tone piece — an extended daydream that drifts skillfully from finely chiseled observations to ethereal reveries skirting the mystical. The plot is minimal, so don't expect much in the way of drama, but there is one twist near the end worth waiting for that flips the point-of-view to the other side of the mirror and serves as an effective reveal.
DeLillo is a great experimenter. He clearly enjoys reordering the most common words in ways that ask you to reconsider their meaning. And by creating a character who, we're told, exists outside of time and circumstance, he sets himself the challenge of using language to communicate thoughts that don't know how to be formed. DeLillo, in other words, wants us to hear what language would be like if generated by a mind that can only reflect and not produce thought. It works, in that respect. That doesn't make the experience scintillating, but for those who appreciate witnessing a great literary scientist in the lab, it's worth a read.
The phrase that succeeded in yanking my head to an oblique angle came just one page into Ta-Nehisi Coates's polemic work.
“Americans who believe that they are white.”
It was a flip in perspective that instantly explained so much about my failure to understand “race” in America. It explained why I've always felt so awkward checking the “White” box on demographic surveys. My ancestors came from the desert by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. They endowed me with a broad spectrum of color. We're not white. We've never been white. “White” was a fabrication needed to justify the enslavement of a people. There is no white.
About a page later, Coates writes, “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.” That line twisted my head the rest of the way around.
This book is devastatingly clear minded and courageous. It's the manner of courage that only comes from anger engendered over generations. I wondered, of the thousands who have read his book, how many started off as I did believing they were liberal minded and enlightened only to be mercilessly slapped down and reawakened?
But surely this book isn't written for us – Americans who think of themselves as white – but for Coates' son and his generation and the children to follow. As Coates says in the final passages, “They made us a race. We made ourselves a people.” The struggle continues with little to point to in the way of progress as rare voices like Coates' make us feel equally ashamed and proud to be human.
THE GIFT OF COURAGE
This, I'm embarrassed to say, was my first exposure to Dave Eggers. The first hundred pages didn't win me over, but his writing — sentence by sentence — is clear, poignant and insightful, so I stuck with it and, by the end, I was a convert. Eggers takes his time and does a lot of meandering by way of looping flashbacks, but inexorably the narrative momentum builds to a glorious, overblown climax of near biblical proportions. You want to scream “preposterous,” and you'd have a perfect right to, but you're having a great time so you ride it out with him.
“Heroes” makes use of a classic “road picture” plot. Josie, the protagonist, is “on a journey to find herself” and the fact that she, with her young daughter and son in tow, are on a physical journey-to-nowhere is about as trite as you can get. But as they say, “clichés are clichés for a reason, because they work,” at least they do in the hands of skilled practitioners.
Josie's a hot mess — a runaway from an absurd marriage and a dental practice that clearly meant nothing to her. She spends endless hours beating herself up and self-questioning while her kids learn to fend for themselves. She berates herself for bad parenting, herself a product of a neglectful upbringing. But in their last ditch trek into the Alaskan wilderness, burning bridges as they go, Josie comes to realize the one thing she can impart to her children is just that — how to fend for themselves and learn to be courageous. In the end, isn't that what parenting is about? Teaching your kids to survive on their own? I had never thought of courage as a gift my parents gave me, and this book brought that fact to light. So for that and much more, thanks Mr. Eggers.
Wordy and self-obsessed, although I suppose readers of memoirs wouldn't be surprised by that, although Delany's colorful and detailed description of life coming of age as a gay man in '60s NYC is eye-opening.