Black Folk Could Fly, page 6
In every account I heard as a child the dog was always helpful: my great-great-aunt had a story of how the dog had led her out of the woods once when she was lost. I heard a lot of such stories when I was growing up. There was even a long story featuring my own great-great-grandmother, a storm, a mule, a broken-down cart and the heroic ghost dog. One woman reported being set upon by a pack of canines and how this beautiful white dog leapt to her rescue, appearing out of nowhere, and escorted her safely home. When she turned around in her doorway, the dog had vanished.
The sightings always occurred along a particular stretch of asphalt highway—once a trail for Native Americans, then a dirt road for horses and wagons, and, by the time I was a boy, a main route to the beach. Highway 50 cut through an astounding forest of old-growth timber (which was clear-cut only a few years ago). Oak. Poplar. Pine. Especially the majestic, soaring, massive-limbed longleaf pine that has recently become endangered. For me, as a child, this forest was truly primordial, ancient, full of mysteries, dangers, witches, and goblins, and all manner of wonders I had read about in Grimms’ fairy tales. And that amazing white dog. The dog I had never seen. But he lived in my imagination. He still does.
It makes perfect sense to me, now, that one day I would write about that ghost dog and that world of southeastern North Carolina. Duplin County. Chinquapin. A town of only a couple of hundred souls. Farmers, poultry-factory workers, marine-base laborers, largely. But that seeming inevitability was not so obvious to me at the time.
II.
I recently saw an interview with the late, great scientist and science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the telecommunication satellite and author of Childhood’s End and the story that was the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He said: “The mark of a first-rate scientist is an interest in science fiction. The mark of a second-rate scientist is lack of interest in science fiction.” By that logic, I should have become a first-rate scientist, but alas, that was not meant to be. When I first left my small, ghost-haunted North Carolina town, I matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s oldest public university, a bastion of classical thinking, progressive social thinking, high art, and most important for me at the time: scientific thought. My goal in those days: to become a physicist. My interest in science had been provoked by my having gotten lost for hours in space operas like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune, in Star Trek and fantasies about alien cultures and faster-than-light travel, black holes, worm holes, and cool ray guns. (I’ll never forget the day my physics advisor said to me when I was a junior: “I think you really want to be a science fiction writer, my boy.” When I took umbrage, trying to explain away my C in differential calculus, he quickly said to me, “There is no shame in being a writer. More scientists,” he said, “would be writers, but they can’t write. So be grateful you can,” he told me. He himself moonlighted as a writer about fine wines.)
Truth to tell, my interest in science fiction—I had already scribbled, on lined notepaper, two or three seriously dreadful SF novels, thankfully lost to time—led me to study creative writing, and studying writing led me to the study of literature. But we are taking about the highfalutin, canonical type of literature, Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Makepeace Thackeray. It became clear to me early on that there was an orthodoxy at work here. Being in the American South, and at a premier Southern American university, Southern literature was king and queen: Thomas Wolfe. William Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor. Richard Wright. Eudora Welty. Southern literature meant social realism. These were the iconic figures held up to us aspiring young Southern writers. Any penchant for the fantastic or the phantasmagorical was met with discouragement. Ridiculed even. Real writers, good writers, wrote about the world as it was. “Write what you know” was the mantra of the creative writing courses nestled in the bosom of the English department, and my major, by my senior year, was no longer physics but English. I was writing what I knew. I knew about ghost dogs.
III.
Ten things about Chinquapin:
1.Soybean fields
2.Two Black Baptist churches
3.Rattlesnakes
4.Turkey houses
5.Cucumber fields
6.Deer
7.Summertime family reunions
8.Tobacco barns
9.September revival meetings
10.Cottonmouth moccasins
IV.
When I arrived at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1981, the percentage of African Americans was in the single digits—around 4 or 5 percent. Yet those hundreds among thousands made their presence known. For whatever reason, most of my closest friends were fellow African Americans. Was it a need for familiarity? A sense of bonding? The comfort of kin? To be sure, I had many good, close, and true white friends—and Japanese friends and Hispanic friends and Indian friends, and with many of whom I am still close—but the gravity of African American culture fascinates me. I wrote for the Black student newspaper. I sang in the Black Student Movement Gospel Choir. I was a founding member of the Carolina Comic Book Club which was, not by design, but refreshingly, thoroughly integrated and dominated by Black guys, curiously enough.
I never felt any actual pressure to “write Black.” I had great respect for the Gospel of Social Realism and its canon, and I knew it well. But for every autobiographical story I turned in to workshop, I would also pen a story featuring a root worker (a practitioner of African American folk magic) or a space station or a talking dog. Moreover, by that time, I had encountered three writers who gave me what I like to call permission.
The best training any writer can receive is reading, reading, and more reading. Even more than writing, this is also essential. And though I drank down the aforementioned canonical writers of the South with great alacrity and added to that mix a deep investigation of the Great African American Book of Fiction—Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks—I would stumble upon writers beyond those garden walls who had enormous impact on the way I looked at the world of prose fiction. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yukio Mishima. Anthony Burgess. Writers who were not, at first glance, the obvious heroes of a young Black man from rural, southeastern North Carolina.
It was Toni Morrison, already popular, but years before Beloved and the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel, who taught me something of mind-opening importance. With precious few exceptions, African American literature fell under the umbrella of “protest” literature, going back to the nineteenth century and the plethora of famous slave narratives. Even as late as 1970, the year Morrison’s first novel was published, most important African American novels dealt largely with issues of civil rights and social justice for Black people. But Morrison took as her primary subject matter Black folks themselves, not racism or politics. She instead chose to focus on personal and family dynamics, matters of the heart and soul. In her world, the perspective of white folk could go unmentioned for hundreds of pages. For my eighteen-year-old mind this was a revelation.
The writings of the great Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez were my first introduction to what has become popularly known as magical realism. I would never be the same again. (In his Nobel lecture, García Márquez stressed that there is nothing truly fantastical about his work; the world he writes about is uncompromisingly real. I understood right away exactly what he meant.) Here was a writer who wrote about ghosts and a town suffering from mass amnesia and storms of butterflies and women flying up to heaven with the same matter-of-fact language of social realism—in fact his three favorite writers are Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf.
Zora Neale Hurston, whose long-neglected works were just beginning to be rediscovered when I was in college, hit me like a neutron bomb. Here was this trained anthropologist, this Floridian, this African American, who seamlessly integrated folklore with folklife, social realism with the fantastic. Like Morrison, who learned much from Hurston, she did not put the politics of race above the existential essence of Black culture.
Song of Solomon. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was as if they were collectively saying: Go write ahead, boy. Do your own thing.
For my honors thesis I turned in several chapters of a proposed novel set in a small North Carolina town very like Chinquapin called Tims Creek. It featured a young lawyer, a native son, who had become a successful Washington, DC, lawyer. But one fateful summer when he returns to Tims Creek full of a certain emotional turmoil, he runs across a root worker who curses (blesses?) him, and the next night, in the full moon, he becomes a werewolf! I called it “Ashes Don’t Burn.”
Mercy, mercy, me.
V.
Imagine what it is like to have as your first job out of college working for the publisher of two of your literary heroes. Alfred A. Knopf. New York City. The long-time publisher of Toni Morrison. The new publisher of Gabriel García Márquez. 1985. I would soon become the assistant to the editor of the author of Love in the Time of Cholera. For an aspiring writer, this was like studying at the feet of Merlin.
But there was another education afoot for me. I would come to spend years living in Queens and then Brooklyn. I was now rubbing shoulders daily, in the subways, on the streets, in the stores, and eventually in homes, with Black folk from all over the African diaspora. I got to know Black people from Ghana and Trinidad and Haiti and Toronto and Houston, Texas. This exposure challenged all those closely held notions of what it means to be Black and made me look back at the world in which I had initially grown up with brand-new eyes. Suddenly the fish fries, the out-of-tune church choirs, the hours spent toiling under the sun in tobacco fields, Vacation Bible School, hog killings, and stories of ghost dogs became important somehow, important to be written about. This urgency was over the connections of my very specific rural South to the larger African cultures, but I also saw the uniqueness of the world in which I had come of age. This new apprehension felt very like a mandate to not only write about that world now lost—for Duplin County had changed dramatically from the time I had been a boy, just like so much of the rural American South—and to write about it honestly, with that honest mix of the seen and the unseen which was integral to capturing the world that had shaped those lives, my life.
“Ashes Don’t Burn” had one fundamental flaw, and, in hindsight, I thank my teachers back at social-realism-saturated UNC for helping me to realize that roadblock. The impediment had nothing to do with lycanthropy. Simply put: I was not a thirtysomething lawyer going through a crisis upon returning home. I was not writing what I “knew.” But I had been a boy in that same home, so, by and by, the narrative I had been laboring over changed. I kept the supernatural cast that I’m sure inhabited those dark woods. The landscape did not change at all; in fact it probably richened and deepened, partly from my nostalgia for it, and as a response to the six-billion-footed city, dreaming of the woods and the deer and the cornfields. But I cannot think about the forests of my boyhood without imagining some inexplicable presence lurking, just behind that great oak tree, meaning ill or good. You must pay attention.
The story I scribbled at doggedly, in the evenings, on subways, on the weekends, would ultimately be published in the summer of 1989 as A Visitation of Spirits. There are no ghost dogs in it, amazingly, but plenty of other ghosts and creatures, spirits of the world and of the mind, mingled in with a healthy dose of social realism as I had been scrupulously taught, and which I respect with great admiration.
For me, now, this approach seems inevitable. Right. The only way for me to do it. Yet the path toward that fictional vision was neither straight nor easily achieved, but worth every twist and bend and cul-de-sac.
I hope to return to lycanthropy one day soon. There is something in that mythology that fits well in Tims Creek, in Chinquapin. And of course, soon and very soon, I hope a ghost dog will make an appearance in one my stories. Leaping to the rescue only to vanish again into the imagination.
Part II
WHERE
AM I
BLACK?
9
Come Out the Wilderness
. . . I can hurt
You with questions
Like silver bullets.
—Yusef Komunyakaa, “Venus’s Flytraps”
“You North American Blacks, you make me so angry,” she was saying. “You set yourselves off from the rest of the diaspora. As if your experiences were somehow better. ‘We suffered more.’ When, in fact, the slaveocracy of the Caribbean was much more brutal.”
We were in a cafe in Greenwich Village, arguing over coffee about the nature of Black America. “But you miss the point entirely,” I said.
She was African. In fact an Ethiopian princess, a direct descendant of Haile Selassie, now studying anthropology at the University of Colorado. Her mother worked for the United Nations and she had spent a great deal of time at their family estate in Antigua, where they were watched over devotedly by Rastafarians, who consider the last emperor of Ethiopia to be their Messiah. Moreover, her family had married into an old Black North Carolina family—thus she felt more than qualified to declaim on African Americans.
“What you say is true,” I said, “but what separates us is not just the psychological shackles of slavery, but the extent to which our bloods have intermingled . . .”
“Bullshit.” She laughed and shook her head in disbelief. “You think that there was no other rape and that there aren’t Creoles throughout the world? That doesn’t make you different, make you better.”
“No one’s saying we’re better. Just different.”
“But you all act that way.”
“What? I don’t think American Black people think they are any better than Africans or West Indians, but we do recognize that our experience has been markedly different. Look,” I said, “we’ve become a part of this country in a way that no other Black group has become a part of their country. I mean, we made this country. We still do. Why was slavery instituted here in the first place? Free labor. And look what that labor has created, materially, for better or worse. Moreover, we’ve contributed to every aspect of American life, scientifically, legislatively, militarily, artistically . . .”
“Oh, God, I don’t want to hear any more about Black music . . .”
“It’s not just Black music. It’s everything. Hell, we are America. We have more claim to this country than anyone other than the Native American. We’ve been here for over three hundred years, for Christ’s sake. I don’t mean to disparage the diaspora, but how can we ignore our blood-and-sweat connection to this land? This very land here?”
“What I’m talking about is just that attitude, that your experience is somehow better . . .”
“Not better, different . . .”
No one won the argument that warm spring evening. Yet the discussion haunted me for years afterwards, not because I had not thought of these ideas before, but because I had not realized how deeply I felt about being an American, an African American. Nor was it the beginning of a search for my identity, but a turning point, a turning point which led me to the decision to explore firsthand the idea and the reality of what it means to be Black in America. To question what it means to be an African American.
___________
What does it mean to be Black?
In discussing Black America, on whatever level, be it politics, economics, music, food, I often use the word “we.” Aside from the necessity of sometimes making broad generalizations about broad groups, the more I think about African America, the more I cannot help but question what I mean by “we.” I’m not the only Black person who does this. All through my growing up, my relatives did it, my teachers, my ministers; in school, at work, whenever or wherever I encountered Black folk talking about Black folk—even when speaking to non-Black folk—the word “we” was used.
Do we mean race? Do we mean culture? Do we mean skin color? The more I thought of it, the more problematic the idea became—even as I persisted in using the word, becoming ever more uncertain of what I—what “we”—meant.
Did I mean race? If I did I was a hypocrite, because I don’t believe in “race” as a fact of nature. Biologically speaking there is only one human species, and though tremendous amounts of time and money have been spent on the classification and subdivision of human beings, classifications that go beyond mere skin color, no one has succeeded, scientifically, in demonstrating any significant difference between people who look different from others. Consider cats: A Siamese, a calico, and a tabby are actually of different genus—that is, they have specific genetic codes (even though they can mate); whereas Koreans, Botswanans, Apaches, and Swedes are all within the same genus. We humans are all calicos, despite visual persuasions to the contrary. But as a rule, human beings don’t think that way. Since the time the noted anthropologist Franz Boas wrote, “Where is the proof of the development of specialized hereditary capacities? Where is the proof that such capacities, if they exist, are recessive? How can it be shown that such specialized characteristics in selected mating will be bred out? Not a single one of these statements can be accepted,” no one has presented any compelling evidence to the contrary. Where race is concerned, I feel very much like Henry Adams when he wrote: “And yet no one could tell the patient tourist what race was, or how it should be known. History offered a feeble and delusive smile at the sound of the word; evolutionists and ethnologists disputed its very existence; no one knew what to make of it; yet without the clue, history was a nursery tale.”
