Charles
Johnson’s Night Hawks, a book of short stories, was given to me by the
reluctant son for Father’s Day to commemorate a particular moment we had
together. I visited him at college and
we spent the afternoon at the Chicago Art
Institute. We had been there before
but this time he asked me to take him to some of my favorites. We went to the American wing and spent time
looking at Georgia
O’Keefes, American
Gothic, and we stopped in to see Nighthawks, Edward
Hopper’s masterpiece, just as a docent with her tour group walked by.
The docent described the work as a meditation on isolation,
noting the lack of a door in the diner – the brightness of the interior versus
the outside and the isolation of each of the four people inside the painting
from each other. This evoked in me a
dangerous thing – a question. I raised
my hand to ask this question and I was afraid (as was the reluctant son, I
later learned but sensed in the moment) that I would embarrass him. We had just seen a play by my mother, his
grandmother, about Jack Warner’s use of the movie Casablanca
to help reduce the political isolation of the United States. Noting the date of the painting, 1942, I
asked if the painting was a political statement on Hopper’s part about America’s
isolationism. The docent responded in a
kindly manner that thought others had wondered about that as well, there was no
evidence that Hopper had that in mind when he painted it.
The people on the docent led tour moved off and we had the
painting to ourselves again. The reluctant
son expressed relief that my question had not been experienced as completely
off the wall by the docent, the others in the tour, or by he himself. We also appreciated the painting in new ways –
seeing details that we hadn’t before. It
was a nice moment. So it was great to receive
the book with a title that referred to that moment. That said, I was also a little trepidatious. My father had once given me a book, American Psycho, Bret
Stevens’ book that describes in vivid detail the mind and actions of a
psychopath who maims and kills women with pleasure. I was worried about what my father was saying
about me and my interests – and I asked my mother about this. She reassured me that he had simply chosen
the book because of psycho – as in psychological – in the title, so he assumed
I would be interested in it.
Johnson’s Night Hawks (the separation into two words was
Hopper’s intended title for his work) is a collection of short stories that he
wrote over the course of nineteen years for an annual reading he titled Bedtime
Stories in which he and others read short stories they had written so that the whole reading took place within a two hour
time frame. Bedtime Stories was
conceived as a fundraiser for Humanities Washington and Johnson is a faculty
member at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle – and, incidentally,
the stories in the collection have worked as bed time stories for me. Johnson is an African American author who has
written a National Book Award book, Middle Passage that is now on my list of
books to read. He is also student of
Buddhism, a philosopher, and a person who demonstrates interest in working to
understand the experience of marginalized populations working from his own
experience as a minority.
The cover of the book is a variant of the Nighthawks
painting – it is a photograph of a brightly lit woman in a laundromat waiting
for her clothes. As in the painting, the
background is a non-descript street scene but, instead of it being somewhere in
Greenwich Village in the forties, it is a contemporary urban picture of a
neighborhood that may have been vibrant during the forties, but seems somewhat
shopworn now. Both versions radiate a
sense of isolation that is present in all of the intimate stories that are told
in this text, but it is the final story – from which the main title is taken –
that helped me appreciate that the isolation I felt as a reader from the
characters that Johnson describes may reflect something about who he is and where
we are as a culture in reading the voices of the marginalized.
While most of these stories are told in the first person –
most of them are also clearly about inhabiting the mind of another person. Whether it is Plato or an Indian student of a
Buddhist master, the author is clearly making a leap into the mind of someone
else. Two of the stories might be truly
autobiographical, and the last one certainly is. In it, the author goes out to dinner with
another African American Author, August Wilson, author of, among other things,
the play and movie Fences,
and he describes the delicious intimacy of being with someone like himself –
but also the wide gap that separates Wilson, a man raised in the African
American section of Pittsburgh – from himself, who was raised in suburban
Evanston, Illinois. Among other things,
the two of them talk about whether the arcs of their careers – in which they
have artistically depicted African Americans – has made a difference – whether it
has made an impact on the race relations landscape of America.
Yesterday, with the reluctant family in North Carolina, we
toured two antebellum mansions. One was on
a
peanut growing plantation outside of Wilmington, and, after the tour, the
older reluctant stepdaughter was in tears.
The tour had, predictably, focused on the lives of the family that owned
the plantation – before and after the “freeing” of the slaves most of whom
become tenant farmers who were perennially indebted to their former masters and
were, at best, no longer marginalized.
She was disappointed that the lives of those who had supported the
family and produced the bulk of the income were not more centrally located in
the narrative about the place. Now, in
defense of the place, there was a long and detailed discussion of the lives of
the slaves and the tenant farmers in one of the rooms in the basement, and the
docent acknowledged the engineering and planting skills of the slaves who had
built the home and tended the peanuts and other crops,but the reluctant stepdaughter was right – the tour
was about the owners – and the slave’s quarters (rebuilt as a tenant farmer
home then moved to be on the property to be easily toured) included a steel
frame bed – hardly representative of the conditions that the slaves actually
lived in.
Later that day, we toured the Bellamy mansion in Wilmington,
NC, built with the profits from one year’s operation of the owner’s nearby turpentine
plantation. It was a magnificent mansion
in town and, again, the skill of the plasterer’s and builders – slave and free
blacks – were honored. Indeed, one the
great-great-grandchildren of the one of the plasterer’s was there that day being
interviewed and filmed. The grounds
house one of seven or eight preserved urban slave’s quarters, and the
functioning of the slaves was described.
The lived lives of the slaves were not.
I leafed through a book in the bookstore (about 15-20% of the titles in
the bookstore were devoted to slaves and slavery). It was a collection of slave reminiscences
collected by the WPA during the 1930s.
This turns out to be a huge trove of material that is of dubious
quality. Ultimately, 41 volumes of
interviews were published (though not until the 1980s were they all in
print). Many of the interviews were
conducted by the children or grandchildren of the slave’s former masters, and
most involved a highly structured interview format administered by untrained
interviewers. None the less, this is the
largest collection of first person accounts of the slave experience.
Slaves were largely illiterate – and there was a virulent
effort to maintain their offspring in an illiterate state for generations. This means that writing – the primary means
of giving voice to one’s experience – was not an option for most who
experienced slavery and for most who directly heard the stories of it. There was not a broad first person written
record of the African American experience for a very long time. The writing that Johnson describes he and
Wilson doing is writing from late in the civil rights period until now. The story about their dining together
emphasizes the importance of their being able to talk together as peers – to connect
with someone else who is doing what they are doing.
I am not certain, but I think it would be easier for “white”
writers to find each other – and easier for African American writers getting
started writing today to do so. Johnson’s
isolation is partly a generational issue.
I don’t know how much this informed his choice to study Buddhism,
another source of the isolation and the means through which he tells many of
the stories that he does, but it must.
There is a sense of “if I can’t control it, I will let go of it” that
emanates from the stories. This is, I
think, a reasonable response to being out of control of one’s life, which the
Buddhist’s point out, is true for all of us.
But this lens, then, creates a universal – but therefore not very
particular vantage point from which to experience marginalization (though JamesCone would argue that the marginalized person has a particularly acute
understanding of this perspective – indeed an essential perspective).
So these stories are not about a marginalized people, but
are the perspective of an isolated man.
A man who is isolated by various factors – he is an African American, he
is Buddhist, and he is smart – he is a faculty member at a prestigious
university and is somewhat emotionally remote – he likes to think about things
rather than to feel them. So when he
imagines himself into a student’s mind, he gets something about being that
student in the same way that I do when I imagine what is going on in the mind
of one the reluctant children. I get the
words, but not necessarily the music.
Interestingly, though, the story about the student, Guinea Pig, includes the student being
in an experiment where he is induced to have the experience of being a dog – the
experimenter’s dog – and he becomes interesting to the experimenter as a result
of accessing the dog’s consciousness. It
is nicely done – and it, like most of the stories feels a bit like a thought
exercise. It is interesting. I am glad to have watched him do it. I get what he is doing, but it feels like an
effort that is overly cerebral.
That said, I think that this is an important bridge to
something that I think we are, as a culture, working towards. I think we are trying to come to grips
with what it has meant to have enslaved people – and then to have worked to
keep them in a disadvantaged state. We
need a range of African American voices, including some overly cerebral ones,
to create a broad ranging palette from which people can draw as we continue to
work towards coming to grips with that it must have meant to be an enslaved
people – and to have enslaved people. We
will need to dig into something like a collective unconscious – not the
spiritual everlasting cloud that Jung imagined – but a much more brutal and
immediate one. It will require us to use
our cranium, as Johnson is doing, and to use our guts – as people who have
preceded and will follow him have done. Unfortunately
we will have plenty of current experiences – including separating children from
their parents in inhumane ways – to study and experience what it means to not
be who we think we are.
Having stood on that little soap box, I feel as naked as I
was asking the question of the docent.
Is Johnson writing as an African American? I think he is and he claims to be. How conscious of his isolation is he? I think his title and the cover photograph
speaks to that. Does he value
intimacy? Yes. In the third to last tale he co-writes a
science fiction short story about a time – 4189 – when people are immortal –
and the illicit drug is one that interrupts the healing powers that keep us all
alive and young so that we can die. I
think Dr. Johnson would join me in thinking that we may need to do our work and
then step aside to let the next generation gnaw on the bones we have been
working on. Ours is not the work of a single generation.
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