Night Hawks: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Feels Charles Johnson's Isolationism

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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