race

The Violin Conspiracy, by Brendan Slocumb

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The Violin Conspiracy

I stumbled on this 2022 novel by chance. What a treat it turned out to be!

Playing one of his high school’s loaner violins, Ray McMillan finds his life’s passion. He loves music, especially classical music. However, his mother wants him to drop out of school as soon as the law allows and get a job at Popeye’s so he can help support the family.

No one in his family understands or supports his love of music except his grandmother Nora who gives him the fiddle owned by her own grandfather, a slave, given to him by his enslaver. Dirty and in need of repair, the fiddle is Ray’s most precious possession.

As a Black teenager, Ray finds his path barred in many ways. As my own son’s first grade teacher said, “No one expects to find a genius in a neighborhood like this.” Luckily he encounters teachers who help him get a scholarship to study music and advise him during his adjustment to college.

When he finishes school and begins auditioning, he discovers that PopPop’s fiddle is actually a Stradivarius, worth $10 million. He becomes a sensation, due to his remarkable talent and amazing story, but he still encounters racism at every turn.

And he’s got other headaches: His family orders him to sell the violin and share the money with them. Not to be left out, the Marks family, descendants of PopPop’s enslaver, claim the violin is theirs.

Then, just as he’s preparing to compete in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition, he opens his violin case to find it empty except for a white Chuck Taylor sneaker and a ransom note.

The author ratchets the suspense up even more, as the clock is ticking down to the start of the competition and to the deadline to raise the ransom money or find the thieves. Could his family have taken it? Or the Marks family? Or professional robbers?

This is simply a great read. The characters are well-drawn; many of them seemed like people I know. It’s a wonderful story with much to say about our culture here in the U.S. and in the international music world.

The author’s descriptions of performances make the music itself come alive. But you don’t have to love classical music to enjoy this story of a young man with a remarkable gift and the tenacity to make the most of it. Plot, character, theme, settings: this novel has it all.

Is there a debut novel that you enjoyed and would recommend?

If I Survive You, by Jonathan Escoffery

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If I Survive You

In this remarkable debut, the author gives us eight interconnected stories about a Jamaican-American family. Most of them center on Trelawny, the younger child, born after Topper and Sarah emigrated to Florida in the 1970s with Delano, their beloved first-born. Not only is Trelawny American in a way that the rest of his family is not, but he is also sensitive and bookish, earning scorn from his father and brother.

“In Flux” explores the complexity of race as Trelawny tries to find out what he is. His light-skinned parents were not considered Black in Jamaica, but he certainly is when he goes to college in the Midwest. That’s just the first layer, as he keeps peeling them back, showing both the obvious and the subtle workings of racism in the U.S.

In this, as in several other stories, the author makes extensive use of second-person point-of-view: addressing the reader directly as “you.” It’s an interesting choice. A fad for second person swept the literary world after the success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and then quickly became tiresome.

Here it works by engaging the reader and creating a buzzing immediacy. The author avoids the doldrums with the vibrant energy of his prose, the precision of his depictions of the culture, and his irrepressible—if often dark—humor. It is also a good choice for someone who hasn’t yet figured out who he is or if he as a person actually exists.

The other characters are unforgettable: Cukie, whom Trelawny envies because he gets to spend a summer with his father learning lobstering; Jelly, whose racist family baits Trelawny in the strangest Thanksgiving dinner ever; Delano, who totally buys into his privilege as the preferred son and assumes the world will likewise deliver for him. One story, in Jamaican dialect, presents Topper as a young man deciding to emigrate to Florida.

Having just been reading the essay “Dysfunctional Narratives” by Charles Baxter, I couldn’t resist applying his thesis that too many books are about a young person identifying the trauma that damaged them when young—usually from their family—and has continued to ruin their lives. Writers sometimes refer to this as the protagonist’s wound.

But if that is all there is to the story, then readers lose interest. Most readers want to see characters who grow and “start to act like adults, with complex and worldly motivations.” I agree with Baxter that we want to see characters admit their mistakes, take responsibility for them, perhaps even justify them.

Trelawny, at least, does acknowledge his mistakes. And certainly he is a victim of so many circumstances: racial discrimination, poverty, his father’s oft-stated preference for Delano, even a hurricane that destroys their home. However, even with the humor and brilliant writing, I sometimes had to take a break from his woes as the victim also of less-than-loving girlfriends, weird jobs, his own mistakes.

If I had any doubt that men are in trouble, this book would have put them to rest. The women, once they’ve left their husbands, do well, but the men all flounder.

Still, I have to defend Trelawny’s sense of being a victim. I can’t speak to enduring racial discrimination, but I’ve been poor and Escoffery is right: when you’re poor, survival hangs by a most tenuous thread. If you have the emotional support of your family or your community or both, you can weave in some happy times, sweet moments, even a few successes. Without them, your outlook is pretty bleak.

As Trelawny says, “It occurs to you that people like you — people who burn themselves up in pursuit of survival — rarely survive anyone or anything.”

I am on the lookout for books of interconnected stories like this one, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, and Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Have you read a good book that uses that format?

Another Country, by James Baldwin

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another country

Baldwin’s third novel starts with Rufus Scott, a jazz musician, standing near Times Square, broke with nowhere to go. We don’t need to be told he is Black; Baldwin accomplishes that with a simple, economical sentence: “The policeman passed him, giving him a look.”

Once well-known with many friends, a loving family, and numerous lovers, now he is “one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous.” He believes he has only one friend left, Vivaldo, a writer laboring over his first novel.

With lyricism and passion, Baldwin indicts the city’s inhabitants, always hurrying somewhere, careless of themselves and others. And then there are the artists, like Rufus’s friends who are writers, actors, musicians, singers. Divided into three parts, this novel immerses us in their world: their ambitions and weaknesses, their kaleidoscope of lovers, their fallible selves.

We learn that they know little of themselves, much less of others. Several, including Rufus, are bitterly confused about their sexuality: identifying as heterosexual while occasionally giving in to overwhelming attraction to other men. For the main characters, the ones whom we get to know, are all men. There are women but they are just devices to drive the men’s plot lines. Which are deeply painful.

Set in the U.S. and France, there are countries within countries: Harlem, Greenwich Village, Riverside Drive, various locations in the Deep South. And each person is a country unto themselves, ultimately unknowable. The story shifts between Rufus, Vivaldo, and several other characters, each trying to find their footing after unimaginable loss, sometimes driven to sex work and other degrading activities in order to survive.

The shifting relationships between them drive this long novel, as the characters make connections and then destroy them in a desperate fight for power. Perhaps a kinder word is control; they try to assert control over the other to shore up the crumbling relationship. “But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable—only love, and love itself mostly failed.”

Coming to this book from the two earlier novels, I found new power and resonance in Baldwin’s use of language. Passionate, yes, and often lyrical, each sentence is weighted with meaning, pulling us ever deeper into these characters. Here is Vivaldo:

He walked out of the phone booth into the bar, which was a workingman’s bar, and there was a wrestling match on the TV screen. He ordered a double shot and leaned on the bar. He was surrounded by precisely those men he had know from his childhood, from his earliest youth. It was as though, hideously, after a long and fruitless voyage, he had come home, to find that he had become a stranger. They did not look at him—or did not seem to look at him; but, then, that was the style of these men; and if they usually saw less than was present, they also, often, saw more than one guessed.

Baldwin needs only two details to set the scene. Then there’s the quick one-two: we think Vivaldo is comfortable among men he has know all his life, and then—boom—we get the one word “hideously” to show us how dreadfully wrong we are. The next sentence gives us the synthesis: his knowledge of them helps him interpret their actions, or inaction in this case, and regain his footing after the terrible blow of feeling alone, not just a stranger but someone who has lost what once supported him.

The characters’ actions and interactions testify to Baldwin’s shrewd understanding of the human heart. Each flawed character, each cruel or selfish act is treated with love and compassion. As one character says, “‘…what can we really do for each other except—just love each other and be each other’s witness?’”

Which book by James Baldwin is your favorite?

Passing, by Nella Larsen

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passing

There is much to be unpacked in this brief novel, first published in 1929. As it opens, Irene is reading a letter from Clare, someone she knew as a child, asking to see her. For some reason this letter angers Irene.

It turns out that while visiting her father in Chicago two years earlier, Irene had run into Clare by accident at a Whites-only hotel. Irene had been feeling faint and the kind taxi driver who’d taken her there hadn’t realised that the light-skinned Irene was Black. Needing to rest, Irene was confident she could pass at the hotel restaurant.

Unlike Irene who lives in Harlem and is married to a dark-skinned man, Clare has been living as a White person ever since she’d left Chicago after her father died, when the two lost touch, and is married to a wealthy White man who does not know she is Black. Clare presses Irene to visit her, seeming desperate to reignite the friendship, but the visit doesn’t go well, as Clare’s husband appears and, taking Irene to be White, launches into racial invective.

Now, two years later, Clare has turned up at Irene’s home in Harlem and, when Irene pretended to be out, sent this letter begging to see her, saying that she needs a break from her husband’s racism. Irene agrees but continues to be wary of the beautiful and charismatic Clare, who rapidly inserts herself into Irene’s private and social lives, winning over Irene’s husband and sons, attending parties and dances whether she’s invited or not.

Irene is afraid of what might happen if, seeing her at Harlem events, Clare’s husband were to learn she was Black. Irene is also afraid for her own marriage, as her husband spends more and more time with Clare when Irene is absent. Although unspoken, there seems to be a fear as well for herself. Irene’s awareness of Clare’s sensuous beauty and her own inability to say no to the woman signal a deeper attraction.

The story revolves around this issue of pretending to be someone you are not. We see Clare’s frustration and weariness at the pretense she must maintain and her yearning to explore the Black life she might have lived. We see Irene’s attempts to maintain her façade of perfect wife, mother, hostess and civic volunteer, knowing she must do more than any White woman if she is to live up to these ideals.

I was reminded of Du Bois’ idea of the double consciousness Black people must maintain, always seeing yourself not just as you but also as Whites see you, and modulating your behavior accordingly. A White friend pointed out that we all do this to some extent, for example, behaving differently at work than at home. This particular example was brought home to me some years ago when I had to take the Myers-Briggs personality assessment twice, once at work and once at home for a class. My results were diametrically opposite. As a result, I began consciously bringing the two closer together.

However, these mild experiences don’t begin to compare to the soul-crushing constancy of the watchfulness Black people must maintain in navigating a world designed for and controlled by White people. The stakes are higher; the potential consequences more dangerous: handcuffs, a gunshot, a noose.

There is so much in this seemingly simple story of two women: the questions around identity, the effects of secrets and lies, the tradeoff between freedom and safety, the absurdity of racial categorisation and the appeal of racial belonging. Larsen offers no easy answers, instead leaving room for the reader to ponder these ideas, indeed to be haunted by them for a long time after closing the book.

Have you read a book by a Harlem Renaissance author that provides insight into today’s issues?

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison

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Published in 1992 but still relevant today, this work of literary criticism looks at how writers create characters different from themselves, specifically how white writers use black characters in their work. As a writer she must imagine others and, thinking about that process, she became curious as to how black characters are portrayed in the U.S. literary canon, which at the time was almost exclusively white.

Morrison also looks at the effect on the work of these white writers as they pretend that race is not a factor in their work. “What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.”

Applying this new critical approach, Morrison describes the deliberately constructed Africanist persona and how it functions in the American literary imagination, examining works by Faulkner, William Styron, Hemingway, and others.

She looks at the silence around race, for example, in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and the lack of critical attention to the black woman who is the agent of moral choice in that novel. In Willa Cather’s story “Sapphira and the Slave Girl”, Morrison’s reading of race shows Sapphira not so much a cruel mistress as a desperate and disappointed woman whose social superiority is the only thing she has left to validate her self-image.

Examining American literature through this lens is fascinating. Morrison looks at the way authors such as Melville and Twain use the image of a slave population to investigate problems of human freedom and the fear of failure or powerlessness in white people. She shows how these authors relocate internal conflicts to slaves whose voices are silent.

These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figuration of death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding signing Africanist presence. It has occurred to me that the very manner by which American literature distinguishes itself as a coherent entity exists because of this unsettled and unsettling population.

She also points out the troubling discrepancy between the fearful and haunted early American literature—Hawthorne, Poe, etc.—and the American dream of a city on a hill.

In addition to offering an allegorical foundation for major themes of American literature such as autonomy, absolute power, and freedom itself, Morrison suggests that this Africanist imagery “provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.”

To me, her discussion sheds new light on today’s concerns about cultural appropriation. I am sympathetic to all sides : the writer’s need to tell the story she is passionate about, the importance of not preempting marginalized voices, and the necessity of having more diversity both in our reading and in our writers.

Have you read something or seen a lecture that gave you new insight into the books you’ve read?