Percival Everett - Erasure

Somehow these notes for a novel came to me on my flight back to Los Angeles. The faces of those nuts in front of my sister’s clinic served as inspiration. But I must admit to a profound fascination with Hitler’s relationship to art and how he so reminded me of so many of the artistic purists I had come to know. But those faces, washed with hate and fear, wanting so badly to control others, their potato eyes so vacant, their mouths near frothing. I could still hear them calling my sister a murderer. Their voices had the scratch of overuse, like the twisting of metal.

On the plane I read a review in the Atlantic Monthly or Harpers of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ runaway bestseller We’s Lives In Da Ghetto: Juanita Mae Jenkins has written a masterpiece of African American literature. One can actually hear the voices of her people as they make their way through the experience which is and can only be Black America.The story begins with Sharonda F’rinda Johnson who lives the typical Black life in an unnamed ghetto in America. Sharonda is fifteen and pregnant with her third child, by a third father. She lives with her drug addict mother and her mentally deficient, basketball playing brother Juneboy. When Juneboy is killed in a driveby by a rival gang, the bullet passing through his cherished Michael Jordon autographed basketball, Sharonda watches her mother’s wailing grief and decides she must have some voice in the culture.Sharonda becomes a hooker to make enough money to take dance classes at the community center. In tap class, her athletic prowess is noticed by the producer of a Broadway show and she is discovered. She rises to the top, buys her mother a house, but her limitations catch up with her and she comes plummeting back to earth.The twists and turns of the novel are fascinating, but the real strength of the work is its haunting verisimilitude. The ghetto is painted in all its exotic wonder. Predators prowl, innocents are eaten. But the novel is finally not dark, as we leave the story, with Sharonda trying to raise enough money to get her babies back from the state. Sharonda, finally, is the epitome of the black matriarchal symbol of strength.

“Is something wrong?” the woman seated beside me asked.

It was raining when I arrived in Los Angeles. A real Southern California rain, which washed away hillsides and homes, flooded parts of Newport and Long Beach and backed up traffic on every freeway. I found that I was restless during my drive home, not because of the sea of unmoving tail-lights in front of me, and not because of my having two more weeks of the semester left to teach, but because something was gnawing at me. I didn’t know what it was; I had seen or heard something that struck me as wrong. I let it go; what else could I do? I finally made it to Santa Monica and my house, where I brushed my teeth, not so hard, as per instructions of the dentist, through his hygienist, as I never got to see the big man himself, but just hard enough to interrupt the formation of the plaque that was eating me away from the inside, and went to bed. My head on my pillow, I had a dream. First, of my father telling me the stories of how Paul Robeson once broke into song in Miss Madsen’s Tea Room at the beach and how Paul Laurence Dunbar would stroll the pier reciting poetry, and then I was alone on that very pier, younger, but not so young that I was afraid of being alone there so late. The moon was full and bright and there was a corona about it. Way out, under the shine of the moon on the water, I imagined I could see the surface disturbed by a school of bluefish. Then my sister was with me and she was trying to tell me something, but she was, uncharacteristically, beating around the bush. “Are you asking for my help?” I asked her, but she just talked on, saying things I didn’t understand, but the quality of them left no question as to her anxiety. “Is it Mother?” I asked, but this too was met with chatter that, as soon as she spoke it, I forgot it. Until she said, “Did you see him?” I stopped her and asked, “See whom?” But she laughed at me for having said whom and would not come back to the subject. Then I awoke.

All propositions are of equal value.

The following morning, after a walk through the large back room that served as my woodshop, I got around to going through my mail and, as I expected, there was a letter from my agent, whom I had for some time been wondering whether to keep, as he seemed painfully, for me at least, resigned to the fact that my work was not commercial enough to make any real money. This was undoubtedly true, but nonetheless it seemed a part of his job to foster some kind of optimistic delusion on my part. Still, he was willing to take my work for what little return he saw. The letter from him was short, merely introducing the letter that had been sent to him, namely a rejection of my latest novel:

Dear Yul,Thanks for letting me to take a look at T. Ellison’s lastest effort. Who am I kidding? Why did you bother sending it to me? It shows a brilliant intellect, certainly. It’s challenging and masterfully written and constructed, but who wants to read this shit? It’s too difficult for the market. But more, who is he writing to? Does the guy live in a cave somewhere? Come on, a novel in which Aristophanes and Euripides kill a younger, more talented dramatist, then contemplate the death of metaphysics?Thanks again.

All Best,Hockney Hoover

There are times when fishing that I feel like a real detective. I study the water, the lay of the land, seine the streambottom and look at the larvae of aquatic insects. I watch, look for hatches and terrestrial activity. I select my fly, one I’ve tied at streamside, plucking a couple of fibers from my sweater to mix with the dubbing to get just the right color. I present the fly while hiding behind a rock or in tall grass and wait patiently. Then there are times when I wrap pocket lint around a hook, splash it into the water while standing on a fat boulder. Both methods have worked and failed. It’s all up to the trout.

Classes did end as all things must, and right on schedule, and with the welcome news that my promotion to professor had come through. But the news did nothing to erase my depression over the rejection of my novel, now the seventeenth one.

“The line is, you’re not black enough,” my agent said.

“What’s that mean, Yul? How do they even know I’m black? Why does it matter?”

“We’ve been over this before. They know because of the photo on your first book. They know because they’ve seen you. They know because you’re black, for crying out loud.”

“What, do I have to have my characters comb their afros and be called niggers for these people?”

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

I was stunned into silence.

“Look at that Juanita Mae Jenkins book. It’s sold like crazy. The paperback rights went for five hundred thousand.”

In my mind, I had the generous thought, Good for her, but I didn’t mean it. She was a hack. “She’s a hack,” I said. “She’s not even a hack. A hack can actually write a little bit.”