Black folk could fly, p.25
Black Folk Could Fly, page 25
We live in a society, just at this moment of the world, where we are taught to put a great deal of value on Product. On visible Service. We are taught also to disparage the value of the process. In fact we spend time and energy and money trying to find ways to reduce the process, make it more efficient, speed it up, cut to the chase.
Question: How, exactly, do you speed up the imagination?
Vladimir Nabokov once gave a lecture at Cornell University on what he called “uncommon sense.” Common Sense, according to Nabokov, was not what a writer needed, or wanted; common sense surrounds and abounds at car dealerships, beauty salons, on military bases, at Walmarts, and at casinos. Common sense, quite literally, rules the world. Uncommon sense, however, is rare and powerful. Think of the uncommon sense of Crime and Punishment, of Beloved, of All the King’s Men, of The Color Purple, of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, of West with the Night. And please, let’s not leave out Batman, Spider-Man, Roseanne, Richard Pryor’s comedy, and the stories of the late, beloved Isaac Asimov. Strange, curious works, from strange, beautiful imaginations, full of uncommon sense.
And, as I mentioned earlier, though I have no special dispensation to make this case stick, I do feel in my bones that only in the imagination—outside and away from the paper-minded men and women with their credit-card eyes—can uncommon worlds be achieved, realized, thought up. Only in the imagination can such ideas be played with. Ah, play!—such fun. But such serious fun. The writer labors within that fun of the imagined. She labors to put down what she has witnessed in the realm of her imagination: of how a little girl got lost in the woods and encountered a snark or a bear, and did battle for her life; of how a poor fellow of honest heart fell in love with a princess of surpassing beauty and intelligence and proved himself worthy of her hand; of how three sisters turned on their youngest sibling and had her cast from the family; of visions of castles and wars and magical goings-on down by the river; dramas of betrayal, malice, hubris, sickness, love—sweet, sweet love—bittersweet success, happy failure; of memories most precious, like jewels; of other ways of living life, coping, learning, being. . . . But without first having played there in the fields of her mind, she has little of value to say.
But here is the dilemma: For grown folk to admit such a thing is to be visited by guilt—a guilt imposed, directly and indirectly, by society.
For we must be held accountable for the time spent, the electricity burned, the money gone. Are you writing a bestseller? Some undying prose to win grand awards? Some poesy for your beau? Some ephemeral gobbledygook? What exactly are you doing, Mary? Is it of value?
Value? In the real world, it is simply not possible to keep questions of quality and worth at bay for too long. We structure our lives based on a system of priorities: What’s more important? What’s better? How much does it cost? I have no intention of wasting anybody’s time trying to debate whether Moby-Dick is more or less valuable than Action Comics, or whether Paul Simon’s song lyrics should stand beside Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems—that’s another game. The truth is I’m glad we have them all.
But I do contend that the act of writing—more often than not, a labor of love, mysterious, uncommon, painful, rewarding, on the page, with each unfolding, new, revealing, exciting, dangerous sentence—is, in and of itself, of more worth than most living and breathing Americans are willing to accord it, let alone say out loud. The process, more than the product. The actual imagination, more than its remnants. True, the remnants are precious, but we must never forget these words are treasures brought back from Other-worlds. We must never forget to honor the traveler’s moxie for taking that brave journey.
By the same token, the writer has no right to whine—No one appreciates how hard I work! No one gives me my just due!—Nope. And why should anyone? As the novelist Mordecai Richler once observed: Nobody asked you to do it anyway. You volunteered. (He that laboureth, laboureth for himself.) So forget about the banker’s sneer and the grocer’s quibble and the lawyer’s scoff, for, when done right, the writer’s work is rewarded by its own fealty. External validation is tertiary at best. For the weary sojourner of the mind has discovered: we truly do contain multitudes.
If you don’t believe me, the proof is there on the page . . .
In the end, for writer, reader, mom, dad, lover, employer, idle looker-on, fellow citizen, the decision of which I speak—to honor the process and keep it Holy—in this workaday, give-and-take, get-what-you-can-while-you-can, hurry-up-and-wait world, is actually more easily said than done.
The avowal, too, takes work, but it is work well worth the effort.
22
Letter to Self
Dear Garrett,
Buy Apple stock.
Seriously. Buy lots of it.
Don’t be blue. Despite how you feel sometimes, you really don’t have a lot to be blue about. True, you’re a poor country boy from the swamps of North Carolina. But in time, that will be one of your mightiest assets. I know, I know, difficult to swallow, huh? But, as improbable as it may seem, where you come from will become one of your greatest assets as a human being.
Look at everything. Remember everything. Nothing is too small or insignificant. Observe everything, from what it’s like to be in a tobacco field in the July heat to what the old women at First Baptist wear and the rhythm of the deacons’ prayers. Remember what it feels like to walk up on a rattlesnake. Remember the argument you had with Mrs. Johnson about your article in the school paper. Remember the funerals and the band practices and the nights you spent with the EMTs at the fire and rescue squad. Everything is important. Now and later. Remember.
Keep reading the dictionary for fun. When people make fun of you, just keep on doing what you’re doing. You’ve got the right idea. That is as important as buying Apple stock. However, dropping $150 words in casual conversation is not always a great idea. It makes you look like a smart-ass know-it-all. You are a smart-ass know-it-all, but you don’t have to let everybody know it but your family and closest friends. Remember they love you despite your faults. This fact will be important. Physics, science fiction, classical music—if you’re interested, keep on studying it. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s a waste of time or not something a Black kid should be interested in. Don’t ever worry about being “Black enough” for anybody. You are not merely an “honorary Negro.” Your ancestors paid that bill for you a long time ago.
That crush you have on T. S.? Don’t let it trouble you too much. I am sorry: He is not going to return your affection. But his indifference is not the end of the world. In fact he will not be the last man with whom you become infatuated who won’t give you the time of day. Yeah, it hurts, buddy. That pain is real. But, as kooky as it may sound, unrequited love/lust is not necessarily a bad thing. You must learn how to take those feelings you have and put them into making stuff. Whatever you can create, make. Creation is the great healing thing. And when you look back, you’ll have that wonderful thing, no matter what it is, to remind you of your heart storm; moreover this creation, this creating, makes you a better and larger person. It’s kinda like magic actually. It’s kinda cool. It’s kinda like being a shaman.
You grew up in the Church and right now the Church is strong with you. You worry about your so-called “unnatural affections” and the Scriptures and what Jesus thinks. Despite what people say, to quote one of your favorite songs in a few years, “The Lord don’t mind.” It’s foolish to think that any type of loving is wrong. That cat, Jesus, was all about love. So please don’t waste time focusing on the species of love but the quality of the love. Keep studying theology; it will come in handy later in a strange and wonderful way. (Please note: I said theology, not religion.)
You were born rich in identity—Black, Southern, Queer. Don’t ever let anybody tell you any bit of it is a burden. The sooner you start seeing your background, your reality, as a diamond mine, the sooner you will see yourself as a force to be reckoned with. In fact, though you don’t know it, you are a force already—just don’t mention it in casual conversation. That would be a little obnoxious. Just be a force. “O to be a dragon”!
The world is going to change in many ways for the better for Black folk and for queer folk. However, ways of looking at Black men, despite our achievements and accomplishments in the great world, will remain a vexed thing. So much of how the culture at large looks at Black man and its view of what a “man” should be is pure fantasy. A lot of this claptrap is designed to hurt you and to cut you down. To keep you in a box. To tell you what you should and should not do. Later for all that noise, brother.
And how this country looks at queer Black men, in particular—well, I hate to tell you but you’ll still be a strange and exotic creature in the eyes of a great many Americans. Big deal. Do not waste a minute fretting over how they look upon you. You have the power to define yourself—remember that power; take that control. It’s like a superpower, really, to be whom you want to be, to do what you want to do, to fly where you want to fly. Your life will get more complicated, but think of it as a great adventure, every damn day. You’re going to have fun.
Fun is waiting for you to have it.
Oh, and get this book and read it: The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián. I didn’t discover it until I was thirty-one, and I wish I’d read it when I was your age. It can help you through some dark moments.
Don’t smoke. Pay your taxes. Be wise in matters of sex and your body—a plague is coming: you can and will survive it, though the casualties will break your heart. Just keep making.
And please buy lots of Apple stock. You’ll thank me. And I don’t mean the Beatles’ music company, either. Leave that to Michael Jackson. Trust me.
For I remain,
Your loving self
EDITOR’S NOTES
The Rooster, the Rattlesnake, and the Hydrangea Bush
Originally published as Kenan’s introduction to the anthology of essays on North Carolina foodways that he edited, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food (Hillsboro, NC: Eno Press, 2016), this essay included several references to other essays in the anthology that have been cut, given the different context here.
Swine Dreams
The version published in the State by State anthology (still available) addresses at some length the history and environmental consequences of the pork industry in North Carolina, drawing upon “Boss Hog,” a story from the Pulitzer Prize–winning series by Melanie Sill, Pat Stith, and Joby Warrick in the Raleigh News and Observer (February 19–28, 1995). According to one of his bio notes, Kenan was at one point interested in writing a book on that subject. Here, however, it seemed too much of a digression. Meanwhile the previously cut material about hog gelding, too riveting to ignore, is now restored to an essay that takes a more personal form and includes Kenan’s original subtitle.
Ghost Dog
A few lines that were cut in the published essay have been restored.
The Good Ship Jesus
Kenan revised his views on Baldwin’s “bitterness” in his introduction to The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin, a volume he compiled and edited (New York: Pantheon, 2010). Academic citations within the article have been removed for readability but remain accessible in the online version on JSTOR.
There’s a Hellhound on Your Trail
This graduation address was given to students in the documentary studies program of Duke University, May 10, 2015, and later published as a chapbook in 2016. A version directed to writing students, absent Gordon Parks, appears as “The Character of Our Character: Reality, Actuality, and Technique in Fiction and Nonfiction,” pp. 45–55 in As We Were Saying: Sewanee Writers on Writing (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021).
THAT ETERNAL BURNING
Kenan wrote this poetic response to Norman Mauskopf’s photographs for a book of those photos titled A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 1996).
CREDITS
“A Change Is Gonna Come” and “An Ahistorical Silliness” are excerpted from The Fire This Time by Randall Kenan, copyright © 2007, and are reprinted here courtesy of the publisher, Melville House Publishing, LLC.
“Scuppernongs and Beef Fat” first appeared in Mother Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South, edited by Samia Serageldin, Lee Smith. April 2019, University of North Carolina Press.
“The Rooster, the Rattlesnake, and the Hydrangea Bush” was first published as the introduction to The Carolina Table, edited by Randall Kenan. November 2016. Eno Publishers.
“Greens” first appeared in Ecotone, University of North Carolina Wilmington, issue 18, 2014.
“Swine Dreams; or, Barbecue for the Brain” first appeared in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. 2008. HarperCollins Publishers.
“Chinquapin: Elementary Particles” first appeared in Amazing Place: What North Carolina Means to Writers, edited by Marianne Gingher. March 2015. University of North Carolina Press.
“Ode to Billie Joe” was first published in the journal Southern Cultures, vol. 17 no. 3, 2011, pp. 33–34.
“Ghost Dog: Or, How I Wrote My First Novel” first appeared in eJournal USA, US Department of State, vol. 14 no 2, 2009, pp. 10–13.
“Prologue: Come Out the Wilderness,” “Cyberspace, North Carolina: Where Am I Black?,” and “New York, New York: Blackness on My Mind” from Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century by Randall Kenan, copyright © 1999 by Randall Kenan. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
“Notes Toward an Essay on Imagining Thomas Jefferson Watching a Performance of the Musical Hamilton” was first published in the journal Southern Cultures, vol. 25 no. 2, Summer 2019, pp. 12–18.
“The Good Ship Jesus: Baldwin, Bergman, and the Protestant Imagination” first appeared in the journal African American Review, Johns Hopkins University Press, vo. 46 no. 4, Winter 2013, pp. 701–714.
“There’s a Hellhound on Your Trail: How to See Like Gordon Parks” was given as the 2015 commencement address to the Duke University Master in Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts graduating class of 2015 on March 10, 2015. and printed as a chapbook by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
“Finding the Forgotten” first appeared in Garden & Gun magazine, August/September 2016.
“Letter from North Carolina: Learning from Ghosts of the Civil War” was published by Literary Hub, August 18, 2020.
“That Eternal Burning” is excerpted from A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta by Randall Kenan, copyright 1997, and is reprinted courtesy of the publisher Twin Palms Publishers.
“Love and Labor” first appeared in the journal Yalobusha Review, University of Mississippi, vol. 4 article 2, 1998, pp. 5–11.
OTHER WORKS BY RANDALL KENAN
A Visitation of Spirits
Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
James Baldwin: American Writer
A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta
Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
The Fire This Time
If I Had Two Wings
Copyright © 2022 by The Estate of Randall G. Kenan
Introduction © 2022 by Tayari Jones
All rights reserved
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Randall Kenan, Black Folk Could Fly
