Response to “The New Negro,” by Darryl Pinckney
“The New Negro” is a selected
excerpt from Darryl Pinckney’s novel “High Cotton.” The novel, while fiction, hews closely to Mr.
Pinckney’s life, telling the tale of an unnamed man raised in an educated,
middle-class black family in Indianapolis during the 1950’s and 1960’s. The narrator, like Mr. Pinckney, goes on to
attend Columbia University and live in New York City.
This
particular excerpt examines the ambivalence and confusion associated with
growing up as a middle-class black person, establishing a complicated
relationship between the past, present, and future of the black community, as
well as examining the ways in which reality differs from the ways that we talk
about reality.
This
selection opens with the narrator’s commentary on his discovery that he is
black – it is “something [he] figured out on the sly” – and the optimistic
feeling that that “The great thing about finding out [he] was a Negro was that
[he] could look forward to going places in the by and by that [he] would not
have been asked to as a white boy” (64).
This optimistic assertion, bizarre perhaps in its lack of mention of all
the other, less “great” things that being a young black person in 1950’s and
60’s America would entail, sets the tone for the rest of the piece, which alternates
between positive, cheerful statements and qualifying caveats that reveal a
hidden, darker side to the story being told.
For
the young man in the story, he is at the “glossy edge of the New Frontier,” and
is separate from the work and workers of the past, all the work having been
done (64). As we quickly see, however,
maintaining one’s place at the “glossy edge” requires constant vigilance and
work, and the messages that one hears about the “New Frontier” are mixed and
confusing. He writes, “All men were
created equal, but even so, lots of mixed messages with sharp teeth waiting
under my Roy Rogers pillow” (64).
Vigilance is a constant requirement and pressure is just as constant –
there is “nothing to fear, though every time you left the house for a Spelling
Bee or a Music Memory Contest the future of the future hung in the balance”
(65).
This
piece is made up primarily of such contradictions. “You were not an immigrant . . . but still
you did not belong the great beyond out there,” the narrator tells us. The community of the “Also Chosen” is united,
but also not, for “United we stood, which did not include everyone on the
block” (65). Perhaps the most shocking
and illustrative contradiction refers to the local swimming pools. One pool (the white pool) is off-limits, and
the pool which is available “had something floating in it that put your mother
off” (65). He writes that the outside
world could not “stop His truth from marching on, but until His truth made it
as far as restricted Broadripple Park, you did not go swimming. . .” (65).
The
narrator’s relationship with his present, and the contradictions within it,
is intimately connected to his
relationship with his past and the history of those who have come before him. This is also a complicated relationship, for
while these older folks might only be the people far away who send the “token
checks that come on birthdays,” they are also something much more powerful, for
“the claims that the past had on you were like cold hands in the dark”
(66). This powerful past extends in its
power into the present, drawing on generations upon generations of people:
the ranks of the
old-timers promised never to thin. They
enlisted the departed in their number, on their side, which added to their collective
power to dominate those of you who would never know what they knew (66).
This
burden of the past notwithstanding, the narrator does somehow manage to
un-burden himself for a time—“escape I did, the burden of consciousness was
lifted from my round little shoulders, and for a while there I was gorgeously
out of it.”
As
with some of the other selections that Gillan and Mazziotti Gillan make, I am
left wondering about the textual world outside of this selection (and inside of
the novel from which it comes). As we
see, the narrator only escapes “for a while there,” leaving me to wonder for
how long he does escape, how he does so, and what causes him to return to the
difficult task of carrying that “burden of consciousness.”
Read More:
The American Poetry Review , Vol. 23, No. 6 (NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1994), pp. 9-14
Response to Father
from Asia by Shirley Geok-lin Lim
The
poem Father from Asia, by Shirley
Geok-lin Lim, is an intensely angry and haunting poem that addresses the
past. More specifically, the speaker
speaks to her father, examining the ways in which we deal with memory and the
past and their power over the present
and the way that we view the world.
Here, memory possesses a fearsome power to “crush” everything in its
path, and to color all things with which it is connected.
The
tone of this poem is incredibly angry and accusatory, though simultaneously
intimate. The speaker is speaking
directly to her father, calmly detailing the ways in which he failed her, and
fighting against the power that memory has to destroy one’s self and that which
one loves.
The
father that we read about in this poem is a powerful figure, and associated
with poverty and violence. He is “. . . dangerous,
father / of poverty,” and his hands are
like “Large hollow bowls” that are “. . . empty / stigmata of poverty . . .”
(19) This is a father who, even in his
absence, is a “ghost / who eats his own children,” – he is her father, and the father of nine other children, and
yet he is the “father of nothing, from whose life / I have learned nothing for
myself.” The speaker is clear, she wants
nothing to do with this man, and yet he is still present, still with her. She writes: “I renounce you, keep you in my
sleep, / keep you two oceans away, ghost / who eats his own children.”
Before
this terrible ghost, the speaker’s response is to forget, or at least “dare not
remember.” Forgetting is of course a
powerful tool, though perhaps a difficult one to yield, as memories tend to be creative
and resilient, demonstrating an enviable power to survive. One may “renounce” one’s father, as the
speaker does, but he may still visit in one’s dreams, when our power to forget
is a less valid option, as seems to occur here.
Unfortunately, as ironic process theory has shown us, not thinking of a
pink elephant is difficult to do when trying not to think of a pink elephant.
Memory,
we see, is a dangerous and violent force, possessing a power akin to the
original action or person upon which it has been founded. Memory is a “wheel that crushes,” and which
has the power to damage and destroy all that it touches. Here, we see that “Asia” – an entire
continent – is not to blame for the violent and painful past of the speaker – “Asia
who loved his children, / who didn’t know abandonment,” and yet the presence of
the speaker’s father “at the center of the world” has tainted all memories of the
place, and now “Asia is dust, is dust.”
More to Consider
In regard to Nash Candelaria's "The Day the Cisco Kid Shot John Wayne," it might be interesting to check out this episode of Radiolab, (a WNYC program distributed by NPR) which takes a look at memory and forgetting.
