The Other Blacklist by Mary Helen Washington

Author:Mary Helen Washington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004040, Literary Criticism/American/African American, HIS036060, History/United States/20th Century
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Whenever he left the Midway, said David McKemster, he was instantly depressed. East of Cottage Grove, people were clean, going somewhere that mattered, not talking unless they had something to say. West of the Midway, they leaned against buildings and their mouths were opening and closing very fast but nothing important was coming out. What did they know about Aristotle?

(44-45)

McKemster aspires to college, to moving away from the South Side, to an intellectual life where he would not only read Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought but could toss it around carelessly as one would a football—as he assumes privileged whites do. McKemster’s desire for access is undercut by his marginalized existence on Chicago’s South Side. He is ashamed of his mother, who takes in washing and says “ain’t” and “I ain’t stud’n you.” With ironic emphasis on the elitism of the word “good,” the narrator tells us that McKemster wants a good dog, an apartment, a good bookcase, books in good bindings, a phonograph with symphonic records, some good art, those things that are “not extras” but go “to make up a good background” (188). In striking contrast to Carl Sandburg’s tributes to the lustiness, power, and dogged vitality of the Windy City, the narrator (always through Maud’s consciousness) informs us that McKemster’s life on the South Side is not “colorful,” “exotic,” or “fascinating” but a place where “on a windy night” he (and perhaps Maud too) feels “lost, lapsed, negative, untended, extinguished, broken and lying down too—unappeasable” (187). The poet and literary scholar Harryette Mullen reminds us that here Brooks is employing the rhetorical device of synathroesmus, which consists of piling up adjectives, often as invective, to modify a noun.18 Buried under this stack of adjectives, McKemster seems to lose any intrinsic qualities and is psychologically demolished by that overwhelming accumulation of negating modifiers until the final adjective. The final term, “unappeasable,” shifts the tone to focus on the need and desires of the “loser” rather than on his state of abjection, thus saving him from total annihilation. If Bigger’s crude references to white power structures more accurately describe the effects of white racial power and black powerlessness, Brooks’s critique is aimed partly at McKemster’s own pretensions but most severely at the integration ideologies of the Cold War 1950s, which promoted the notion that as blacks achieved sufficient intellectual and cultural weight they could become candidates for integration, even as the economics of segregation were rigidly maintained. Clearly, however, this narrator knows the meaning of and how to deploy synathroesmus and thus how to assert her own power.

Chapter 24, “an encounter,” the second David McKemster chapter, almost certainly meant to suggest the story “An Encounter” in James Joyce’s Dubliners, aligns Brooks with a quintessential modernist. Following the pattern of the other thirty-three chapters, the chapter is elliptical, about six pages long, narrated almost entirely in free indirect discourse, and focused relentlessly on Maud’s interior reactions, ending abruptly without conclusion or resolution. Now a young married woman and mother,

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