You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

Author:Chandler Burr
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

I drive us back. I am not clear why Denise’s presence was needed—although it was, and she is evidently appreciative of my help—but I think that something was supposed to happen that didn’t. It is impossible for me to tell.

Kelvin is a sullen boy, ineloquent with internal gravity, like some collapsed star. He is an exhibition of limited capacity. He projects a dark tunnel. And though he debates options and logistics, at nineteen his reasoning is inferior to Sam’s at eight. Sam’s friends, hyper-articulate, slightly neurotic, typically aggressive Jewish boys and girls, ambitious and verbally off-the-charts, Denise has known for years. And then Kelvin. I think: No, Wilde and Marx are both wrong. Not the sick and the well. Not employer and employee. The greatest distance between any two human beings is the greatest possible distance between any two cultures. She looks out her window at Los Angeles rushing by, and finally she says darkly, “Din raise Kelvin. Street raise ’im.” Her voice claims that she accepted this reality long ago. But it’s obvious she never really has, nor will.

They all sit with their copies of Faulkner, which I had assigned them two weeks ago, the day after I drove Denise to Compton. They listen to me telling these stories, staring at my hyacinth or the Los Angeles sky overhead or glaring at their hands. What I am saying makes them uncomfortable. I can see that. I hesitate, trying to be gentle. It is simply observation, I point out to them. Perhaps we don’t discuss it. But if you’re going to tackle Faulkner, you’re going to have to tackle this bitter empirical reality, although Faulkner of course does it through fiction.

Half of all black men between twenty-four and thirty-five have no full-time employment. One black man graduates from college for every hundred who go to jail. Almost half of all black children live in poverty.

I glance down at my notes. In a letter, dated August 30, 1791, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Banneker, a black astronomer and mathematician whom he had had appointed official surveyor of the District of Columbia: “No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

They glance at one another. The book they hold is Absalom, Absalom!

I get two glares. I say to them, I understand the desire not to wound, but it has been long observed that literature, if it is not ruthless, is nothing. They do not capitulate, but they turn the point over in their minds.

I can feel a breeze moving up from the Los Angeles side. For an instant it carries the sound of a radio, the music then blown toward the valley. No one says anything. I repeat to them, to clarify. Remember, I say, that in this context, this is a literary question.

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