Being and Race by Charles Johnson

Author:Charles Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Unlike Delany, McPherson in Hue and Cry never plays with the poetic possibilities of language and voice or with stylish sentences—epanalepsis or anadiplosis—and the reason, I suspect, is because he’s too busy, from one line to the next, with recording as clearly and simply as he can the lacerations and wounds of modern black life. He can be canny and comic in “Of Cabbages and Kings,” in which his narrator, Howard, is transformed into a guilt-ridden follower of Claude, a mad member of the Brotherhood (read: Nation of Islam), who works upon Howard’s racial guilt. But generally McPherson is our best transcriber of pain. His title story is interspersed with dialogue passages that tell us in no uncertain terms that simply to be alive is to be unhappy. His unnamed speaker asks, “But if that is all there is, what is left of life and why are we alive?” And is answered, “Because we know no better way to be.”

Something like a “world” emerges from McPherson’s fiction. A sad one. But finally, we suspect, true. “All the Lonely People,” for example, brings McPherson’s considerable powers of characterization—his ability to select precisely the right details and unique quirks that bring forth a character as recognizable—to bear on the anguish of a homosexual, Alfred Bowles, whose advances throw his narrator’s sense of his own sexual being into greater ambiguity. Largely, and throughout most of the stories in this collection, the grief McPherson explores focuses on our sexual and racial pretenses, as in “Hue and Cry,” a tale in which black couples (and one white) continually betray each other. And themselves. Of course, this must be said with caution. For McPherson’s palette is broad enough, and the point of his brush precise enough, to render suffering people on what seems the longest of continuums: the Irish janitor James Sullivan in “The Gold Coast,” a lovely story about a black man’s journey to committing his life to writing, and Doc Craft, the “Waiter’s Waiter,” in what may be McPherson’s most anthologized story, “A Solo Song: For Doc.”

In “A Solo Song” we have what may be one of the few portraits in black fiction of the worker as an artist of sorts, someone who, as in the case of Doc Craft, obliterates himself to give “good service” to others. Is he cut from the cloth of Ellison’s Lucius Brockway in Invisible Man? Yes, but McPherson takes the portrait of the black worker, “the machine inside the machine,” further by opening us to a moment of history among Pullman porters, a flickerflash in time that vanished—and with it a way of life—with the death or retirement of members of the “Old School” of waiters, those who didn’t rely on rule books like the greenhorn waiter this story is addressed to. Leroy Johnson, looking for work, finds it and is renamed “Mister Doctor Craft” by the other blacks. Being crafty, we learn, is a virtue among these men, in fact a necessity because the characters in “A

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