In Praise of Uncomfortable Books: Huck & Harper Revisited

18 February 2018 / alejojoyner / 3 Comments

photo by Chris Lawton via Unsplash

Huck and Harper are on the block again and I’m not comfortable with that. Then again, I think it’s high time we all got uncomfortable.

In late 2016, as I was beginning Heartlands, I reflected on the controversy that was roiling Accomack County, Virginia where I live. Only that’s not strictly accurate. The decision by the local School Board to temporarily remove The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird for offensive, racialized language did lead to some protests here (and the eventual return of the books), but the headlines were largely elsewhere. Accomack County was one more piece of evidence for blue America (and places far beyond) that red America was regressing into ignorance and intolerance.

Now I think that maybe the greater danger is that the country as a whole is regressing into head-in-the-sand comfort.

The courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama

This week news came that the same two classics of American literature were being removed from the required reading lists in the schools of Duluth, Minnesota. The decision was not the result of a particular complaint but from ongoing conversations that included the local NAACP chapter.

“We felt that we could still teach the same standards and expectations through other novels that didn’t require students to feel humiliated or marginalized by the use of racial slurs,” Michael Cary, the school district’s director of curriculum and instruction, told the Duluth News Tribune.

Stephan Witherspoon, president of the local NAACP said, “There are a lot more authors out there with better literature that can do the same thing that does not degrade our people.”

I don’t want to argue the case for Mark Twain’s Huck and Harper Lee’s Mockingbird, even though they stand among the best and most important books American culture has produced. The de facto canon that American public schools have been using is too limited and could surely be strengthened by adding more diversity. But to set aside Huck and Harper in favor of literature whose primary requirement is that it does not offend is a travesty.

Good literature is offensive precisely because, if it is authentic to experience, it goes directly to those places where humanity is exposed and revealed in all its flaws and triumphs. Sure, let’s add Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave to the mix of required reading, but what they describe is degradation and it’s going to be no less offensive. Put James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time on the list and there will still be squirming in the seats.

I get the distinction. Twain and Lee are white authors who may be using the racialized language satirically but who certainly don’t bring the same lived history or context to it that African-American writers would. But the characters they create—Huck, Jim, Scout, and Atticus—are the kind of people I want my children to meet in literature. They are limited by their times and their prejudices, just like their authors, but they contain the beating heart of humanity and of the possibilities of expressing that humanity in this land. They can’t be what they are, fully fleshed out, without the jarring reminders of what racism and the legacy of slavery has done to them and their language.

Alex hanging out with Scout & Jem

Removing the books may seem like a good move to save children from the disturbance of knowing how such hurtful language has been used against people who look like them. But isn’t empowerment, in part, helping students of every race deal with the world they live in everyday that includes such language and its history? Is it better to let them struggle with such language in its cartoonish version in alt-right chat rooms and casual daily racism or to deal with it in books that give them other resources for understanding what’s going on?

Another danger of the move is that it threatens to remove another voice from our contemporary world that we still need—our ancestors. Because they do not conform to our current standards of appropriate terminology and ethical behavior, they make us uneasy and we are tempted to hide them away as an inconvenient embarrassment. But the dead do not stop speaking for all our attempts to silence them. What motivated them and stirred them to both moral horrors and triumphs is still within us and we have much to learn from them, even as we expand the canon with voices that were suppressed in their own time.

So here’s a plea for some holy discomfort that should welcome the challenge of Huck and Harper. Perhaps it’s a longing for schools to be a space where wise books and wise people can lead us out of our struggles to live into a common story. Or maybe it’s just because I believe that we are already uncomfortable and will be despite such changes, so why discard some companions who would try to help?

Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#1 Lincoln in the Bardo (& a recap)

22 December 20178 April 2018 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

There are certain things you know you’re going to find when you sit down to read a George Saunders story. It will be weird, funny, engaging, and surprisingly deep. I expected no less from Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’ first novel and I was not disappointed.

The book, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, uses a little-known but poignant episode from Abraham Lincoln’s life as a center around which to turn: Lincoln’s late night visit to a DC cemetery in the early part of the Civil War to visit the mausoleum where his young son, Willie, lies dead. From that point of connection with history, Saunders creates a universe of characters – ghosts who are watching and lamenting their own unresolved lives.

Lincoln is interesting, but it’s the ghosts who take center stage. They are the ones who, like the dead in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, carry, in exaggerated form, the distortions of their lives, waiting until they can accept the peace that awaits them. They cling to their past–not wanting to acknowledge their deaths, not wanting to let go of the ones they love, and not believing that the angels who visit can mean them anything but harm.

It’s haunting and beautiful and it’s my best read of 2017. Click the link on the title above for my full review.

And now, to recap the Best Reads of 2017:

1. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

2. Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves

3. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders & the Birth of the FBIby David Grann

4. Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan

5. The Crucifixion:Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge

6. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

7. All the Pretty Horsesby Cormac McCarthy

8. American Fire: Love and Arson in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse

9. Can You See Anything Now? by Katherine James

10. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Heartlands Best Reads of 2017: #10 Strangers In Their Own Land

7 December 20177 December 2017 / alejojoyner / 1 Comment

It’s been a great year for reading. I credit Sarah Willson Craig for inviting me into a real mid-life reading renaissance. She’s the one who posted the Better World Reading Challenge on Facebook in 2016 and got a group of friends committed. I’m grateful.

Since everyone else is doing their end-of-the-year list, I decided to join the fray with a Heartlands Best Reads of 2017. Some caveats: These are books I read in 2017, but they weren’t all published this year. 2017 books did get some extra points in the ranking, however.

Also, I’m not making any allowance for genre. Fiction, non-fiction–theology and journalism–cats and dogs living together–it’s one big, unruly house on my nightstand.

Of course there are some great books that didn’t make the final list. Here are a few of the near-misses that I loved reading this year (with links to reviews where I’ve done them):

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Cancer is not Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Cancer by Jason Micheli

All True Not a Lie in It by Alix Hawley

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Duane’s Depressed by Larry McMurtry

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Given the quality of those books, you can see why the Top Ten are extra special to me. So today we start the countdown with #10.

Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild was not one of the best-written of the Top Ten, but it lingered with me and proved to be a very useful book during a year when I was trying to get my mind around the Great Divide. Her “deep story” that emerged from many days of living as a California sociologist in rural Louisiana was a very useful framework that reminded me of a Flannery O’Conner story. A bonus for me was the opportunity to interview Hochschild and she turns out to be a delightful, perceptive, authentic person.

James Baldwin’s Moment and the Danger of Racial Innocence

22 May 20173 April 2018 / alejojoyner / 4 Comments

photo by Cristian Newman via Unsplash

James Baldwin is having a moment, 30 years after his death. First, Ta-Nehasi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book that drew its inspiration from Baldwin’s 1963 book The Fire Next Time, topped The New York Times’ bestsellers list. Then, a documentary about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Academy Award. It was time for me to see what the fuss was about.

The Fire Next Time is a brief, searing read. In it, Baldwin tells his own life story as an African-American man growing up in mid-century Harlem within the larger narrative of race in America. At times angry and disillusioned, it also works below the surface of racial tensions to come up with a surprising definition of love. “Love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided,” Baldwin says. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” But until America, and particularly white America, comes to see itself as it really is and not as it imagines itself to be, love will be perverted into antipathy and fear.

“Love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided,” Baldwin says. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

Baldwin sees the danger of the myth of innocence. In imagining that we are a color-blind society with a heroic narrative of advancing civilization, we fail to see how the ripples, the peoples!, who trouble that narrative would allow us to be more honest, more open to new frontiers. “What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might being new life to the Western achievements, and transform them.”

I find this book as fresh and relevant as Coates’ book, even though it is more than a half-century old. Perhaps because it seems so clear that we are just as incapable of grappling with race as we ever have been. In fact, the lines between us have hardened between those who see race as a pretext for liberal policies and those who see it’s avoidance as evidence of white nationalism.

Racism, like air, isn’t something Americans have the luxury to avoid. It just is. And like every manifestation of Sin, it has its claws in us from the time we are born. To spend vital energy denying its existence or continuing impact is to whistle in the wind. One might as well deny the fact of death, which is what Baldwin says that white Americans do.

Racism, like air, isn’t something Americans have the luxury to avoid. It just is. And like every manifestation of Sin, it has its claws in us from the time we are born.

We are prone to simple narratives in these days. Our summer blockbuster plot lines boil down to a cataclysmic confrontation with personified evil overcome by a hero, if not good, at least justified. We are drawn to leaders with simple answers – walls, guns, and jails.

But the church, which Baldwin found so energizing and ultimately disappointing, is nonetheless the custodian of a language of faith that offers something deeper. Within the story of God and ourselves in the Bible is a Love that refuses to credit any of the easy lies we tell ourselves. In the light of the cross, we can have no illusions that there is an innocent history.

We are chained by forces that resist God’s work of mercy and redemption. We are incapable of seeing how truly distorted our lives become. It takes a God incarnate in the world and on a cross to “deliver us from slavery to sin and death,” as the United Methodist communion liturgy has it.

Baldwin’s writing is suffused with the language of the church. It lends him an urgency for the time we face. To wit, his closing line: “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”