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The Real Deal
| Article
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11420 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1994 |
3,349 Words |
| Author
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John McCluskey, Jr.
John McCluskey, Jr., is professor of Afro-American studies
and English at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the
author of two novels: Look What They Done to My Song (1974)
and Mr. America's Last Season Blues (1983). The editor of The
City of Refuge: Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher (1989),
he is completing a historical novel and coediting a
collection of essays on African American males for Indiana
University Press. |
Like trusted and anointed vessels, the autobiographies of African Americans have consistently borne the lessons of personhood for generations. Marvelous fiction, poetry, and drama have revealed the complexity of black American lives, and surely the richest forms of popular expression--blues lyrics, folk sermons, tales--have done the same. Yet the autobiography as testimony, history lesson, and dossier has stood for so many readers as the genuine article, as Truth, as the real deal in representing black Americans.
Autobiography has claimed an authenticity and invitation to uncritical reading that few other forms can so consistently command from the opening pages. This is the case despite the now-familiar design, especially in black male autobiographies, of the journey from confinement to freedom, from ignorance to enlightenment, from stasis to mobility. Consider, among others, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, Chester Himes' The Quality of Hurt, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Richard Wright's Black Boy. The truths can often be shaped to the vessels.
Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler fits neatly into the tradition in several important ways. In the book's first half, McCall, now thirty-nine, relates his early years growing up in Portsmouth, Virginia, where he moved with his family at the age of nine. He recalls Portsmouth as a medium-sized city dominated by a naval base and nearby shipyards. Neither Claude Brown's mean streets of Harlem nor Richard Wright's volcanic Natchez, McCall's Colonial Manor was solidly working class. As they often did in other close neighborhoods, neighbors and schoolteachers operated as surrogate parents, extending the network of support for values learned at home.
McCall paints his neighborhood as a community of shared assumptions, a common ground of hope and ambition. Strangely, it does not seem to have been a community of memory, a site where the young could witness nurturing traditions extending from the past. At any rate, the early portrait is troubled by brief glimpses of class divisions and racial conflict, reflected in demeaning work and grade-school experiences. McCall and his brothers were reared by a stepfather, whom they often accompanied to work in the yards of wealthy whites. Humiliated when the stepfather is addressed by his first name (Bonnie) and seemingly taken for granted as a yard statuette, young Nathan quickly loses respect for him. Though redeemed much later in the book, Bonnie appears a voiceless, powerless man in the early pages. Manual labor is another casualty.
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