Race in Gilead

To continue with Gilead: Apart from fatherhood, the theme in that grabs me is race. It's the place of slavery and race in this novel that justifies saying that the book is about America itself.

It takes a while for the theme to emerge and that's what's brilliant about it; race is easily submerged in white America, and Robinson makes her treatment of race more effective by framing the white town of Gilead its own terms before introducing the realities it ignores.

Two white individuals, Grandfather Ames and Jack Boughton, made closer connections to blacks and before we understand that they recognized race as a problem, we learn to mistrust them as the people of the town did. The once-abolitionist grandfather who appreciated the preaching at the Negro church had, according to Ames, a "strenuousness in ethical matters" and a "narrow vision." Jack Boughton got into all kinds of trouble. John Ames is a sympathetic narrator, but even he takes it for granted that these two men rightfully belong on the margins of society. If they're not even respectable, what claim can they make to criticize? The trajectories of these characters normalize the racial exclusions of American society.

Robinson's depiction of race is most deft in the Des Moines baseball story. Baseball may be the only thing the fathers, sons, friends, and brothers in Gilead have in common. When John was a boy, his ancient grandfather, missing one eye, took him all the way to Des Moines to watch Bud Fowler play. The game promised to be a great treat, but it was disappointing: the game rained out in the fifth inning. The denouement is even more of a non-event. Ames's recalls about Fowler: " I followed his career in the newspaper for years, until they started up the Negro Leagues, and then I sort of lost track of him."

This image is remarkable: a half-blind radical abolitionist taking his grandson to watch a black baseball hero. The whole thing went fell flat and years later his grandson still misses the point about why his grandfather chose this hero or about why excluding the hero from the sport was wrong. Through his widowed years, radio baseball was his lifeline, but John Ames can't see the hateful swell beneath this grace. What a bittersweet effect for readers when race appears in the definitive American pastoral: Iowa baseball. Nostalgia for Iowa tastes different once Bleeding Kansas is stirred in.

But John Ames doesn't sense the tension. He isn't concerned about what he recalls as a "nuisance" fire at the Negro Church. After the fire, the town's black population moved to Chicago, but Ames doesn't question the reasons for the exodus. The Negroes left; the Lithuanians moved in. To him, it's just a rhythm of peaceful town life.

Jack Boughton always could stir Ames up. At the very end Jack Boughton's story about race strikes him, and this is the last lesson of his life. It's a big lesson for a dying man and shakes his certitudes: "I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone's...It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand."

It's too late for Ames to address the question, but the book is written as a letter for his young son and is thus oriented toward the future. Ames's late revelation restores Kansas to the story he's telling about Iowa and America. "What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all an ember now, and the Good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again."

I'm so moved by Robinson's treatment of race that I'm going to rag on one reviewer who just didn't get it. Tessa Hadley, who wrote on Gilead in the London Review of Books, entirely missed the point. It's too bad, because hers is one of the only early reviews to comment on the place of race in the book. Unfortunately, she didn't read carefully enough to see the development within Ames.

In fact, Hadley characterizes Ames as incapable of "fresh thought." The review is odd because it conflates a criticism of Ames's self-understanding with one of Robinson's own faith and politics. It states the book postulates "a continuum between the grandfather’s activism spurred by passionate faith and Ames’s late-life celebrations of a world radiant with God’s love." The reviewer hasn't figured out how the conversation with Jack Boughton humbled Ames's satisfaction with his small world.

Most egregiously, Hadley opines that at the end Ames achieves a "mere acquiescence to the existence of Jack’s mixed-race child [that] can’t stand all by itself for a significant engagement against injustice." Well, no, of course it couldn't, but Ames achieves more than a "mere acquiescence." Acquiescence would not cause him to feel as if he were on the "floor of hell." Because Hadley can't see that Ames has grown over the course of the book, she doesn't see that his late arrival at understanding magnifies the loss created by his death. His final words to his son are: "I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray that you find a way to be useful."

It's worthwhile, I think, to clarify this point. This message from a dying man to his son, is a most poignant statement of sadness and hope for this country.