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.

Fatherhood in Gilead

I've read nine novels in the past year. Seven were by J.K. Rowling and two, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, were about fatherhood. Both won Pulitzer Prizes, both were immensely powerful.

I may be in a minority on this point, but compared with other McCarthy novels I read I found The Road to be relatively optimistic. The burnt-over world is utter dystopia, but the father and son love each other perfectly. At the end McCarthy suggests it's possible to live sustainably in an ashy world without photosynthesis, which is more hopeful than anything current science tells us. So, the book left me feeling more "up" than I did after reading All the Pretty Horses, even if it did motivate me to start researching what Mormons recommend for a year's food supply.

I've thought about McCarthy's world a lot, but what with the cannibalism and buggery, I don't think I could bear to read it again, much less see the movie. On the other hand, I've just reread Gilead and it's haunting me. All the reviews make much of the narrator's Calvinism, but it's an atypical sort of Calvinism. His religion is of a gracious father God; he barely mentions Jesus. I guess it's possible that a Congregational minister in southwest Iowa could be so possessed by everyday grace to the exclusion of sin and atonement, but he would be a remote outlier among his preacher peers.

Still, I am captured by his voice, his story. It's a story of fathers and sons and of their relations with each other, God, and finally America. Ames is facing death and is recounting his life for the benefit of his young son. He makes much of the observation that the Bible has no bad parents. Similarly, the fathers in the book aren't absent or abusive to children (save one). For their part, the youth recognize and respect their fathers, but in every case but one, fathers and sons suffer estrangement and agony. As Ames puts it: "A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension." Robinson's fine craft produces a compelling story of generational tension mutating and reproducing itself.

John Ames came from a male line of preachers, but unity in doctrine or practice evaded them. The grandfather had been a radical abolitionist in Bleeding Kansas. When his son, Ames's father, witnessed his violence in the name of God's fury, he could not reconcile himself to it. Decades later, frustrated with the lack of urgency in his son's religion, the old man ran back to Kansas to die. In the next generation, John Ames's older brother Edward studied theology, but broke with their father over the faith itself. John became a preacher and took up his father's church in Gilead.

John's first wife and daughter died when he was young, but the pattern of estrangement continues with his namesake, the child of his best friend, the Presbyterian preacher "old Boughten." No common prodigal, Jack Boughton is a charmer with a deep mean streak. Nonetheless, Rev. Boughten loves him. John Ames, on the other hand, sees through Jack and doesn't like the view. The only unfraught father-son relationship is between the dying Ames and his adored boy, born after his second marriage when he was sixty-seven.

Ames is weak and sick. His heart is giving out and his imminent death will be a tragedy for his boy and wife, younger by probably forty years. His wife also had seen untold loss and hardship before she met him. It is all sadder because Ames never saved any money and his wife and boy will have a hard life after he goes. But no one is bitter. After seven years of unexpected love, Ames is filled with a luminous appreciation for life, God, his son, and his wife. There's nothing clap-happy about it, and he never sentimentalizes pain and poverty. Ames says, "There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient." Under Robinson's hand, this makes sense.

As powerful as the story of the late-blooming, soon-withering fatherhood is, I was more rattled by Ames's revelations about himself and his own father. These are withheld until the end of the letter to his son. At the end of his preaching career, John Ames's father left poor, dusty, backwards Gilead to retire on the Gulf Coast with his rationalist older son Edward. The pretext was the climate, but move gave him the opportunity to shed his religion. (Thinking it over, this is more implausible to me than Ames's beatifics.) Having abandoned Gilead, Ames senior wanted union with both his sons, Edward the atheist philosophy professor and John the widowed small-town preacher. The father returned to Gilead to invite John to join them, to convince him that his world and God were too limited to deserve such dedication.

John couldn't abandon the town or his faith. He also couldn't tolerate his father's condescension. His enduring anger toward his father is rivaled only by that for the villainous Jack Boughton. Ames may not have found any unfaithful fathers in the Bible, but his own father turned away from him. Ames recounts for his own son: "My father threw me back on myself, and on the Lord. That's a fact, so I find little to regret. It cost me a good deal of sorrow, but I learned from it."

John Ames's comfort lies in God, the perfect father whose love had carried him through the loss of a spouse, child, and father. It's a mark of God's grace that his beloved wife first came to his church on Pentecost. In dying, he leaves his wife, his son, and himself to that mercy. The close of the book allows Ames realization of Gilead's and his own limitations, but also a reconciliation with Jack Boughton, delivered in soaring, aching language. His comfort is so deep and his hope so modest that there's no embarrassment in feeling it with him. For me, it was an honor to have known John Ames, even if I didn't always understand him, even if he never mounted a prophetic call such as his grandfather's.

"A Primer" by Bob Hicok

I hope I'm not violating too many copyright rules by reproducing this. It's from the New Yorker, May 19, 2008.  Bob Hicok seems like an interesting guy. Not sure I'd like to have a beer with him but I'm amused by what he says about Michigan. With thanks to Bob and apologies for any infractions.

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word "truth,"
can sincerely use the word "sincere."
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we're not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you're from Michgan.
It's like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there's a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
"Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball"
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn't ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. "What did we do?"
is the state motto. There's a day in May
when we're all tumblers, gymnastics is everywhere,
and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he's from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let use tell each other everything we can.

A Bit of Hearsay About Life's Satisfactions

This is what an East German academic told a friend of mine after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She told it to me about 15 years ago.

He said he had lost the thing that gave him the greatest sense of achievement. Living under the DDR, his greatest satisfaction was receiving a book order. Ordering academic books from the West was difficult. Merely keeping up with his field required a lot of struggle through red tape. But when it succeeded, his joy was sublime. His most satisfied moments were walking home with a new book in his arms.

When the Wall fell, he could order any books he wanted. Cost was the only limitation. Receiving new books no longer gave him the same sense of pleasure. He missed that feeling, he told my friend.

It's hard to recount a stranger's story second hand. I've tried not to embellish it. Most certainly, in communicating it to the Internet, I've misrepresented some part of it. Not only is my version hearsay, it isn’t even entirely clear. It would be better if I could ask him some questions. How did this sense of achievement compare to other joys in his life, such as being with his family and friends or even reading the books he received? Did joining the West offer him new opportunities for satisfaction? How did they compare with the one he had lost? To make sense of his loss, we need some relative understandings.

It might be possible to find the man and ask him for clarifications. Maybe I could track him down by contacting my friend. It’s possible that she’s forgotten the story, but I doubt it. One reason it made such an impact on me was her telling of it.   If she knew the man’s name, perhaps we could find him. But then there’s the possibility that this was a story that he’s stopped telling and that in order to confirm it he would have to recreate it. The new telling might have a different meaning than the one that resonated with my friend and me.

I guess it’s really my story at this point, so I’ll explain it. I appreciate the message that the process of acquisition can be sweeter than the acquired object. I like the observation of loss in victory, about nostalgia even after life has improved. I think it’s good to be reminded that people living a constrained life find joy that we might not know. All this in a little tale of a man walking home in a gray city under a gray sky, holding a book wrapped in cheap brown paper, luminous.

Ruffian

I won't repeat Ruffian's history here. You could look it up (or Google it, in the modern form).

I'll say this: that I was fourteen years old and that she was beautiful, bigger than the colts, and maybe faster. I was bigger than the boys and had some reason to think that I did some things better than they did. But this was 1975 in Middle America. The fact that she was a filly brought out things in people who discussed her. Could a filly beat a colt? More to the point, if she could, what did that say about my future?

They arranged a match-race between her and the Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure. I ached to watch her win. The match was set for a Sunday afternoon. Generally, TV was off on Sunday afternoons, but my parents knew this was important to me.

Church was at 6:00. Church was an obligatory twice-on-Sundays event. Both services were a lot alike, except that in the evening they didn't repeat the ten commandments and the prayer was shorter. The race should have been over in time for church, but the start was delayed. Missing church for a sporting event was a slippery slope and avoiding slippery slopes was our speciality. The time edged closer to when we should be leaving but the race had not started! My parents agreed to my way out. Dad went to church with my sister and Mom stayed home with me to watch the race. We could go to a 7:00 service at a neighboring congregation.

So, I watched TV at 6:00 Sunday evening. The race was very close; Foolish Pleasure was the fastest horse Ruffian had ever run against. I don't remember who was ahead when she pulled up, lame. She ran her leg into a fracture and Foolish Pleasure finished alone. I had imagined many possible outcomes - mostly how the outcome would go down among the neighborhood boys and girls - but Ruffian breaking a leg had not been among them. Anyhow, Niekerk Church was starting at 7:00. We flipped off TV and left. I remember that I didn't get much out of the service. Mom was also shaken. Ruffian fought all attempts to help her and during the night they put her down. Mom woke me up the next morning by saying, "Honey, they had to put your horse down."

The race might have given me bragging rights, as a girl. If she'd run well and lost, at least I'd take pride in that she was in the race. But for the girl to die in the attempt was just dumbfounding. I put the clippings in my scrapbook and mourned her along with Amelia Earhart.