Jamel Brinkley's "A Family" and the case of the detective who tried to solve the mystery that everyone else had already solved

When Jamel Brinkley's "A Family" cold starts, we meet a man on a stakeout. Curtis Smith is watching a mother and her son across the street. In some ways, he seems competent at the craft of discovering whatever he wants to know about the two: he applies reasonably good logic to guessing what they're arguing about and what movie they might have gone to see. In other ways, though, he's a bit bumbling about the work: the whole neighborhood, apparently, is aware he's following the woman and child, and they're talking about it. He is not a professional detective. It's a twist to the usual detective on a stakeout scenario, because in this case, the one doing the surveillance is himself a criminal, only recently released from twelve years in prison.

In the first few pages of the book, the details of why he was in prison emerge, as well as glimpses of why he might be tailing the two. He had a friend, Marvin, who is the father of the boy. Marvin is now dead, a death that sent Curtis into a tailspin that ended when he killed a woman while driving drunk. This vehicular homicide landed him in jail for twelve years.

At first, I assumed what Curtis wanted was to be some kind of big brother or mentor to the child, fifteen-year-old Andre: "Obedience, he thought, he could talk to the boy about that." Although his would-be advice, like that many fathers give, is a little muddled: "Though sometimes it was important to disobey." While eavesdropping on the two, he learns that the mother, Lena, is going clubbing the next night, and she wants Andre to stay home alone. I fully expected that Curtis would go to Lena's house to talk to the boy while she was out. There were hints he might have held a grudge against her at this point in the story, and I assumed he needed or wanted to be able to talk to Andre without Lena present.

In an unexpected second act twist, it's actually Lena he goes to see the next night. He contrives to run into her at the club. She knows who he is--mostly, anyway. She knows he was Marvin's best friend. "Like brothers," she says they were. She doesn't know they had a falling out right before Marvin died in a fire, a fire Marvin started when he fell asleep in bed with a cigarette. She doesn't know the fallout was because of Curtis's jealousy over her. She doesn't know that Marvin's friendship meant something different to Curtis than it had to Marvin.

Strangely, they head back to a hotel and strike up a sexual relationship right away. But it isn't love. It isn't clear to either of them what it is they feel. Curtis tries to rationalize it as a sense of obligation, but:

"it felt like something more bewildering than an obligation....It was beyond either of them...so it claimed them both. It was as though a bright delicate object they couldn't see, some filament, were held between them, along the length of her sapphire dress...and they had no choice but to pull each other close, to preserve the object between them, otherwise it would drift free and fall and lose its light." 

The sleuth motif emerges

There was a detail in the story I almost skipped over. While in prison, Curtis developed a liking for the novels of Walter Mosley. That's the writer best known for the Easy Rawlings series of mystery novels, with Rawlings as the black detective. I had gone past that for a few pages when Curtis asks Lena if Marvin liked Easy Rawlings. Suddenly, a light went on and an aperture to the whole story opened up.

My literary tastes are generally high-brow, but I do love a good hard-boiled mystery

Curtis pictures himself as a detective, even if he doesn't put it in those words. What exactly he's searching for is itself sort of a mystery. On one level, he wants details about his friend's death. He pesters Lena to find out about it, even though she claims she doesn't know much: "You must have heard how it happened, Curtis. It was just like that." It turns out that this mystery--the mystery of what happened to Marvin--is a mystery everyone has already solved. And what isn't already known, Lena really doesn't know that much about. She didn't even know that Curtis and Marvin had fallen out, much less why.

Curtis might also be searching for redemption from killing a woman while drunk driving. He is haunted by the woman in light-flooded dreams. One way to find redemption might be to take care of his own mother, who is 60 now and starting to show her age as a result of caring for and worrying about him. Another would be to take care of Lena, who takes over the role of breadwinner for Curtis when he leaves his mother's house for hers. Most of all, he could find redemption by sharing life lessons with Andre, the fatherless son of his best friend.

Curtis isn't without these hopes. Neither was his friend Marvin. They wanted to provide for the people in their lives. Marvin was once naive enough to believe he'd be able to pay off his mother's debts and buy her a house. As Curtis put it, the young Marvin "spoke as if the days and years to come were nothing but a cycle of restoration." And Curtis, although unable to find a job or pay for himself after prison, much less help those around him financially, still feels something inside him that wants to be the traditional male provider. This traditional man likes old 60s and 70s love ballads, rather than rap music that has women shaking their asses lewdly. Curtis seems himself as "a man true to better times."

Black men and their families

But like in any great mystery story, the detective starts investigating one mystery, and finds he's been played for a fool all along, because this mystery goes all the way to the top. Or in this case, to the bottom of the power pyramid--to the struggling black men who are unable to find work and who therefore become listless. Curtis sees himself, in fact, as a "baby" with his mother: "That's right, he thought. Your baby. Can't get a job, can't get my own place, can't open a goddamn bank account. You wouldn't even care if I pissed the bed."

Through a combination of institutional racism, the prison system, and bad personal choices, these black men who once had dreams of taking care of the women in their lives end up being cared for by them. It begins with their mothers. Early on, Lena shows a sort of feminine chivalry towards her son, shielding him from the rain and wiping off a wet bench for him to sit on. But the pampering and Sunday breakfasts continue when the men move from their mothers to their romantic female partners.

Curtis is mostly unable to share anything with Andre about being a man, because he hasn't been able to learn how to master it himself. Even Curtis's initial meeting with Andre, which I assumed at the end of Act One would be the big moment of the story, takes place anticlimactically off-screen. All Andre seems interested in are the lies Curtis tells about prison. Andre does come to Curtis, though, with one earnest question: "What makes mothers the way they are?" In many ways, this might be the real mystery for gumshoe Curtis to solve. If this had been a Tyler Perry dramedy instead of a crime-mystery-inspired meditation, Medea would have come in with sassy jokes for the women in this story, asking why they continued to support men who wouldn't change. But these women don't question it. When Curtis gets Andre to start making fun of his mother for the way she feeds them bacon on Sunday mornings with food she paid for and made, she accepts the harassment.

It's not clear whether the story is suggesting the very indulgent behavior of the women, which is a natural reaction to the wrecked lives of their men, is itself somewhat to blame. Does the indulgence  infantilize them, prevent their growth? Curtis's answer to Andre's question about why mothers are the way they are is, "They lose themselves and get all kinds of ridiculous...Ain't no mystery to it."

Unable to find their own independence and uneasy while accepting semi-permanent charity from their women, these men seek for a middle ground, one where they can feel "contained but not trapped." Curtis is "horrified" by the "feeling of being stuck" when he realizes he is headed for a relationship with Lena, but at the same time, he feels that "freedom is a wilderness." He feels about his relationship with Lena like he does about the East River: it is polluted, but he likes it anyway.

The men are stuck, and the women coming along with them by whatever bonds there are to hold them there are stuck along with them. The story is called "A Family." Not "The Family." "The" family would have suggested something special about this one family in this story. "The" family indicates hard ownership and people who belong together. But "a" family suggests this is just one possible arrangement out of infinite choices, a possibility that came together like molecules bouncing into each other until they formed a happenstance bond. (Brinkley asserts in the notes that he changed the title from "A Kind of Family" because he didn't want to suggest the family in this story was a degraded family in any sense. It's not. I don't think that, either. It's clearly a legitimate form of a family. But legitimate families can still be pathologically dysfunctional. Curtis's family is every bit as much a real family as a family in a Eugene O'Neill play, including all the things wrong with it.)

What began as a solitary quest to find out facts about a lost friend becomes, by the end, a deep meditation on the struggles of black families and black men.

Personal thoughts on the writing

Two things about the writing put me off temporarily. One was the figurative language that seemed to me at first to hammer away too often with light imagery: "many windows, a thousand squares of humming light"; "bright delicate object they couldn't see"; "daylight flickering in their faces, blinking madly through the diamonds of the fence"; "his dreams were full of light."  Once the importance of Mosley dawned on me, though, I started to like the play of light, giving it, if not a Dashiell Hammett-like noir quality, at least something of a chiaroscuro crime story feel.

Secondly, last year I did a couple of posts in the "Would I have published this story?" vein. The idea was to take a critically acclaimed story and review it, asking myself if I would have thought it was good enough to publish it if it had come into me as a reader at a literary journal without knowing it was supposed to be good. The first page of this story might have put it on thin ice with me as a reader. The first page-plus has just a few snags as Brinkley is getting us acquainted with three living characters and one dead one, and sometimes he uses appositives in order to avoid repeating names too much. Andre is "the boy" in his first mention, then Andre after that, then "the boy" again. But he's "the boy" in the same sentence that Lena is "Lena," which made me wonder why he knew one person's name but not the other's only to find out he did know them both.

It's fine, really. But a tired reader on his eleventh story of the day might have prematurely bailed on it. I might have bailed on it, given the wrong circumstances. I respect Brinkley for trusting his readers. And I respect Gulf Coast for getting it right. Props also to Roxane Gay for picking it for BASS. She's two-for-two so far according to my reading.


FOR ANOTHER TAKE ON THIS STORY, SEE KAREN CARLSON'S POST IN IT HERE.