The manifesto as fiction: Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's "Control Negro"

It's hard to write a good story about something going on in the news right now. The show SVU has been cranking out nothing but "ripped from the headlines" stories for what seems like forever now, and none of them are going to be remembered a hundred years hence for having really gotten to the heart of the society they've tried to mirror.

One of the stories from my book was about the Baltimore Riots of 2015. I wrote it about a year after they happened. I knew I'd have to anchor this huge story to something small to give it any kind of emotional hook for a reader to attach to. My wife, who was teaching in the city at the time, had passed on to me a story one of her kids told her about the riots. He'd gone to the Mondawmin Mall, which was right in the heart of some of the worst of the rioting. That was the spot where helicopter camera crews caught several people loading up cars with stolen merchandise. This student had walked around watching the looting, and taken one thing himself...a cinnabon that the store had left sitting out. I thought it was so funny, and in that one fact was something I could spin a story around. Humans have a great gallows humor, a way of enjoying themselves in bad circumstances. We'd probably roast marshmallows while the world burned, if it came to that. Sometimes, humans seem more pitiable when they're trying to make the best of something bad than when they're just perishing beneath the oppressive force. I don't know if I succeeded with that story, but I knew I couldn't write a story that just seemed to preach about the social conditions that led to the riots.

For much of Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's "Control Negro," I felt I was being preached to. It reminded me of the show Murphy Brown from decades ago: tiring precisely because it was preaching to me about things I already largely agreed with. It wasn't until the last page that I got a clue that I had read the whole story in too straightforward a manner.

The straightforward reading

On one level, you could read it as a simple fable, one that is meant to demonstrate how far America still has to go in achieving racial justice. Professor Cornelius Adams, the narrator, has devised an experiment to test his country's ability to live up to its own ideals. But this experiment requires a live, black baby he can mold for twenty-one years to fit the parameters of the experiment. Miraculously, he obtains the needed materials for this project. He finds a black woman who is happily married, but whose husband is infertile without actually knowing it. She is somehow willing to have an affair with Cornelius and bear his child, while also being willing to listen to his input on how the boy should be raised. Neither the child nor the woman's husband ever know who the real father is. Cornelius, exerting influence behind the scenes, is able to make the child into his needed "control negro."

What is a control negro? In an experiment, you enact controls in order to isolate the factor you're trying to test for. In this test, what Cornelius wants to test is America's racial justice. But he can't just have any black person test this. If a black child grows up to face injustice, a critic could always cite factors other than racism as the cause: parental care, poverty, the educational system, health care, etc. So Cornelius wants to try to eliminate these factors by raising Cornelius as close as possible to an average Caucasian man, or ACM. As Cornelius puts it:

I wanted to test my own beloved country: given the right conditions, could America extend her promise of Life and Liberty to me too, to someone like me? What I needed was a control, a Control Negro. 

The child would have to "keep his grades up, have clear diction, wear his pants at an average perch on his waist." He would need "a moderate temperament, maybe twice as moderate--just to be safe--as those bright boys he'd be buffed so hard to mirror." Cornelius needs all of these controls so he can have a child he could prove "was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there."

Predictably, if you're reading this as a straightforward reading, America fails. The child, although meeting every expectation society would have of white men, is attacked by the police when someone calls in about a "suspicious looking man." The video shows the police being rather overly enthusiastic about the boy's compliance. The cops later claim that although he had an ID, it was out of state and they were confused whether he was who he said he was.

Along the way, we get a back story on Cornelius. He was beaten up by a drunk gang of adult white males in the South when he was ten. His refuge from poverty and racism was books. This was partly why he was not married himself, and needed such an unusual setup for his experiment: "Those early years of struggle and I'd become a solitary sort of man."

The thing about this straightforward reading is that it's fairly dull. The whole story becomes the manifesto of a boring history professor, justifying why he manipulated the life of a boy just to prove a point. As the professor drones on, the reader feels preached to with familiar material. It's like a Facebook rant in fictional form. Fortunately, this isn't the only way to read this story.

The not-so straightforward reading

Cornelius is intelligent, but he isn't honest. The entire experiment requires lying, lying he recognizes, even in his own self-justification, as he notes that he was "less than forthright...I concede." As a history professor, Cornelius is aware of how questionable even putting the words "negro" and "control" together is, but he engages in a massive ends-justify-the-means argument. He repeatedly hopes his son will be able to see that it as all "for a grander good," or "in service to something bigger--that someday our sons' sons might be spared."

Cornelius often expresses doubts about his methods, only to immediately talk himself out of them. But there are a lot of reasons we, the readers, ought to be more suspicious of Cornelius than he is of himself:

1: He's playing God: He tells his son that he "began as a thought fully formed and sprung from my head." This is a reference, of course, to Zeus birthing Athena. Cornelius is comparing himself to a capricious god who meddles in human affairs for his own amusement. Speaking of God, Cornelius reminds me of someone who loved God so much he was willing to do something unspeakable to his son...

Take it easy son, this is for science. 

2. Cornelius is a shitty father: Cornelius grew up with an absent father, and notes he felt that "abandonment acutely, like hunger." But he is willing to let his own son grow up without his father, even granting that the boy did have a good substitute. When the boy is grown up, Cornelius has to go years without knowing much about him. When the boy finds he is good at diving and starts to excel at it, Cornelius intervenes to keep him from continuing on with it. Why? Because if the boy becomes TOO exceptional, it will ruin his experiment, because the boy will be too far above an ACM for the experiment to be valid. (You can't judge how America treats black people based on how we treat great athletes or a genius like Neil Degrasse Tyson.) He is willing to sacrifice his son on the altar of his own experiment.

3. Cornelius is asking his son to do something he himself didn't do: Cornelius went off to school while others went to Vietnam or "marched in bigger towns, facing police dogs and fire hoses." Cornelius, meanwhile, devoted his life "to scholarly truth," which, while admirable, didn't require sacrifice like marching did. Or like the sacrifice he is making his son take part in, unknowingly.

4. Cornelius is obsessed and irrational: Cornelius is a little like Dr. Frankenstein, losing contact with the rest of humanity while he pursues truth in an unbalanced way. He sometimes thinks America is getting better for black people. But he can just as easily cite many reasons why it isn't. He doesn't know for sure if his own mediocre career is due to his own failings or his skin. He needs this experiment, because of one question that occupies his mind: "...how can I know for sure? How does anyone know if they are getting more or less than they deserve?" He is obsessed enough with finding the answer, he is willing to sacrifice his own son to find it. He is willing to ruin a black boy to prove America ruins black boys.

The two readings together 

The second reading, the one where Cornelius's entire point is deconstructed, didn't open up for me until the end of the story, where we discover that the impetus for the police attack on Cornelius's son came from Cornelius himself. Cornelius called the police and made the report of a "suspicious man" where his son was, but didn't specify race. There were a lot of students there, but the police picked out his son. For Cornelius, this settles the answer of his experiment. He was willing to let his son be attacked by the police to get the answer he was looking for.

When I read the story the first time, I mostly was thinking the straightforward reading was where it was taking me. It wasn't until that ending that I saw another way to read it. During my second read-through, I was picking up on a lot more things that fit with this reading of Cornelius as an unreliable narrator. But the first reading never quite went away.

The fact is that Cornelius is a little nuts, but he isn't wrong. He should never have called the police on his son, but at the same time, it shouldn't be so easy for him to know how to prove his experiment correct. Cornelius knows truths about America and race in his body from when he was a boy.

On the other hand, Cornelius himself is the tool that unleashes systemic racist faults in America on his own son. We can feel bad that afterwards, when Cornelius tries to explain what is wrong with America, using the boy's case as an example, the media disregards him and writes him off as an angry nut. Then again, he is kind of an angry nut, and this cockamamie scheme of his that he's putting in his own manifesto is the best proof of that.

Cornelius's intervention proves him correct, but it also invalidates his results. It does this not just because an observer became involved in the experiment, but because the idea was for the boy to be treated like an ACM in all ways. What parent of an ACM would have gone out of the way to unleash the police on their child?

In a sense, the black intellectual is letting down the young black man, because even though he is giving the young black man the truth, it's not a truth that is helpful. There is an interesting line when Cornelius quotes the boy's mother. She is an environmental scientist concerned with global warming. Her opinion on racism in America is that soon, we'll all be drowning when the seas rise anyway. It's a grim view that might actually be true, but she doesn't live like it's true. She raised a son, which is not the act of a woman without hope.

There is some wisdom to living your life without regarding the truth too seriously. That's the both the foolishness and the wisdom of youth, which thinks it is going to be able to change the world in ways every generation before it failed to. Youth will mostly fail, but there will always be some successes they were just foolish enough to not realize they couldn't do. Without these foolish successes, we wouldn't even have a world where one has to wonder enough about our shortcomings to need an experiment to verify them. When youth succeeds where it by all rights had no reasonable expectation of success, the responsibility of the older generation is to be happy for those foolish successes, not to go out of their way to prove the success wasn't real.

For Karen Carlson's excellent analysis of this story, go here.