Hero's journey for the black man: "The Special World" by Tiphanie Yanique

Every year, when I read through Best American Short Stories, there are at least a few coincidences that make me think the order of stories was chosen on purpose, even though I know that the stories are put in the sequence they're in based solely on the alphabetical order of last names of authors. This year's collection has probably set a record for the number of times I've felt like the stories are doing a call-and-answer with one another, and the final story in the collection, "The Special World" by Tiphanie Yanique, does it more than any other story. Not only is it a story about a black character struggling with trying to understand what authentic blackness is when surrounded by white norms, making it a perfect bookend to "Godmother Tea," the opening story in the collection, it also contains a reference to a Mahalia Jackson song, like Carolyn Ferrell's "Something Street," and it plays with the notion of invisibility, much like Kevin Wilson's "Kennedy," the story just before "The Special World." If guest editor Curtis Sittenfeld intended to pick not just twenty stories she liked, but twenty stories that somehow actually worked well together in spite of not having been written with the collection in mind, she succeeded mightily.

This final story is playing throughout with a well-worn way of looking at classical literature known as the "hero's journey." Concocted by Joseph Campbell, it's an attempt to find common traits in many heroic stories in world literature. You can Google it and find a number of graphic representations of the stages of the hero's journey, but I'm going to use the one that seems to be the closest to that which "The Special World" is playing with. 

 

Obviously, some stories fit the model better than others. I first learned about Campbell's model in college when we were discussing Star Wars. It fits well for stories like The Odyssey or The Hobbit. As Yanique will point out in her story, though, it doesn't fit everything, and you probably wouldn't want it to, because "anything that follows a formula is useless anyhow." 

The basics of the formula are that someone is living their normal life, then there is a call to go on an adventure. The hero resists the call before finally answering it. Once on the journey, the hero faces a series of trials that begin to change the hero. Finally, he faces one, singular defining trial which changes him so profoundly, the old him dies, leaving a new, resurrected version of him in its place. This resurrected version then goes back to the ordinary world, but as a changed man, meaning the ordinary world around him is changed, too. 

I have to admit, I was a little leery of the story at first, because it seemed to be making more out of college than I think it deserves. College does, certainly, forever change most people who go, but it's also a rather ordinary part of life. To give college epic status seemed a little overstating its importance. (Also, it just reminded me of "A Different World," an 80s/90s Cosby Show spinoff about students at an HBCU.) 

But once I got to the end, I realized that this story was trying to appropriate Campbell's model for black men, to bend it and break it until it fit a little better, and the experiences of Fly, the main character, do fit this new model. Or, rather, they show why it's so hard to make a model for black men. 

The story is split up into nine sections, all of which fit some version of Campbell's model, with one exception. I'll follow that order while analyzing the story. 

Section One: The Ordinary World

In Campbellian theory, this is the status quo for our main character. In The Hobbit, Bilbo lives a life of quiet content, although he has adventure in his blood and doesn't realize it. His life is made up of peacefully moving from one meal to the next, punctuated by smoking his pipe. This is the world that will be upset and which the main character will have to leave. 

For Fly, the main character of "The Special World," his ordinary world has been the life he's lived with his parents prior to the first day of college, when his parents drop him off at the dorm. Unlike other students, Fly doesn't want them to come in. He goes to his room and skips orientation. 

Fly's ordinary world, his status quo, seems to involve an indelible loneliness. The night prior to coming to school, he'd felt "nervous, and alone in that feeling." His loneliness seems to be re-inscribed, rather than erased, by the situation in the dorms. Whereas many college freshman find themselves living for the first time with people unlike any they'd ever known, Fly has a single room. He's one of the few students who does. His RA, Clive, struggles to figure out why. He assumes it's because Fly has some kind of serious allergy.  

Section Two: Call to Adventure

Fly's real call isn't just going to college; it's being asked to go to church off campus. Suzie and Arthur, two white people, ask him to go. They're apparently very into their church. This doesn't seem like much of an adventure, either, on the surface: for many people, going to church is very much part of their "ordinary world." But we'll learn later why it's part of the "special" world. 

Section Three: Refusal of the Call

Things are going well for Fly at college. He's hanging out with people from his Intro to World Religions class, smoking pot at parties, listening to typical freshman pseudo-profundity and spouting off some of his own. He's got no time for church, because who needs it? 

One of the stoned comments of freshman insight bears looking at. It's the notion that religion provides a socially acceptable avenue for male homo-erotic behavior. This is going to come up again. 

Section Four: Traversing the threshold

In this section, Suzie, a.k.a. Sue, a.k.a. Suzanna, depending on which version of herself she's being, is walking away, and Fly is literally at the threshold to his dorm room, watching her leave for church without him. Fly's happy to let her go, but when Clive specifically tries to warn him that this church is a cult, suddenly, that is the intervention that spurs Fly to go. If Clive's against it, then Fly is for it. 

As soon as Fly enters the special world, the world beyond the threshold to the normal, he finds, somewhat Matrix-like, that the world he thought was the "ordinary" world was actually hiding secrets. At one point, while still in the ordinary world, Fly saw people of color eating together in the school cafeteria and wondered where they were all hiding all the time, because he hardly ever saw any. Once at church, though, he realizes that Suzie and Arthur were also people of color. In fact, the church seems, suddenly, once his eyes are opened, to be full of people of color: "All the people of color were camouflaged. Maybe they had been around Fly all the time, and he'd been too self-absorbed to notice. Maybe he was camouflaged too."

Perhaps Fly's essential loneliness can be cured, now that his eyes have been opened. He's not alone. There are others like him. Perhaps this is why Clive, the white dwarf who had tried to guard the threshold to the special world, wanted to keep Fly from attending. Clive pretended to be Fly's "brother," although not in the jive sense, but in reality, he may have been part of the white power structure trying to keep Fly feeling isolated. 

Section Five: Tests, Allies, and Enemies

Immediately after going to church, two things happen to fly: he is in love with Suzanna, now that he knows she is black, and he is tired all the time. We will learn in a later section that Fly had porn at home. The porn collection was magazines of black girls on the top and white girls on the bottom, as though he was secretly attracted to white women, but had to cover it over with an attraction to black girls. One of his first thoughts when he thought Suzie was white was that he couldn't bring her home to his parents. 

Suzie seems to solve the riddle for Fly of how to resolve his attraction to both black and white girls, because Suzie, the lightest-skin black girl he's ever seen, can be either. 

The "tests" in "Tests, Allies, and Enemies" are actual school tests. The allies are his new church friends. I was momentarily a little disturbed trying to figure out who the enemies are, because it seemed like the only possible enemies in the chapter are the Jews who claim they aren't really white. There's Clive, of course, but he's one enemy, not enemies, plural. Which means the only other possible enemies seemed to be the Jewish kids. However, once viewed from the end, it's possible to read the Jews as allies, albeit unexpected ones Fly can't quite get his head around, while Suzie and Albert are the real enemies in disguise. 

Section Six: Approach to the Innermost Cave, or, The Meeting with the Goddess

Any nineteen-year-old would take talk of an "innermost cave" in a sexual way, and that's exactly what it means here. Suzie, turned on that Fly is starting to be into God, first starts giving him oral sex and then, after he is formally "saved," allows him to partially penetrate her. It seems like typical evangelical hijinks, the kind of stuff that gets skewered in HBO's Crashing, how evangelicals will split hairs between vaginal sex and things like hand jobs or blow jobs. Maybe Suzie really just does want to maintain some kind of technical virginity out of a sense of Christian virtue. We don't learn until later that there was something truly awful about her refusal to let him fully inside her "innermost cave." 

Within this section, we once again get a hint that church is linked to homo-eroticism. After getting saved, Fly is hugged by a number of men, receiving "more male affection than he'd ever received." He's far more fascinated by the female hugs, but still, the idea that religion allows for male intimacy in ways that nothing else does is reintroduced. 

Section Seven: The Ordeal

Fly thinks he's found a solid answer to both his loneliness and also to constructing identity in church. He doesn't stop to think that his parents also met in church, that it was also the beginning to their sad story. 

Clive, the one who never wanted Fly to go to church and discover the place where all the colored people could appear as themselves, is the one who puts the seed of doubt in his mind. He says he's seen Suzie romantically involved with freshmen before. Clive, thinking he's finally figured out that the reason Fly had the single room is because he's gay, suggests that maybe it's some kind of conversion therapy, trying to turn gay men straight through Suzie's enormous sex appeal.  

This is the third time someone has linked the church to homosexual or homo-erotic behavior, but Fly is very clearly not gay. Clive has failed to understand that the real reason Fly got the single room is that for any black man who wishes to live as himself, loneliness is unavoidable. 

The cumulative effect for all this linking church with homo-eroticism is to cancel its appeal for heterosexual black men. What could have been a place for much-needed intimacy, a place to undo the loneliness that is the "ordinary" world for a black man, is negated by making it seem it is only for people not like him. 

Section Eight: Atonement with the Father

This is the section title that doesn't really correspond to Campbellian theory, although fathers are an archetype Campbell does discuss. Fly's father, we find out, has been dealing with mental illness his whole life. His father also, for some reason, kept a sex tape with a former girlfriend, a tape that ended up in the inner sanctum of Fly's porn collection. 

Fly has apparently had a lot of resentment built up against his father, and it comes to a head when the father decides to leave his mom. But when his father hands Fly Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, there is suddenly a truly holy moment, the moment when the father is giving his son the real esoteric knowledge that the secret world was supposed to reveal to him, because he is presenting his son with the sacred text that can explain all the reasons for Fly's essential loneliness. There are limits to the applicability of the Campbellian formula for a black man, because the formula was never written with black men in mind. Rather than a cycle that can help relieve Fly of his loneliness, the hero cycle for a black man is more about understanding why that loneliness is somewhat unavoidable. 

Just as the story has altered Campbell's steps to meet Fly's needs, though, it has no intention of sticking closely to any model, even a model as revered as Invisible Man. As we'll find out in the next section, ""Anything that followed a formula was useless anyhow," so Fly needs to find a new template for the hero's journey, one that fits his experience as a black man in America in his time. 

Section Nine: The Road Back

Turns out his sleepiness was mono. Turns out, Suzie gets engaged to Arthur, the man she was saving herself for, the man God created for her. So maybe her "sluttiness" with Fly really was missionary sluttiness after all. Far more damaging to Fly's heterosexual black male image than Clive thinking he's gay is the fact that Suzie only was having semi-sex with him because she thought he might be. Fly has returned to his ordinary world, which is to say, to his fundamental loneliness: "So Fly was alone again."

Is he changed? Has he come back from the special world a different man, such that he can change the ordinary world around him? An important part of the Campbellian cycle is resurrection, the moment the character comes back from the special world, reborn into the ordinary one. We are told there is no resurrection possible for the father, but is it possible for the son?

It's hard to see how. Fly's self-image is even worse than it was before. It isn't that some people have thought he was gay, it's that being authentic and vulnerable and intimate is so automatically linked to homosexuality; since Fly knows he's not gay, he feels like all the other things that are assumed to be part of homosexual identity--things Fly really needs--are not for him. Fly has been made to think that his loneliness is because he longs for an unmanly intimacy, when in fact, it's got nothing to do with sexual identity. "Just because I was lonely doesn't mean I was gay. And was lonely what gay people were anyway?" 

If there is redemption for Fly, it isn't that he'll be able to escape being lonely. It's that he might have a greater understanding of what it causing his loneliness. 

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense paid more attention to something I only alluded to, the importance of vulnerability in this story. For her take, go here.