A musical with a second-act showstopper: "Blessed Deliverance" by Jamel Brinkley

When I read through "Blessed Deliverance" the first time, I was struck by its similarities to watching a Spike Lee joint: the nostalgic sense of loss at the gentrification of Brooklyn balanced with an understanding of the inevitability of change, the great jazz music slyly dropped in, a young person's climactic move toward introspection as a way to deal with disorienting social change...the only thing missing was the double dolly shot.

On second read, though, a different story started to appear to me, one that still has some resonance for me with Spike Lee (maybe because I don't really know that much about New York in general or Brooklyn in particular, so anything having to do with Brooklyn is going to remind me of Spike Lee movies), but which reminds me more of earlier work I've seen from Jamel Brinkley. It's a colorful, wonderfully shot nature documentary inside the interior life of an intelligent and sensitive young man navigating a young adulthood with complicated family and social surroundings. 

The story has five acts, and I think, rather than grouping elements of the story thematically like I often do, it's better here to follow the five acts chronologically, letting the themes unfold as we go.

Sun Ra, whose poster is on the narrator's wall, is one of the few jazz musicians I can say I enjoy without having to fake enjoyment to avoid being judged

Act I

An unnamed male narrator in his last year of high school gathers with his four friends one "balmy" October day. The friends are a boy named Antonio and three girls named Cherise, Walidah, and Roni. This balmy day is introduced right after a rather lyrical passage about the group of young people discovering their bodies. Some of this discovery had been within the group, and the trust build up by the members of the group knowing each other for a long time meant that when that discovery happened, it came with "ample room...an open field, like the ones in the Botanic Garden or in Prospect Park where on warm days, when things seemed simpler, we used to lavish time, each field providing a volume of space in which to flex and stretch ourselves freely, to play, to recognize that our bodies absolutely belonged there, among all the other fragrant and colorful organisms surrounding us."

The narrator explicitly puts the kids in nature and part of nature, in spite of being in the middle of New York. They are "organisms," which puts them on a level with flowers or trees or birds.

Or rabbits. As the kids are enjoying this balmy day linked in the narrator's mind with simpler times and  open fields of green space, they come across a new store in the neighborhood. It turns out it's a rabbit rescue, and much to their surprise, one of the people working there is "Headass," a homeless and mentally ill man who has been roaming their neighborhood for years. They thought they had seen the last of Headass when a vacant home he was squatting in was raided. Headass had been a victim of gentrification and "certain cruelties of the law" that were "now being strictly enforced" because of gentrification. 

Nonetheless, there Headass is, and the white man running the rescue calls him Reginald. The white man, named Cyan, has names for everything, rather Adam-like as he strives to turn Brooklyn into an upper-middle-class Eden. He gives names to all the rabbits, who are of course unaware that those are their names. 

Headass/Reginald seems to connect with the rabbits. So, too, does the narrator, although perhaps he doesn't realize it yet. The narrator continually speaks of the group as "we," but keeps "I" out of his "we." We get all the names of all the main characters in the first act except the narrator himself. The narrator also doesn't seem to be partaking in the sexual exploration of the rest of the "we," meaning he doesn't fully see himself as an "organism" in his environment the way the rest of the group does. However, the narrator does unwittingly describe himself in a very rabbit-like way early on. When worrying about what the future might hold, he notes, "Life apparently would never stop with the excitement, leaping from the gray shadows of alleyways to jump you, knocking you to the ground and seriously kicking your ass." This sounds very much like an animal wary of being attacked. 

Seeing Headass has temporarily reunited the group, who spend the balmy day in perfect harmony, like the old days. Perhaps they are also reassured by the rabbits' "serene confidence that everything they wanted would eventually and inevitably arrive." That's very much the attitude of a young child, and perhaps it is being reminded of these simpler, younger times that allows the group to be happy again like they used to be.

The group is bothered, though, that Cyan has given him the name Reginald, which they are sure is not his "government name," meaning his official, birth-certificate name. They object to white people in general giving whatever names they please to people and things that don't belong to them, including parts of the city. 

As the first act ends, though, the narrator pauses to consider whether the friends have any leg to stand on when they criticize the new people for changing names. Hadn't they, or someone close to them who was part of their self-identity, once given Headass his name? They don't like the use of "DoBro" for "Downtown Brooklyn," yet they think nothing of using "Bed-Stuy" for Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they all come from.

To put the central tension another way: from whence comes their own right to name things? Have they been using names, and language in general, based solely on social convention? If so, what happens when the society changes or disappears? Will their names and language go with it? What really belongs to them? This uncertainty seems to be behind the narrator's wish to keep his own name hidden. 

Act II

Headass's identification with rabbits gets a lot more literal. He's wearing a rabbit suit outside the rescue, in theory to drum up interest, although it's quite possible Headass just wanted to dress up like a rabbit. The suit doesn't seem right, prompting the narrator to observe: "Headass’s face peeked out of the creature’s open mouth, as though he was being swallowed or bizarrely birthed." Whether he is being born again or swallowed alive, either way, it is the end of one phase of Headass's existence. He will no longer answer to either the names Headass or Reginald. He apparently has some other name that he keeps to himself. 

Meanwhile, the kids notice all of the people riding by actually wearing their bike helmets, "assaulting us with their show of law-abiding goodness and safety." This is the second time the law has been tied to the encroachment of development, and neither time has it suited those living under the previous, less-law-abiding society. 

The kids try to remember what came before the rabbit rescue, because they are trying to remember what the intruders took from them. They can't remember, but they don't want to just ask the people running the rescue or Google it. They want the memory of what came before to be organic, something that would be theirs by right of belonging to the neighborhood. 

Without realizing it, Headass answers their question. He starts to hum, or purr, or make some kind of chanting sound. The kids join in:

"What started with the incredulous stares of the other four became, gradually, through a process of reluctant submission, our unanimous choral moaning in response to his call. He moaned and then we moaned—Antonio did it so loudly you could feel the vibrations of his chest—and for a while it went on like that, antiphonal, until finally all six of us made the sound together." 

They don't know it yet, but the rescue used to be a storefront church, the "Cathedral of Blessed Deliverance." The narrator's father will reminisce approvingly on the music that used to waft from it. Headass is reviving the neighborhood's memory of what was once there through his "antiphonal"--that is, a musical piece sung alternately by two groups in medieval Christianity--music. 

At the end of this second act, the kids' mojo is broken, and they start breaking up. There are two groups of two and then the narrator as the odd man out. They feel they'd been cast into a "net from which they were eager to escape," which is a different reality of a rabbit's existence from what they felt at the end of Act I. 

Acts III and IV

In the short act three, Reginald has been fired for not following the rules. He has been sleeping in the rescue, and the managers are concerned this might have been a code violation that would get them in trouble. The introduction of rules and law seems only to hurt the native organisms of Bed-Stuy. 

In Act IV, the narrator's father remembers what came before the rabbit rescue. He also gives his own name to Bed-Stuy: "Cathedral City." Then, the father begins to cry while the narrator hears him through his bedroom wall with the poster of Sun Ra on it. The narrator remembers when his friend Antonio was also crying similar tears after finding out how sick his mother was. He remembers how he tried to care for him, and how he let his romantic feelings for Antonio slip through, then tried to apologize, but then Antonio pretended not to understand what the narrator meant so he didn't have to deal with what it meant. 

This is the moment of the narrator's catharsis and realization. Again, the narrator takes on a mental position similar to one a rabbit would have. Realizing that with sadness, sometimes you don't even know what is hitting you, the narrator thereby makes sadness into one of the scary things "leaping up from the gray shadows" that he worried about in the first act. He method to survive these attacks is: "So, no matter how horrible the sound, it’s best to stay very quiet and avoid calling any attention to yourself." 

The narrator is surviving an assault on his language, his neighborhood, and his cultural property by switching to an extra-linguistic way of thinking. He is thinking like a rabbit, which of course doesn't care at all what its name is. 

Act V

Having come to this cathartic moment, Act V now works at the denouement. Headass has gone back to the rescue, taken a pot and a spoon, and banged on them in a sort of reverse-Pied-Piper-of-rabbits. He is setting all the rabbits free from the rescue center. The neighborhood cheers on Headass as he "delivers" the rabbits." 

The neighborhood doesn't even all agree what they're cheering about. "Everyone seemed to be smoldering in their own private fire," the narrator sees. The big, socially constructed language we all borrow from is nothing but the effect of innumerable individually built languages. These will continue to exist as long as people look out at the world in wonder. Having shared in extra-linguistic thinking, along with Headass, the narrator is now able to learn names of things for the first time, his own Adam in his own new paradise. These are the names "given out of love." These names include Headass's real name and the narrator's own, but we do not learn them. 

Questions

So whom or what is delivered in the story, and from what? In a literal sense, the rabbits are delivered from the rescue center, although to what fate, who knows? 

Perhaps the narrator has been delivered from a relationship to language that is entirely logical and rules-bound. He has been freed from the oppressive law with its logic for creating words, and instead has  acquired a more "organic" language, one that will allow him to continue to find new words for things no matter how often his environment changes. 

A question I don't have an answer to is what the kids mean early on when they look at Headass being eccentric and say to one another, "There goes your father." Am I supposed to take this literally, or are the kids clowning on each other in the manner of a "your mama" joke? If it really is the father of one of the kids, is it Antonio? It isn't the narrator, because his father is at home crying, but maybe it's Antonio, for whom the sickness of his mother is therefore all the more poignant. I doubt this reading, because it seems like there would have been more mentions of Headass really being the father of one of the kids, but I honestly don't know the answer. 

Also read: Karen Carlson's take on this story, which also focuses on music and naming.