A merciful two-for-one: "Countdown" by Anthony Marra and "Just Another Family" by Lori Ostlund (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

There are two kinds of stories I feel I can mostly skip over when I'm blogging my way through one of the big short story anthologies. One is a story I think so bad, so undeserving of its place in one of those anthologies, that I just can't bring myself to look at it closely. Those aren't any fun to do. The other is a story that seems to me so obviously accessible to nearly any reader, there isn't much for me to do. If the point of me blogging is, for the most part, to help a bright and curious but non-literary-professional see things in a story they might not see for themselves, then a story that doesn't really present many difficulties for the non-professional is one where I can take the day off. 

That's the case for both "Countdown" and "Just Another Family" from the O.Henry 2025 Anthology. In the case of "Just Another Family," I've already dealt with it (or not dealt with it) before, because it was in last year's Best American Short Stories. It's a fun and funny story that pretty much anyone can read and enjoy, but it's also a little long for the kind of analysis I do here, plus I don't know that the analysis would add much.

For "Countdown," there might be some context to the story that isn't familiar to an American reader not familiar with life in modern Russia. However, I think most of that context can be inferred pretty easily, at least enough to understand the stakes of the story. It's very easy to find oneself sympathizing with the family trying to avoid getting pulled into Russia's immoral war with Ukraine, especially given that Alexei's brother sacrificed his own life for Alexei in another, earlier episode of Putin's adventurism in Chechnya. Alexei's many and familiar foibles add to our ability to empathize with the family. He's not a perfect person, and he has likely lived his life fully aware of how little he has justified his brother's sacrifice, but for that reason, he comes across as an underdog, and who can resist rooting for an underdog? Especially one in a beat-up car racing for the border? 

We probably tend to think (if we aren't repeating Putin's propaganda) of the victims in the war being primarily in Ukraine itself, but "Countdown" reminds us that there are plenty of victims in the aggressor country, too. American readers can perhaps see parallels from our own history of fighting a largely unjust war in Vietnam but still feeling sympathy for young American service members sent to fight there. 

I'll only offer two very quick observations, which are more questions I won't even bother to answer than they are analytical assertions. Feel free to answer these questions for yourself.

1. When I was in graduate school, I had a moment where I couldn't stand to read fiction anymore. On every page of every story, I felt like I could see tricks. Maybe film students learning about technique go through something similar where they can't just enjoy a movie as a normal viewer anymore, and it kills all the magic. Every time I saw a technique that felt "writerly" to me, the whole spell of the work was gone. I left grad school not wanting to read anymore, and it took me a few years go get over it. 

I'm mostly over that instinctive repulsion now, but there are still passages I read where I have a hard time staying under the spell of the suspension of disbelief. Here's one from "Countdown": Very early in the story Alexei and Sonya are sitting at the table talking about trying to get flights out of the country. "Sonya set her passport on the kitchen table. She'd been smelling the visa itself, which had the fresh, fibrous scent of a newly minted banknote." 

I recognize that this is good technique. Most of the story moves pretty fast, which is appropriate, because it mirrors how events moved fast early in the war and how quickly the family needs to make decisions in order to escape. This passage, then, has the effect of momentarily grounding the reader in the world through a slowed-down, tangible, five-senses observation. And because writing advice tells us that anyone can use sight or sound but real pros use taste, smell, and touch, it picks one of the cooler senses. Everything is right about it, but I felt that old, instinctive desire to keep the work at arm's length. This might explain what might be my own greatest flaw as a writer, because I tend to resist putting observations like this in my own work. I don't know how to alternate between movement and slowing down, because I myself so dislike slowing down as a reader. While there is nothing I can say to really critique a passage like this, because I know it's the "right" way to write, I do wonder, when I read it, if I've completely followed a wrong path in life with literature, because part of me is constitutionally not built for it.

2. I don't usually look up anything about writers themselves, because I think it's not relevant to examining the text of the story. For this story, though, I made an exception, because it made me wonder if Marra himself had a personal background in Russia. It doesn't appear to me that he does, although he has written about Russia and Chechnya before and once studied in "Eastern Europe." I'm sure he's done more than his fair share of research. Not just research, which has an end goal in mind, but study, which starts from a more open-ended perspective of wanting to discover truth. I write stories about Korea or Ethiopia, because I think I've studied enough to do them justice, and there's certainly no reason Marra couldn't do the same with Russia. 

But would a top literary journal like Zoetrope, and a top anthology like The Best Short Stories, allow a white male writer to publish stories about, say, Nigeria the way they allowed this story about Russia? Are there modern examples of a Conrad writing about Africa without added scrutiny in the way Marra writes about Russia? Isn't it at least as possible that Marra's outsider view differs in important ways from a native Russian such that the story would feel alien to a native as it is that an outsider writing about the DRoC would feel somehow odd to a native there? Do we allow white writers to write about Russia in ways we don't allow for with Latin America or Africa because most inhabitants of Russia are white, and our American liberal perspective tells us that color matters more than geopolitical or cultural complexity?

I'm certainly no expert on Russian affairs, but a few things struck me while reading "Countdown" (which, again, I liked very much and think of as an obvious "thumbs up") that felt slightly off. One was Alexei's penchant for taking his news from Reddit. I really had no idea if Reddit was popular in Russia. When I originally read it, I didn't know anything about Marra, so I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. Here's a writer of likely Russian origin telling me that Reddit was a big thing in pre-invasion Russia." But it turns out that Reddit wasn't really that big in Russia. VK is by far the most-used social media platform in Russia. But okay, maybe Alexei was very Western-leaning, and so he hung out on Reddit. Maybe he's an unusual Russian. I also wonder, though, whether Alexei should have been refreshing Instagram, which was blocked in Russia in March 2022, just a few weeks after the invasion. I don't know the exact time of the story, but it's not quite the very first days of the war, because we have a reference to "since the first days of the war." 

I'm not sure enough to call the inclusion of either of those sites exactly "wrong," but I guarantee that in the real world, Alexei would not have found flights to Pyongyang in 2022. The story has him finding "even flights to Pyongyang" booked. (I could be wrong that these are still the early days of the war, but it does seem that we are still in 2022 in this story. I think it might be late 2022, when mobilizations began. And if it isn't the early days, then there's no way Instagram is still working. Unless Alexei is cleverly using VPNs to access it, which we know he doesn't know how to do.) North Korea wasn't allowing any foreign flights into the country at this time. So you couldn't find "booked flights" to Pyongyang. You couldn't have found flights at all. 

Then there is the child, Masha, who repeats Alexei's cursing. This is a charming part of the story, and Masha's eventual cursing out of a car impatiently beeping at them presents a needed moment of defiance. Still, I can't help but wonder what the original Russian is when she repeats "Fucking, fucking fuck." There are times to present the dialogue in direct translation and times when it feels right to me to first present it in the original Russian, and this should have at least some reference in it to the original Russian. 

Again, this is a good, even a very good, story. I don't think any of these quibbles make it less so. But I do think it's quite possible that if a white, male writer did a similar story about a family in Sudan trying to escape the trials of war there, and there were a few small factual derivations from reality in it, it's possible there would be an outcry among some politically liberal readers in America. I think it's especially possible there would have been such an outcry if this story had come a few years ago, when being woke was safer. 

I don't think such a reaction is necessary or helpful in the case of this story, and I don't think it would have been necessary or helpful in the case of a story written by a white, male writer about China or India or Lesotho or Haiti, but I can imagine it happening for the latter cases much more than I can for Russia, and I 'm not sure the reason for this makes much sense. You can have stories written by insiders, like Maria Reva's amazing story "Letter of Apology," set in late-Soviet Ukraine, but you can also have a story written from the observations of a keen outsider who has done the work to learn from another part of the world than the one he comes from, as in the story with Marra. And if this is true of a politically complicated place like Russia, then it ought to be true of anywhere. 

Am I wrong? If so, am I wrong because it really would be wrong for a male, white writer from Nebraska to write about a family from Sudan, or am I wrong because if the story were good enough, there really wouldn't be any pushback, even if it contained a few minor errata? 

Goldtooth

I was born in 1972 to parents who had both been at Kent State University during the 1970 shooting. At the time of the massacre, they were living in married student housing while Dad was finishing his degree. Mom had graduated a year earlier and was working as a teacher. She was pregnant with my older brother on the day of the shooting, and soon she’d take the next ten years off of teaching to raise kids. A few weeks before the shooting, she participated in the first Earth Day, where she was scolded for being pregnant and contributing to Earth’s overpopulation.

            Their mixed experience with progressive movements at the time probably explains why their parenting philosophy was a blend of hippie idealism grafted uncomfortably onto the depression-era conservativism they were both raised with. My siblings and I were raised on books like TA for Tots, which our family read and discussed together like we were all in a book club. My parents let me play records at night to help me sleep. One was called Free To Be You and Me, and it consisted of a number of then-noteworthy celebrities singing or acting out short dramas encouraging gender neutrality and being comfortable with your own identity. Although it wasn’t my favorite part of the album, I will never forget the chorus to the record’s eponymous opening anthem. It promised that if you took the singer’s hand, you would soon find yourself:

In a land where the river runs free

In a land through the green country

In a land to a shining sea

And you and me are free to be you and me

 

            My parents believed in the ideals of the sixties, but they also believed in the bootstraps, no-excuses achievementism passed on to them by their steel factory fathers. I played piano for three years, although I don’t remember ever asking for lessons. Was this because they were nurturing, new-age parents who wanted to encourage me to have confidence in myself, or was it an old-school belief that children needed culture, discipline, and productive tasks? Yes to both, I think.

            We were a similar mix of future and past when it came to racial ideology. My biological brothers (my only siblings until I was eleven) and I knew and understood that prejudice was wrong, and cruelty to anyone based on any kind of difference they couldn’t control would result in swift retribution. We knew that we should not treat the racial or cultural “other” badly, but that didn’t mean we put much effort into seeing the world from their point of view. A lot of our ideology could be summed up by the show M*A*S*H, which we watched endlessly after taping all the episodes. Hawkeye would fiercely defend Korean farmers or Chinese enemy combatants or Black American soldiers from bigots, but there were hardly ever any moments in the show when Korean farmers or Chinese soldiers had agency. Most of the “Koreans” who appeared on the show were whatever generically Asian actors the producers could scrounge up. Rewatching the show now that I speak Korean, I can tell most had only learned to say a few lines and didn’t actually know the language.

 Like most well-intentioned white Americans who might have voted for either party until the culture wars of the 90s took off and made us solid Democrats for life, our racial ideology was probably centered around two concepts: the notion of color blindness and the belief in the white savior.

            Color blindness is universally rejected by liberals as a racial ideology now, but back then, it seemed like the cutting edge of hip progressivism. People who practiced color blindness, as I saw it, were what we would now call woke. They were aware in a way others were not, like Neo in the Matrix. This was confirmed for me by En Vouge’s 1992 hit “Free Your Mind,” which regarded color blindness as achievable only by those who had emerged from something like Plato’s cave:

Free your mind

And the rest will follow

Be color-blind

Don't be so shallow

           

Color blindness wasn’t regressive; it was something only those woke enough to free their minds could accomplish. It didn’t even feel like something I could achieve, because I didn’t feel cool enough. It was like being a saint: ordinary people could only hope to imitate the truly holy.

One of the reasons color-blindness as a model is discouraged nowadays is because it denies identity and agency to people of color. If I can’t see color, I can’t appreciate the differences of others and learn from them and adapt to them. I don’t think, though, that most people ever conceived of color blindness in a literal way. En Vogue wasn’t telling us we should convince the rods and cones of our eyes that they were lying to us so we literally couldn’t tell others were different. It was more limited than that. The idea was simply that you were to treat everyone the same, in spite of the fact that you could see they looked different. It wasn’t far off from the adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. En Vogue linked it to this adage in their song, because the verses are mostly about not judging the narrator by the clothes she wears or the fact that she dates white guys or that she likes to shop. Color blindness as an ideology might have been restated like this: Once you have seen that someone looks different—which you of course cannot help but do—try to act as impartially with the “other” as with those within your group.

Blindness as a metaphor invoked the image of the woman holding the scales of justice with a blindfold over her eyes. One reason for its appeal was that it didn’t require anybody to actually change how they felt about others. You could maintain your ancient prejudices as long as you could set those prejudices aside when taking part in social, business, and legal interactions. It was, perhaps, a not totally useless stepping stone for the first generation of American society raised after the Civil Rights Movement, when younger people would be learning a new way of interacting with otherness while the foundations of the old way were still visible. Its simplicity and rough-and-ready pragmatism were at least comprehensible to the masses and provided some guidance about how to act.

The notion of the white savior was less clear, because unlike color blindness, it wasn’t something we talked about directly. It was an idea we absorbed indirectly from the way in which every narrative we knew that involved an interaction between whites and non-whites ended up with the whites benefiting the non-whites more than the other way around. This was certainly true in M*A*S*H, with Father Mulcahy running his orphanage for local children who lost parents in the war. Do I even need to dissect the message behind Different Strokes? White saviorism was something a well-meaning white person would imbibe from an avalanche of narratives in which the praiseworthy, proto-woke white person showed their modern and progressive attitude toward people of color by helping them to adapt to and succeed in a world ruled by white people. Neo-liberal progressivism owes much of its roots to mid-to-late 19th century social progressives largely coming from a Protestant background, and the missionary impulse was still there in the late 20th century, even if the movement had largely secularized.

 The upshot of the prevailing progressive ethos in the 1980s concerning race was that our family adopted two children from Hong Kong. Nowadays, there is a long-overdue movement advocating the rights of adopted children, and one of the points it stresses is the need to undo the narrative that adopted children of color were saved by heroic white parents. I don’t believe that my parents adopted children to be admired. There is a fine line between doing a deed because you believe it is admirable and doing a deed to be admired, and we all likely struggle at times to have pure motives. I’m sure my parents struggled, too, but I believe they were at least aware of the struggle and tried, as much as they were able, to do it out of love rather than the desire to be admired.

Their motives might have been blameless, but looking back on it now, I can see that our family was in no position to support the emotional needs of our new siblings. My parents did what they could. They found someone in Ohio who spoke Cantonese to help interpret when we couldn’t communicate with them. We made an attempt to preserve some notion of Chinese culture for them by celebrating Chinese New Year and occasionally going to eat at a Chinese restaurant. We did this on special days, like the day they became naturalized U.S. citizens. For my own part, I know that I must confess to mostly viewing them as strange-speaking, lovable but funny oddities, and only in my best moments did I manage the empathy to try to imagine what the experience must have been like for them.

The weakness of the dual color blind/white savior framework showed itself. This framework gave me enough of a foundation to defend my siblings against the—depressingly substantial—number of people in North Canton, Ohio who still used terms like “gook” and “chink.” It meant I recognized that these were my siblings as much as my biological brothers. It even meant that I recognized I had some responsibility to help them, but that responsibility mostly consisted of treating them with “color blindness,” i.e. treating them like everyone else, partly in order to help them to adapt to being American. Color blindness taught us to treat others how we’d want to be treated, but it didn’t give us the imagination to realize others might want treated differently from us.

Families in northeast Ohio who adopted Chinese kids in the 1980s tended to know everyone else in the area who had done the same. We got together for potlucks and camping trips. Some families had far more children than we did, and many were very religious, so the missionary impulse in their decision to adopt was much more evident than it was in my quasi-agnostic, quasi-nominally-Catholic family. I wonder what kinds of conversations my parents had with the other grown-ups while the kids were off playing together.

Maybe because of my 80s-version-of-woke upbringing, my best friend for years, until he moved away, was one of the few black kids in North Canton. He was one of three adopted black kids in his family, the children of a Methodist minister. When my family got together with them, I think it’s quite possible we had a sizable percentage of all the people of color in North Canton under one roof. Once, during an intramural sporting event, some of the older kids in our middle school yelled at him that he should “go back to the plantation.” He laughed at it. What else could he do? I certainly didn’t leap to his defense. Those kids would have pummeled me. I didn’t think being a white savior meant I should actually sacrifice myself. White saviors lectured stupid people, they didn’t get their asses kicked.

Color blindness and white savior thinking made sense to me in an environment where people of color were extreme minorities. Why would they ever want anything but to adapt and fit in? And someone had to be there to stand up (not always very successfully or bravely) to the casual and not-so-casual racism they faced. This was the entirety of the responsibility of a conscientious white person toward people of color as I understood it.

I had occasional glimpses into worlds where people of color were not minorities. We’d play basketball against all-black or nearly all-black schools from Canton or Akron (and lose, badly). Although it was obvious that with these kids, they weren’t looking to fit into my world or act like white kids, that they in fact had their own, autonomous ways of acting and speaking and living in the world, I somehow always wrote that off as an exception. America was mostly a monocultural white society, I thought, with occasional pockets of idiosyncratic non-conformity. But these pockets were in “the inner city,” a place that seemed as exotic and unreal to me as Korea in M*A*S*H.

And then, I joined the fucking Marine Corps

 After high school, I entered the Marine Corps. It was the first time I’d lived in an environment in which whites weren’t a clear majority. When my platoon in boot camp lined up at night in the squad bay wearing only towels, half along a yellow line on the port side and half along a similar line on the starboard side, it was the most black skin I’d seen in my life. It wasn’t majority black, perhaps, but it wasn’t majority white, either. The recruits to my left and right as I stood on the line were black. Three of my four drill instructors were black, including the senior.

The Marine Corps encouraged its own form of color blindness, one it believed made the Corps a unique haven of racial utopia among the mess of society we all came from, a society for which it could not possibly express its contempt strongly enough. The Marine Corps didn’t see black and white, they said. There was only light green and dark green. That was the actual vocabulary used. If you needed to describe a person to someone who didn’t know them, you said they were light green or dark green. If it was a very dark-skinned person, you’d say dark-dark green. (I don’t know why they picked green, the color of our camouflage utility uniforms, when the Marine Corps colors, as they never grew tired of telling us, were scarlet and gold.)  

Although the Marine Corps claimed to be color blind, it could also be cruelly observant about the physical features of recruits. It is, I have since learned, not unlike China or Korea, where someone a little bit overweight is likely to be called “fatty” by his friends. Our black senior DI called a very “dark green” recruit “Daffy Duck.” The black recruit I was probably closest with in boot camp was Wilkens. I don’t know his first name. We didn’t use first names then, and nobody called him Wilkens, either. He had a prominent gold cap on his front tooth, and the drill instructors, with all their imagination, dubbed him “Goldtooth.”

Because Wilkens’ surname was the closest one in the alphabet to mine, he stood to my left and slept in the bunk next to mine. He was a big guy, and this presented problems for us every night when we had to perform a sweeping ritual. We were supposed to grab our “scuzz brushes”--little hard-bristled brushes--run to the bulkheads (walls) behind our bunks, then duckwalk between our bunks, sweeping up the squad bay as we went. When the two sides of the squad bay met in the middle, we’d clank our scuzz brushes on the deck (floor) in unison to get the last of the dirt out, and then the two recruits who had the first shift of fire watch that night would sweep them up. The rest of us would run back to our bunks, tuck the brushes into our boots under the bunks, and return to stand on line. Woe to the recruit who straggled getting back.

Yet straggle I often did, because Goldtooth and I couldn’t both fit into the space between our bunks. One night, out of desperation, as Goldtooth and I turned from the middle of the squad bay to run to return our brushes, I reached out and took his from him. It surprised him, but thankfully, he got the point in time for me to run back and drop both our brushes off and return to the line much faster than I usually did. This went on for a few nights until he surprised me by reaching out to take mine. For the rest of boot camp, we took turns like that, and we were faster than anyone else at getting back to the line before lights out.

After we’d been doing this a few weeks, one night a drill instructor noticed what we were doing. It was a night when it was my turn to carry the brushes for both of us, so all Goldtooth had to do was go straight to the line. Realizing I was carrying his brush for him, the drill instructor asked, in the impossibly sardonic voice only a D.I. can accomplish, “Does he always carry that for you? Is he your little errand boy?”

“We take turns,” Goldtooth answered. He had a high and soft voice that you wouldn’t expect to look at him.

“Welllllll, isn’t that sweet,” the D.I. retorted. “Ebony and Ivory.” He didn't even notice that Goldtooth had used the pronoun "we" instead of the proper "these recruits." 

I think Ebony and Ivory would have become our new nicknames, except that D.I. was suddenly replaced in the middle of boot camp.

When I went to Defense Language Institute to learn Korean, all I knew about Korea was what I’d learned in M*A*S*H, which wasn’t much. As class went on, I realized something about the racial attitudes of fellow classmates. Some who started out training not openly racist at all would become so during training. They were frustrated, I think, with so much immersion into total otherness all at once. I’d been raised to think that racism was always the result of not knowing people of color, and that if we just got to know each other, the world’s problems would be solved. That might be true, but there’s a curve to it. Before things get better, they sometimes get worse as people get their first dose of realizing otherness can be so, well, other.  You have to keep going deeper in to get past the disorienting feeling of it all before you can get to an acceptance based on knowledge rather than a general principle. This takes time and work. Some students got stuck in the early phase.

I am told by a much younger, currently active Marine that “dark green” and “light green” have all but disappeared, and that only very old Marines will still say it. “Most Marines now acknowledge color,” he told me when I asked him. That seems to be the way society has moved, also. The song “Ebony and Ivory” that my drill instructor referred to claimed that, “We all know that people are the same wherever you go,” another attempt from that generation to achieve color blindness by insisting the differences between us didn’t matter. Nowadays, we are just as insistent that people are not the same, and that we need to understand, appreciate, accommodate, and account for our differences.

 Where we go from here

The rise of Trump has led to increased visibility for openly racist groups, the kind that the 70s and 80s were trying to get rid of, the kind I thought were all but gone by the turn of the century. Many people read this as proof that old-school racism never really went away and was just lying low, awaiting its moment. That’s certainly one way of reading it, but I think that among white swing voters in places like Ohio who turned the state from Obama twice to Trump twice, the number of whites who wouldn’t dream of carrying a tiki torch but who are nonetheless unhappy with the change from color blind ideology to the anti-racism they see in their social media outnumber the carriers of torches by at least ten to one. Every person I grew up with in Ohio who voted for Trump fits into this category. They all accepted the notion of color blindness in the 80s, so they have a hard time accepting the label of racist today. To them, racism still means what it did in the 80s: a person who said things like “gook” and “chink.” Changing it to a subtler meaning of supporting systemic inequity and then lobbing the term at political opponents feels unfair. As one friend I know said in 2016 when explaining his vote for Trump, “I got tired of being called a racist.” It was a vote of defiance. If you’re going to call me a racist anyway, I might as well go all-in.

I was born at the beginning of what has been called “third-wave anti-racism.” The first wave was the end of slavery, the second the Civil Rights movement, and the third a post-Civil Rights movement to counter, as John McWhorter put it, “a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional.” Judging from the practical outcomes, the third wave has used one effective strategy and one ineffective one.

The effective strategy has been the explosion of narratives from people of color. One of the weaknesses of 70s and 80s color-blind ideology was that the default “neutral” position was white and male. Hawkeye spoke for the person of color, rather than letting the person of color speak for herself, denying her agency. Nowadays, the available novels, memoirs, network dramas, Netflix standup comedy specials, and blockbuster movies written by and starring people of color absolutely dwarfs that which was available forty years ago. I tend to think that if only this change had been made, many of the other changes third-wave anti-racism wanted to achieve would have happened on their own. The default neutral position of color blindness would have changed for enough people that the “psychological abuses” would have changed, too. Even Trump voters from Ohio watch these narratives enthusiastically. If our culture had been able to pass a generation with new voices speaking, the political goals might have followed the culture far more easily.

The less effective strategy has been to call people who still cling to some form of the racial ideology of the early post-Civil Rights years racist.

 

My wife Amy grew up in the same part of Ohio, with as little racial diversity as I did. We went to graduate school in Chicago, moved to Maryland in 2004, and she began working as a teacher in an all-black middle school in Baltimore in 2006. Her only real preparation for her job was that she’d focused in undergraduate and graduate school on black writers. She was a middle class, white woman from rural white Ohio, now teaching poorer, black kids. On her first day of class, she had students fill out index cards with their information. One line asked them to write “something you think I should know about you.” One student wrote, “I hate white people.”

I wouldn’t have believed it, but the two dozen or so black writers Amy had read during college actually was a halfway decent preparation for her job. As a lit major myself, I always harbored the fear that literature was probably kind of useless in the real world, but her experience suggested that isn’t so. She knew the worst verbal mistakes to avoid, and she was able to interpret remarks from the perspective of her students with reasonable accuracy. She has always been one of her students’ favorite teachers. Her social media today is made up of hundreds of former students who love her. One of those former students is now our daughter, and when I deal with the issues involved in trying to meet her needs even with all the resources available today, I can only marvel at the sheer moxie my parents had, flying nearly blind in the 80s.

No DEIA curriculum prepared her for her job. She had no anti-racism set of principles laid out. She was an empathetic person with passion who had read stories from people similar to her students. That was enough to get started with.

The limitations of the color-blind ideology we grew up with meant that only going in with a determination not to judge her students by appearance would not have been enough for her to succeed. In fact, even during the heyday of color blindness as an accepted idea, the cracks in it were apparent. They were apparent in that same En Vogue song, as a matter of fact, because at the same time as the narrator is asking for color-blindness, she also tells those judging her that, “Before you can read me/You got to learn how to see me.” The song realized that blindness has its limitations. Nonetheless, Amy, who like everyone from our time started with color blindness as an ideology, was able to adapt from there. Color blindness, with all its faults, had been a somewhat effective bridge.

For me, thrown into a situation I was also not prepared for, if I had ever been to DEIA training, I don’t know if I’d have ever reached out and taken Goldtooth’s brush. Was that being insensitive? Was I assuming too much? What unconscious biases might be leading me to take the lead? Should I wait for him to tell me what he thought we should do? Instead, I made the assumption that “people are the same wherever you go,” and that he would quickly see the advantages to the arrangement. He did.

This is the strength of the simplistic racial ideology we were brought up on. It allows for action. An imperfect but committed action is sometimes better than well-informed inaction. The 80s gave me ideas that allowed me to do something. My workplace DEIA courses, and the discourse on anti-racism, for all their claims to be about action, leave me wondering sometimes what the hell I’m actually supposed to do.

Rather than blowing color blindness out of the water, I think it would have been more effective to simply refine it. It could have been updated to: If dealing with someone whose background might mean they view the world differently from you, start with the assumption that what you like, they will also like, and then refine from there. Our culture now gives us tools to refine. Color blindness is like the advice given to beginning chess players, such as to avoid placing your knight on the edges of the board. There are situations where you will want to put your knight on the edge, but that comes with playing and learning. A simple heuristic, though, will at least get you playing. The relative complexity of third-wave anti-racism’s message, though, has encouraged many people from my generation who used to think they were progressive to drop out of engagement with racial discourse. Social media’s tendency to flood their timelines with the most extreme forms of anti-racist messages, because those are what provoke rage-based engagement, tend to make it all much worse.

 

One thing both the old generation and the new have in common is a wistful, hands-thrown-in-the-air questioning of why we can’t do better. This was voiced many ways pre-2000, from Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along?” to “Ebony and Ivory’s” “Oh Lord, why can’t we?” to “Free Your Mind’s” “Why, oh why, must it be this way?” However, I think the exasperation of the older generation was different from today. Today, the frustration is that the problem seems too complicated to solve. A generation ago, the disgust was that the problem seemed so simple to fix, if only people would do what they obviously should.

There is always a relationship between culture and politics. What has changed since 2016 is there has been a much more intentional attempt to use politics to change culture, rather than the other way around. This was occasioned by one group believing that the culture influencing politics had become too “woke,” which was another way of saying one group did not understand how the goals and aims of anti-racism were an improvement on the color blindness preached a generation earlier. Calls for “equity” seemed to them like the antithesis of color blindness, and the attack on color blindness itself seemed like an attack on something that had done some good compared to the 50s and 60s.

There is always a balance between idealism and pragmatism. If the goal is the elimination of what may be termed “sneaky” racism, there will need to be a mix of unbending calls for absolute justice and also political deals struck to achieve less than the full goal. It seems to me, though, that time is on the progressive’s side, and there was never any need to rush. Rather than blowing color blindness out of the water, a better strategy for the present might have been to refine color blindness by saying it’s a good place to start, but that afterwards, listening and reflection might refine your thinking. Culture is doing a good job now of providing grist for that reflection by producing so many great stories by new voices. If pushing too hard for change all at once is causing a reaction, it might be okay to practice a little Taoist wuwei and back off for the moment, letting the inertia culture is creating do its work. This isn’t about coddling sensitive white people who see their privilege threatened. It’s about a change in rhetoric to avoid losing an election that might mean the end of the world.  

I'm unqualified to write this post, but who isn't? A wrap-up of Best American Short Stories 2021

A few months ago, I offered a defense of those who try to educate themselves about fields in which they are not experts. That defense went so far as to suggest there may be some topics where it is appropriate for lay people to question experts, or in which there is no one field of expertise central enough to the question that any one type of expert can claim plenary authority. 

I'm about to offer a critique of the Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology. I've already analyzed every story in the collection. Every year I've done BASS (this is my fourth), I've debated doing a wrap-up. In one sense, it's kind of pointless, because the collection itself is made up of stories that were never intended to go together. Editors who choose the twenty winners aren't under any kind of compulsion to pick stories that work well together, and it's quite possible that if they did, it would make the collection as a whole weaker rather than stronger. So evaluating the twenty stories that happen to have been chosen together as a whole is a little like ordering twenty different items off the menu from twenty different restaurants and then critiquing them as a single meal. 

Nonetheless, BASS is the best-selling of the many annual short story anthologies that come out every year, and as such, it's an interesting and revelatory artifact, one that tells us something about the American literature and culture that produced and consumed it. Twenty menu items from twenty different restaurants might not deserve to be critiqued as a set, but jointly they do present an interesting subject for study of American food culture. That's how I intend to look at BASS.

But I'm not qualified

I'm not an expert in literature. At best, I'm a well educated lay person. I got an M.A. in English in 2003, and I originally intended to go on for a doctorate and professional expertise in literature, but I changed my mind. For the past eighteen-plus years, I've been focused on other subjects. The one that's taken up most of my time has been the Korean Peninsula. In the few weeks since I read my last BASS story, I've been reading a Korean collection of short stories called Inconvenient Convenience Store (불편한 편의점). Like all Korean literature I read, it's taking me a long time to finish. My point here is that even though English language literature is still a passion of mine and something I like to do, my professional life doesn't even leave me much time to be a devoted amateur critic. I might not read ten books in English in a year. So I hardly qualify as an expert in American literature. 

There's another subject relevant to discussion of an anthology like BASS I'm also not an expert in, which is what most corporations would refer to as "diversity and inclusion" or "diversity, equity, and inclusion." One hardly needs to be an expert to realize that BASS and every other anthology like it strives to provide a diversity of voices not just aesthetically, but in the sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, and national origin of its writers. Given that this effort to achieve diversity is so salient a goal in each volume, it would seem like a critic seeking to describe what this effort achieved would need some deep grounding in the field of diversity and inclusion in order to analyze the accomplishments. In this subject, though, I'm even less qualified than I am as a literary expert. I try to read at least something on D & I topics, and maybe in a random group of ten people at any given workplace who are forced into an awkward D & I discussion hour together, I might have less stupid things to say than eight of them. But even though I've occasionally allowed myself a foray or two into posting on D & I-adjacent topics, I usually feel a lot of doubt and anxiety when I post on them. The most likely possible outcome seems to be getting myself canceled for being stupid. Which is a dumb concern, given I'm not even enough of a thing to be canceled, but I worry about it nonetheless. 

Then again, nobody is really qualified

If the only kind of literary analysis worth writing is an assessment of a work qua literature, placing it in its literary context and assessing its worth by the esoteric rubric of literary professionals, then I'm not the right person for the job. But then, I don't think that's the only kind of literary analysis worth producing or reading. Seeing as how anthologies like BASS continue to be marketed to, bought by, and read by people doing all manner of work for a living other than literature, then it seems only reasonable that there could be critical analyses of those stories also produced by and meant for a lay readership. 

I've always seen the sermon as my model for literary criticism. While a preacher may borrow academic approaches to sacred texts learned in seminary in order to orient listeners to the meaning and context of passages, the preacher's goal isn't academic. It's practical. It's to change the way listeners think about and live their lives. 

I believe good literature works the way religious people believe sacred texts work. I think it makes its readers better, challenges their assumptions, or at least helps readers to feel less alone. That's how I approach writing about fiction. I assume the reader goes to fiction for similar reasons, and I try to open up texts to help stories do these things for the reader. As part of that process, I have just enough "seminary" learning to manage the necessary intellectual part of reading in order to enable the "spiritual" aspects of it, if I can use that word. 

In short, if the goal of reading is to become a better person and not to know more about literature as a subject--and that should be the goal--then a literary preacher doesn't need to be the most erudite person in the room. In fact, literary experts might be so inured to an academic way of thinking about stories that they've lost something of the ability to be personally transformed the way a banker or clerk or mechanic or computer programmer who reads might be. The fact that I work at something else that demands my attention most of the time and can only occasionally turn my focus to thinking about literature might make me better able to talk to normal folks than literary experts can. 

So here goes

That apologia for the hubris involved in my critical efforts behind me, there are a few things that stand out to me. 

In 2018, after my first full BASS blog-though, I talked about how Harold Bloom had such derogatory words to say about the Best American Poetry anthologies of the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s because of how winners were chosen based more on the identities of the poets than on the quality of the works. I haven't really changed my opinion since 2018 of the effect of identity as one of the criteria for choosing stories (although I don't think it's the only one, and maybe not always the central one). I would still say today that while Bloom saw entries that were identity-based and bad, I see stories that are identity based and actually quite good. But this goodness itself might present a problem. 

In a recent article on how we might finally have really reached peak TV, Linda Holmes wrote this about "good" and "great" TV:

"What resonates the most, though, from that talk in 2015, is the way Landgraf talked about the good and the great. A lot of people who heard those "peak TV" numbers from critics — 400 shows! — groused back that it didn't really matter, because most of it was terrible. Landgraf, on the other hand, was careful to point out that this was not the point he was making. He didn't think the problem was too much bad TV; he thought the problem was largely too much good TV. Or, maybe, too much good enough TV. The head of FX, after all, doesn't care about total garbage shows or about how many of them there are; that's not the competition, either for viewers or awards, or for critical attention. (There was a lot of speculation at the time that this part of the speech reflected in part FX's frustration at a lack of awards recognition for The Americans.)

Here's what he said about too much good TV: "There's just too much competition, so much so that I think the good shows often get in the way of the audience finding the great ones." 

I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think American arts have become great at creating good work, which makes it rare and difficult to create, find, and support great work. I think BASS is an example of this. There is a lot of imagination in the stories, but not much capital I Imagination. There is light, but seldom thunder. I enjoy most of the stories, but can remember little from most of them not long after reading them, even when I've taken the time to read and re-read them carefully enough to write seriously about them.  

Perhaps the thing I'll remember most about this anthology will be how many stories featured an unnamed central character. If I counted right--which I doubt I did, but I think I'm close--only seven of the twenty stories featured a main character whose real name was given. The rest either gave no name or used a nickname/title, like "Girlie" or "The Teacher" or "the son." This isn't a new phenomenon, although I don't think I've seen a collection of BASS stories that displayed it so fully. It immediately called to mind Stephen Marche's critique of a Sally Rooney novel, in which he introduced the concept of the "literature of the pose," which has replaced the literary voice. The literature of the pose is, above all else, about being "right," or more appropriately, not being wrong:

Each sentence passes quality assurance...The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes...One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking.  

This unwillingness to name characters seems related. Names come with baggage and meaning. We can often tell something about the sex, gender, race, and social position of a person from the name. To give a character a name is to invite a whole host of criticisms of that character, so it's better not to name them. Mary Gaitskill recently described an aversion her students had to describing the way faces looked:

Fascinatingly, one student told me that he didn’t like to describe what people look like because he thought it was like staring at someone which was rude. Another remarked in a similar spirit that in describing people you have to assign value to their appearance in terms of conventional beauty standards. This second statement is completely untrue; conventional beauty standards can be made irrelevant when describing a face if you want to focus on how the person’s nature animates that face.

The reluctance to assign names and the reluctance to describe faces seem related. Writers feel that to describe something or name it is somehow an act of colonial violence. Better to avoid it and so avoid criticism. 

A few things I will say about the focus on diversity and its impact on literature 

Literature really only does two things well. It can make us see the world through someone else's point of view, and it can make us question our assumptions about the world. The diversity-forward literary anthology excels at the first and sometimes is a little wanting on the second. 

I don't want to act like doing the first thing well isn't hugely important. Of all the attempts in the last twenty years to change the way our culture talks about D & I categories, I think the improvement in the diversity of stories and voices available to readers and viewers has been the one of the most practical benefit. I saw this benefit when Mrs. Heretic, my very white wife very much from majority-white Ohio, started teaching in 99% black schools in Baltimore in 2007. About the only bridge to her kids going in was the fact she had read a fair amount of contemporary literature by black authors in college. I thought she was going to get eaten alive. But to my wonder and amazement, just that literary introduction really was extremely useful. She walked into schools where students openly told her how much they hated white people and somehow connected enough with those students that there are still dozens of former students every year who go out of their way to tell her how much she meant to them and how she was their favorite teacher. Literature more than did its job of helping her to see the world through the eyes of other people. That forever changed how I think about literature's potential utility in a very real-world and pragmatic sense. What literature did for Mrs. Heretic, I believe it's also doing for many other people, even if it seems like part of America is becoming less interested in hearing what people different from it has to say. 

It does seem to me that the diversity-forward approach does job number one extremely well, but probably at the expense of not doing job number two very well. If you wanted to respond that I'm a white male with the privilege to care more about thundering soliloquies that question cosmic justice than the stories of black boys suffering from unfair human justice, I won't defend myself. My background and the privilege that comes with it has a huge impact on what I want out of a story. Bloom wanted Truth (capital T) and beauty in art and felt anyone who wanted anything else was a fool. I want Truth and beauty in art but realize art can do other things besides that. 

Still, I can't help but be disappointed sometimes in how anthologies seems to take cues from the Democratic Party. There is a coalition to keep together with a large number of constituencies, so it's important to try to keep as many of those constituencies as happy as possible. It leads, sometimes, to collections that feel like a Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden campaign: full of competence and utterly devoid of excitement or vision. Maybe that's what you want in a technocrat, but it's not what I want in the few stories I have time to devote myself to in a year. Or at least, it's not what I want most. 

Perhaps in a hundred years, historians of literature will look back and find our era's focus on the primacy of politics in literature, with identity issues composing a major chunk of that political concern, to be natural, given our political reality. Even living within the current time, I can see reasons why that would be true. But I also see how the focus on politics is making even the political thought in fiction less daring, more concerned with not making mistakes than with imagining new realities. I can see how much anxiety there is surrounding correct thinking about identity, and how this anxiety--like anxiety almost always does--has the ironic effect of making insightful thinking about identity more rather than less difficult. The water of D & I thinking is so stirred up in 2022, it's very hard to see anything through the churn. 

Haguillory

If you ask me what my two favorite stories from BASS 2021 were, I'd say "Switzerland" by Nicole Krauss and "Portrait of Two Young Ladies in White and Green Robes" by Jane Pek. "A Way with Bea" by Shanteka Sigers would probably take honorable mention. But the story I might remember most, the one that most seems to me to speak to the political moment, might be "Haguillory" by Stephanie Soileau.  

The white title character is incensed that black people in New Orleans seem to get all the news attention after the hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. He thinks there are white people struggling, too, and that their struggles are being overlooked because all the attention is focused elsewhere. Haguillory is mean and hyper-protective of his turf, but he also shows a spark of human decency. 

We could write Haguillory off as another white man unaware of his own white privilege. We could see him like one of those people who claim "all lives matter," missing the point that black lives are statistically more threatened in American than white. I'm very confident that's what the text of the story wants us to see. I do see that, but I also see something else.

In 1970, economist Milton Friedman wrote a hugely influential article entitled "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits." He essentially argued that businesses should be indifferent to their social impact. An oil company should drill oil as cheaply as it can get away with. If society wants to reign the oil company in, then it's up to society, through the apparatus of government, to force them to do so, rather than incumbent on the oil company to do what's "right" on their own. 

I think Friedman's way of looking at things has had influence way beyond business. I think that all the various political factions in America believe it's their responsibility to fight as hard as possible for the interests of their constituents, and if that results in them getting more than their fair share of limited resources, well, then the other factions should have lobbied harder. Americans tend to believe that this free market of ideas and the competition between interests will somehow lead to the right balance. One thing it won't lead to, though, is solidarity. It won't lead to a belief in shared interests or mutual prosperity. Instead, it leads to a belief in a limited pie of resources where a bigger share for someone else means a smaller share for you. 

Within such a system, is Haguillory wrong to resent the fact that a rival for aid is getting more press? He is wrong as a human being, but not in the twisted moral experiment of a Friedmanian political landscape. His job in this dystopia that also happens to be the real world is to push for the maximum advantage of his group. If the other group doesn't get enough, they should have fought harder.

Moreover, it's perverse to try to talk to Haguillory about privilege. Although more nuanced positions acknowledge that there are varying levels and types of privilege and that whiteness is only one of them, there are plenty of morally zealous people out there more than happy to harangue Haguillory for his white privilege. To someone in his position, falling out of the bottom of the middle class and surrounded by others doing the same, the notion of "privilege" is perverse. Even if his whiteness has been a benefit to him, it violates all laws of logic and decency to talk to someone like him about his privilege. Of course that kind of talk is going to activate his self-preservation instincts. He can only think one of two things: either he has no such privilege, or if he has been privileged, there is something terribly wrong with him to be struggling so mightily even with those advantages.  

The diversity potpourri approach to literary anthologies does some things well and others less well. I'm not arguing that it's the wrong approach for the hour, and Lord love a duck, I'm definitely not arguing, like one terrible and unfairly-privileged-in-every-way old white writer recently did, that old white men are discriminated against in publishing. They are not. 

If I had to try to distill my moderately informed, still-in-progress, and very much influenced by the same anxiety everyone else feels thoughts on this into a few sentences, it would be this: Our current political system relies on tenuous alliances between groups with only partially overlapping interests. The literary model of pushing diversity somewhat models this political system. Both the political and literary approaches require grace, goodwill, and the ability to communicate nuanced and imperfect systems with conviction and the power to convince, but all of those things are in short supply. Which means that the best you can hope for, perhaps, is conflicted and at times ambivalent cooperation with the approach being offered. 

I enjoy BASS. I like most of the stories in each volume. I profit from them. I am seldom mentally and spiritually undone by them. Maybe I've been reading too long. Long-time church members find it more difficult to rekindle the fire they felt early in their spiritual lives; maybe it's like that for secular readers, too, and it's got nothing to do with the literature being written today. But part of me feels, when I do manage to find time for literary fiction, that I'm doing it for the same reasons I keep voting for Democrats: it's not that I'm enthusiastic, it's just that I don't know of a better option.

Haguillory doesn't live in a world where his rights are politically threatened because of his race. He does, arguably, live in a world where people of his struggling economic class get a bad deal from the political system. In order for him to avoid thinking that pushing for the improvement of others is not an unfair threat to him would require a level of goodness and broad-mindedness that I'm not sure most people possess. Haguillory isn't without kindness, but he also only has a normal person's amount of it, not more. He lives in a political system in which not feeling resentment of others competing for limited resources with him requires above-average moral and mental qualities. Which means it's going to be a strained system. The only ways for a system to survive are to make the demands on ordinary people something that ordinary people can actually do or to compel, shame, or inspire them to become better people who can live up to the demands of the system. 

Is contemporary American literary fiction doing enough compulsion, shaming, or inspiration? To judge by America's racial backsliding, maybe not. I suspect, though, that there's something else going on here. Good fiction like that in BASS does engender empathy for others. If it's not working on a social scale, I'd guess it's somewhat similar to how masks work at stopping the spread of disease, but mask mandates don't. People seem to be the problem to the proposed systemic solution. 

Which is why even though it's important to have people slugging away at the scrum of public policy and policing to get us through the pandemic of the moment, it's also critical to have some obsessive dreamer locked away in a lab somewhere. She's thinking of something that seems to have no relevance to the pandemic that's raging, but because she is dedicating her full intellect and imagination to something everyone else in neglecting during all the hub-bub, she makes a discovery with relevance to fields never expected. Her refusal to think about what everyone is shouting is the only concern of the moment is what allowed her to figure out a way out of the mess for all of us. 

That's what I wish BASS had more of. Instead of 18 of 20 entries being about the disease du jour, I'd like more that are about reimagining what a cell is, or how DNA functions, or some strange problem in astrophysics. Instead of mostly being about how to drive a car safely, I'd like more on how we could move society past cars. We can have stories about Haguillory's shortcomings, but I'd also like some imaginative pieces on a world where it was easier for Haguillory to be less selfish. 

James Patterson might find the identity balancing in anthologies like BASS as evidence of "another form of racism," but I don't. I see it as evidence of the modern cultural tendency to apply safe answers to problems that are so intractable, they now require imagination, boldness, and heresy, things that are the opposite of safe. 

Because of racial uplift: "Something Street" by Carolynn Ferrell

You ever have an experience where you're so sure something is going to be hard, it takes you forever to realize it's not that hard and you can actually enjoy yourself? That's what happened to me with "Something Street" by Carolynn Ferrell. Two years ago, Ferrell's "History of China" gave me fits trying to come to terms with its meaning. Recently, Mrs. Heretic has been reading the 2018 Best American Short Stories, because I told her it was my favorite one, and she had to skip "History of China," because she couldn't get through it. So I came to this story carefully reading every word, not wanting to get lost this time, which actually made it take much longer for me to realize this story is pretty approachable. 

It's a story very rooted in the history of black culture since Reconstruction. It mostly takes place at Hampton University, which, as Hampton Institute, was one of the first black institutions of higher learning after the Civil War. One could go very deep with how this story is commenting on and influenced by black culture. An expert on the subject would have enough for a thesis, but even someone like me, who just knows the basic outlines of black history in America, can get the basic gist. It's really not a story that is hiding its secrets, unlike "History of China." My goal here isn't to go thesis-deep. It's to help readers of BASS who might not remember enough of the basics of black history to get at least some idea of where this story is going.

The obvious

Let's start with what nearly everyone will realize: this story is at least in someway alluding to Bill Cosby, the black comedian who was once the biggest star in America, but now is disgraced because of his multiple counts of sex crimes. The protagonist is Parthenia, wife to Crawley Stevenson, better known as "Craw Daddy," hugely successful black comedian now on the downside of his career. What helped put Craw Daddy on the downside of his career were the "Complaints," which Parthenia partially personifies by thinking of them in capital letters. The Complaints were that Craw Daddy had been involved in numerous sexual dalliances, many of which were against the will of those he had sex with. Immediately, the link to Cosby is pretty plain.

I would normally put a photo of Cosby here, maybe one with him wearing a sweater and making a funny face, but he raped a bunch of women, so fuck him. Here's Mahalia Jackson, who is also in "Something Street" and who almost certainly never raped anybody. 

The less obvious

Kenya Barris's #BlackAF titled every one of its eight episodes in its first season with some form of "because of slavery," making the point that nearly everything that is now a major part of the lives of Black Americans can in some way be traced to the historical facts of slavery. Although I generally saw where he was coming from, I'm not sure if a hard historical analysis would support every assertion. Do black men today really like wearing expensive sneakers because slaves were paraded around in Sunday clothes? I don't know. 

Slavery is important to the American human landscape today, of course, but a more directly contributing factor to many of the assumptions contemporary Black Americans live with is what came after slavery, especially when Jim Crow was instituted after the country gave up on Reconstruction. Those assumptions are what drive the decisions made by Parthenia in "Something Street."

A History 101 understanding of America will include some sketching out of contrasting views from black leaders after the Civil War of how to improve the lives of freedmen. Even most white readers who have never taken a class or read a book specifically about black history will be able to name W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington as central figures who emerged a few decades after the Civil War, figures who had somewhat opposing views of the way forward. 

To simplify greatly, Washington believed that it was important to develop a strong black working class, and that if blacks were able to support themselves and show what good citizens they could be, they would eventually find greater acceptance--or at least tolerance--from whites and their lives would improve. Washington believed political agitation for equality should wait. Du Bois's beliefs, on the other hand, could be summarized by one quote: "We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong - this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it." Du Bois was critical of Washington's policy of racial accommodation, of wanting to make black people more palatable to whites. (Here's a link to a famous Du Bois critique of Washington, if this is all new to you and you'd like to know more.) 

Although Washington and Du Bois represented two ends of a spectrum, with Washington as the conservative end and Du Bois the progressive one, they both shared some assumptions. One was the notion that has since come to be known as "racial uplift." (I'm not linking to the Wikipedia article on this, which I think is a little suspect.) As Kevin Gaines explains (in the linked source), despite the differences between black radicals and conservatives, 

"...black leaders generally countered anti-black stereotypes by emphasizing class differences among blacks, and their essential role as race leaders. From their perspective, to “uplift the race” meant highlighting their function as elites to reform the character and manage the behavior of the black masses. Against pervasive claims of black immorality and pathology, educated blacks waged a battle over the representation of their people, a strategy with ambiguous implications and results. They referred to themselves as a “better class” of blacks, and demanded recognition of their respectability, and privileged status as agents of Western progress and civilization. But in doing so, they ushered in a politics of internal class division...that often seemed to internalize dominant notions of black cultural depravity and backwardness even as they sought to oppose racism. In other words, this method of opposing racism tacitly echoed dominant ideas of class and gender hierarchy. Their view that social progress for blacks was ideally measured in patriarchal terms of male-headed families and homes produced tensions between educated men and women. Such expectations of female deference to male authority and leadership were challenged by many educated black women, such as Anna Julia Cooper and the anti-lynching activist and journalist, Ida B. Wells."

What this all has to do with "Something Street"

Parthenia, wife to comedian Craw Daddy, was raised years after Washington and Du Bois had passed on the mantle of black leadership to others, but the sides those two had helped create still lingered on. Parthenia's own parents seem to have been the more conservative stock. They gave her a classic Greek name (one that has the meaning of "virgin," rather interestingly for the story). They sent her to Hampton Institute when it was still an "institute" and not a university. (Parthenia's dislike of the name change gives away her political conservatism in that an "institute" would focus on Washingtonian job training, while a "university" would focus on higher thoughts that might lead a black person to get "uppity," something Parthenia's mother has apparently warned her against.)

Because Du Bois and Washington, in spite of their differences, shared a number of conservative beliefs concerning racial uplift, her father was still able to appreciate Du Bois enough to "misquote" him. The narrative doesn't aim to criticize either Washington or Du Bois or those who followed either. Parthenia's parents are admirable for all their conservatism. The point isn't to advocate for one or the other political philosophy, but rather to examine how the essential contradictions of racial uplift have created pathologies in those raised to believe them. Parthenia sees herself as part of the "better class" of black and charged with upholding the higher class of blacks, but she's a victim of the very class hierarchy she is supporting. 

For Parthenia, living her live in a way that uplifts her race means several things. It means not being a troublemaker: "Each time I was a student (at Hampton), I was not a troublemaker. I did not wear an Afro, nor did I burn my cotillion gowns." It means trying to learn to imitate white high society through her participation in a club where young black women were taught to behave properly. It means she did not take part in Civil Rights marches. It means not showing her "true colors" when white people are around, meaning white people should never seen black people acting angry or disagreeable. And it means, above all else, that she will "put her hands over her ears" when Craw Daddy seems to do wrong. Because Craw Daddy is a symbol for blacks, who see him as "our man, he will always be our man." He's been hailed as a black comedian who can even make white audiences laugh. To turn on Craw Daddy means to hold a prominent black man up to shame in front of white people, which would be a setback for blacks. Better to hold it in, to "shield the world from my raging emotions, the overflowing cup of my indignations." Better to say "yes" to everything Craw Daddy puts her though.

It's this political conservatism, more than anything, that makes the story reminiscent of Cosby. (Okay, that, and the reference to funny dad sweaters.) Cosby was himself rather on the conservative end, berating blacks who didn't do well in school or who wore their pants down low. He was extremely beloved by white people (I grew up in a nearly all-white town, but almost everyone I knew watched The Cosby Show during its best years). Cosby's own wife has steadfastly refused to accept that charges against him are legitimate, insisting instead that it's all part of a racist plot to bring down someone like her husband. His wife is a loyal soldier of the philosophy of racial uplift, a philosophy which has never really gone away.

Her loyalty to her husband, though, causes her to be terribly callous to the women he has attacked. She has testified against all of them, disbelieving the evidence plainly in front of her nose rather than give the women the justice they deserve. 

Greatness

Unlike the real Mrs. Cosby, Parthenia does eventually get straightened out. (In this sense, Ferrell shows a greater ability than T.C. Boyle did with "The Apartment" to handle real-life material but stay in control of it rather than letting it control her.) Much of the story concerns itself with the question of what greatness is. While Craw Daddy is playing his farewell tour in front of one of the last friendly audiences he can find at Hampton, Parthenia sees the audience bowled over by his greatness. But she also remembers another woman who had the stage at Hampton once, Mahalia Jackson. Mahalia was not accommodating like Parthenia has always been. She was "slow and belligerent" when she walked off after just one song. She was imperious, not even lifting her eyes.

Parthenia finally learns to channel this indifference to worrying about how something will look to others, to stop bottling up the feelings she's bottled up for years. Just to make it clear that it's not necessarily political conservativism the story's railing against, but the effects of a kind of conservatism when that belief makes one unable to stand up for justice, Parthenia goes to Clarence, a man whose "old-fashioned darkyness" her own husband found so charming. Clarence is the one who allows Parthenia to stage her rebellion by refusing to care any more for the grandchild she knows she and her husband should not be raising. 

Eboni

There are all kinds of paths I'm not going to get to go down in this story. It's as rich as a good allegory in how many things there are that represent other things, without having any of the dullness or didacticism an allegory sometimes falls into. I can't resist, though, quickly considering Eboni. This is the girl assigned by the college to tend to Craw Daddy's needs. It's clear that Craw Daddy is messing around with her. For most of the story, Parthenia regards Eboni with class-based judgment for her ashy, lotionless skin, her unkempt scalp, her non-yellow complexion (yellow meaning light-skinned). Eboni, meanwhile, responds with passive-aggressive jabs at Parthenia. 

Eboni could, of course, be spelled "Ebony," which is a near synonym for "black." In fact, ebony is a fairly dark black. Ebony is the name of a magazine that has played an important role for years in the fight for equity for Black Americans. Eboni's reaction to Craw Daddy, then, could be seen as, in some ways, representative of how all Black Americans who want something better for themselves feel about someone like Craw Daddy, someone who once made whites feel better about blacks but who also seems to have done terrible things. 

That feeling seems to be expressed by Eboni when she is taunting Parthenia with the fact that Craw Daddy has been fooling around with her: "I thought right up to now I liked it." Eboni has apparently been one of Craw Daddy's willing partners, although her willingness was likely a product of her being star-struck. Eboni suffered from a form of the same disease that has afflicted Parthenia, the desire to see a black person succeed so badly, she allowed herself to be drawn into his madness.

Eboni and Parthenia both seem to snap out of their afflictions at the same time, with Eboni plotting to have her husband and others beat Craw Daddy after the show just as Parthenia is giving the baby away. Rather than be angry at Eboni for attacking her husband, Parthenia feels love for her. The story closes with Parthenia wanting to connect with Eboni, finding that Eboni is the greatness she has been looking for:

Eboni is stamping down the hill, backlit by moonlight. Her fists are tight by her side--she seems all greatness in her youthful march, her hair gone wild and free as it flutters in gangly strips atop her head--I want to find out if that is true. Are you great? Have you always been great? Hoisting myself from the grass, I stand and wave. Her silhouette inches closer to mine. My arms open, I start to cry. This girl is going to meet me for the first time, even if she doesn't yet know it.

Parthenia's awakening is to realize that the greatness she sought wasn't in some "top tenth" celebrity who could represent the race. It was in people like Eboni, people unafraid to show their true colors and their true color.  

   

Other readings: Jim Harris at Auxiliary Memory (who shared my finding that this story is enough for someone's dissertation)

Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense, who examines water as a motif in the story in a way that I missed. 

Being real when nobody else is around: "Godmother Tea" by Selena Anderson (Best American Short Stories 2020)

Nearly everyone probably agrees that the diversification of voices that's taken place in Western literature in the last five to eight decades is a good thing. While it can be intellectually and emotionally profitable to read works from cultural viewpoints external to the reader's, and although some truths really are universal, one of the reasons people read is to feel less alone, which means at least some of a reader's diet out to consist of people with a background somewhat similar to the reader's. So it's good for black readers to have some black writers to read. 

A funny thing happened during those decades of literary diversification, though. It became apparent that when black voices were able to tell their own, black stories, there was no unanimous opinion as to what being black meant. In reality, this shouldn't have been surprising, since centuries of literature from white writers with similar backgrounds had never revealed any underlying psychological unity. The heterogeneity of white thought on identity never bothered most white thinkers, but some black thinkers, perhaps feeling there should be a degree of unanimity within the members of one of the out-groups of society within itself, have evidenced some angst about the diversity of opinions of what authentic blackness means. 

This angst reverberates with young black people today, even those with no awareness of arguments within the black intelligentsia. Part of the black experience is a constant struggle over identity, with questions such as, "Am I acting too white?" or, "Is my lifestyle true to my identity as a black person in America?"

One way this identity battle manifests itself is when black people question other black people who use what they deem to be white vocabulary, or who dress white, or who live in white neighborhoods, or even who do well in school. As one study on African-American identity in adolescence put it:   

"...many African American youth underperform in school; the interplay between race and dis-avowal of achievement is the focus of a number of theories (Fordham, 1988; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Graham, 1994; Hudson, 1991). Thus, Ogbu (1991) and others (e.g., Steele, 1988) have described how awareness of racism and the need for collective struggle against racism result in a sense of in-group policing of boundaries. Group members who attempt to affiliate with whites or engage in activities viewed as white are sanctioned by the group. This may result in 'cultural inversion' or viewing conventional successes and achievements as not black and as threatening one's blackness. Similar in-group policing is described by Dyson (1993) among black academics, authors, musicians and creative artists who may find themselves channeled into particular content domains, techniques or styles and risk criticism by others in the black community if their work does not fit a narrow view of blackness or black traditions. Thus attempts to define blackness as not white may result in sanctions for those who focus on academics and schooling ."  

Joy has an identity problem. Literally.

The protagonist of Selena Anderson's short story "Godmother Tea," twenty-something Joy, is living this identity problem. She wonders somewhat obsessively whether her words, dress, and life are too white. This neurosis is helped along by a society constantly accusing her of being too white: her mother, her estranged friend, a random Nigerian guy at a party. When we meet Joy, her identity problem is quite literal. Her big problems in life, we learn, are that her best friend has abandoned her, her old boyfriend has a new girlfriend, and her driver's license is so expired that it is "becoming difficult to prove (she) was (her)self." The license is a fairly obvious symbol that her issues are related to identity. 

Outside of her identity problems, Joy's position in life isn't one our culture specifically associates with black Americans; instead, it's the rather more universal twenty-something concern for not having established oneself yet, needing help from parents, and wondering if life is ever going to take off. I'm a white guy in my late forties, and I'm still not sure I'm past that phase in life. Like Joy, a lot of the furniture in my house is from my parents. So one of her problems is specific to her blackness, while another is something experienced by almost every young adult in America.  

What makes Joy's experience of the universal crappiness of young adulthood specific to her is that she's currently without an identity. As a teen, her friend Nicole helped Joy to develop an identity that felt authentically Black in Joy's mind. Nicole seemed to Joy like a "real" black woman, and Joy imitated her: 

But what made us last was that when we were together, it felt like we were speaking a special language. Looking back, I think that maybe I had just learned to speak her way. I hung on to every turn of phrase and rhythm, because there was so much hope in them, the way her words sailed out and up with such poise and without fear. My mama didn’t even sound like that.

Nicole taught Joy about "the dozens," which, as an outsider to the culture that practices it, I understand as something like "talking shit about each other for fun." It is, apparently, something one has to be able to do well in order to be accepted in some black communities. 

But Nicole has graduated from her teen self. She's got a job now, and a fiancée, and she goes to parties at houses on oaky boulevards where you have to "enter a gate code to even get inside the neighborhood." Seeing Nicole embrace this new side of herself is confusing to Joy, because Joy so often feels pressure not to act white, but here, the very person Joy thought could teach her about being authentically black seems to have decided that version of herself in in her past. Joy is left feeling that Nicole is "becoming one of them," while Joy is "becoming the wrong version of (her)self." 

I don't know if this Key and Peele sketch is the most accurate depiction of black intra-cultural pressure to be authentically Black, but it is probably the funniest one I know of. 

The godmother

Joy feels conflicted about taking help from her mom, the deliverer of furniture. She feels conflicted about nearly everything. She imagines her mother's charity is a subtle way of judging her, the "messy presents" like gym passes and coupons for maids more a commentary on Joy's shortcomings than attempts to help. Joy imagines not just what her mother really thinks about her, but what all of her long train of ancestors think. She isn't sure if they approve of her or disapprove, and she splits it in half by supposing they look at her with "loving disapproval." She imagines that her mother is looking at her funny for using too white a word ("self-reflexive"), but she also imagines her family praising her for having grown up into a "well-spoken young woman full of potential." Joy's mental state can be aptly summed up by a phrase she uses early on: "a complaint I'd been having with myself." 

As Joy is imagining what other people, living and dead, think of her, she conjures up the godmother from the mirror her mother gave her. Like everything in Joy's head, the godmother is a bit of a contradiction:

The godmother is like an ancestor who never really left. Someone who’s here even when they’re not. The godmother is what happens when somebody asks your name and you suddenly can’t remember. When it’s gorgeous outside and you work up the nerve to be part of something but not enough nerve to brush your hair, that’s the godmother. Maybe you stay up too late and are tempted to give yourself completely to unrequited obsessions. That’s the godmother’s doing, too. When life speeds through its continuum without pushing you forward, she starts to look your way. You have to be careful with this familiar face. She’ll have you batting your eyes and practicing your smile. 

There's some truth in there, but a little bit of that description is Joy's own self-contradicting brain at work. Joy actually comes closer to the truth about what the godmother is when she's trying to dissimulate to Nicole about it, to ask her friend about the godmother without telling the full truth. She describes the godmother as "a scenario where versions of my former self judged me through the bedroom mirror." That's the narrator giving the reader a non-magical-realist way of understanding the godmother, and it's believable that Joy's imagination is so active where judging herself is concerned that she would conjure something as real as the godmother, symbol of past generations come to life to tell her what she's doing wrong. 

Within Joy's imagination, the godmother cooks for her (soul food, mostly), and chastises Joy for trying to make fancy food she can't pronounce. In that sense, the godmother seems to be answering that part of Joy's brain that feels guilty for being too "white," i.e. having a good education, speaking collegiate English, aspiring to learn about and experience things from all over the world. But the godmother's not just the voice telling her to stop being white; the godmother also critiques Joy for wanting to remain black according to her teen self's understanding of what that meant, i.e. refusing to make decisions that could increase her material comfort, the "the blasé way I naturally stood squandering my opportunities."

The mixed message is itself the message, which is that there is no magical message

Joy is a little mixed up about whether the godmother wants her to get her shit together in a traditional sense so she can get ahead in life, or whether the godmother wants her to stop worrying about white people things like getting ahead and be her true self. She senses, though, that it's more the former. She believes the godmother would "find a way to come out on top." 

Immediately, what this means to her is that she is going to act out a bit and get her ex-boyfriend Andre to have sex with her even though he's with a new girl, Porsche. (Porsche is a fascinating part of this story I don't really have time to go into, but what draws me in about her is that she's got the bougiest white girl name you could just about image, but also, Joy sees her as kind of a black girl's black girl. Her slang is so authentic, Joy concludes, that it "takes skill to get to that level, years if you study really hard." Why "study"? Does this mean Porsche, also, is having to feel her way around her blackness and figure it out?)

Joy gets Andre to not only have sex with her, but to lie to Porsche to get the man's shirt she was wearing off her back and into Joy's car. She's won some little petty game she had going on in her mind with Porsche. She thinks that this was the key, the attitude change the godmother had planned for her. She drives the next day to get her license renewed, thinking "the city seemed to have changed its opinions about me. I could speed up traffic with the nod of my head. I could weave through lanes. There wasn’t a person alive whose angry gaze could get their hooks in."

It's a false epiphany, though. The DMZ is closed, because it's Easter, a fact that Joy somehow missed. She walks away from the building and almost gets hit by a car, "zipping the city back into order." She hasn't gone through a dramatic change yet that will resolve her identity problem. 

There is one more act to the story, and in this final act, Joy finally figures out how to "get over." The godmother is being kind of hard on Joy while Joy is crying in the tub, but when Joy gets out, the godmother offers her tea. One more time, the godmother tells Joy she "talks like a white girl." She tells Joy she "can't even be real when nobody else is around," but she also gives her the tea to drink (which is, let's face it, kind of a white girl thing to drink). Confused beyond her ability to cope, Joy prays "to be in harmony with the city I called home and with my time on this earth and for this to show in my face and the way I talked. And if none of this was meant to be, I prayed that I wouldn’t want it in the first place, that I would be turned into a different girl completely."

This is the moment she finally solves her identity problem, the moment "when things turned around for me," and this time, the epiphany is real. Because she hasn't figured out her identity relative to what someone else thinks it should be, her friend or her mother or her mythical ideas of the ancestors. She's figured out what she wants for herself. She puts on an orange dress she "used to like," suggesting she had put her own tastes to the side for a time and is now reclaiming them. She heads outside, forgetting her wallet, but the guy at the store just gives her the soda she wanted to buy, apparently content with her now that she is content with herself. Joy concludes by saying that her ability to be true to herself, her own reflection in her own mirror when nobody else was around, is "how she got over."

A nice twist on an old concept

Black literature of the past half century has often looked to the ancestors for wisdom needed to face life today. Some stories imagine that communion with past ancestors and traditions could bring wholeness and new vibrancy. In "Godmother Tea," the ancestors do have a lot to offer, even if it's sometimes "messy presents," because the ancestors, in spite of their judgments based on their own prejudices, still have a "loving disapproval" even when they disapprove. But the ancestors also sometimes need to clear out of the way. Joy isn't able to "get over" until she is truly alone, until the godmother is really gone and there was "nobody there to explain to me my options." 

Joy isn't made whole through imaginative communion with the ancestors; she's made whole when they go away and she's able to get to work figuring out who she is when there isn't a voice in her ear telling her what she ought to be. 

Other readings of this story: Jim Harris at Auxiliary Memory and Karen Carlson, the mother of BASS blogging, at A Just Recompense