Mother Character Analysis

Poor me! A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own. Giving up life for life, loving as I knew I should, and, perhaps most importantly, attempting to live up to the measure of my sister. Time seemed anything but mine, as if I were sleeping, walking and eating with a stopwatch!

I went to what had been my father’s study, and perhaps still was his study, but now it was where I worked. I sat and stared at Juanita Mae Jenkins’ face on Time magazine. [...] I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?”

“I want you to meet him.” And suddenly Bill’s voice was different, but it was more than just the sound of a man in love. His pronunciation changed. It was not quite that he developed a stereotypical lisp, but it was close.

“Why are you talking like that?”

His voice went back to normal. “Like what?”

The news of the money came and I breathed an ironic and bitter sigh of relief. Maybe I felt a bit of vindication somewhere inside me. Certainly, I felt a great deal of hostility toward an industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel.

The letter was unsigned. That was all that was in the box. I had read a voice of my father’s that I had not heard directly in life, a tender voice, an open voice. I couldn’t imagine the man who had run off to New York to have an affair. I knew my mother had read the letters, but I didn’t know when. I knew she wanted me to read the letters. Knowledge of the affair gave me, oddly, more compassion for my father, more interest in him. Even when I considered my mother and her feelings I did not find myself angry with him, though I worried about her pain.

My mother’s maiden name was Parker and they lived on the Chesapeake Bay, south of where we summered. A couple of Parkers were farmers, others worked in plants of one sort or another. Mother’s brothers and sisters were considerably older and were all dead before I was an adult, leaving me with a herd of cousins that I never saw, never heard anything about, but kind of knew existed out there somewhere with names like Janelle and Tyrell. Mother had become an Ellison. As a child, I saw some Parkers only once, visiting a farm house near the bay. They frightened me. Big-seeming people with big smells and big laughs. Had I known more of life then, I would have liked them, found them thriving and interesting, but as it was, I found them only startlingly different.

I hung up and stared at the phone on my desk. It was black and heavy and had been used by my father and sometimes I imagined I could still hear his deep voice humming through the wires. Bill sounded so remarkably sad, so lost. When we were kids I had often felt, however vaguely, his sadness, but this hopelessness, if it was in fact that, this lostness, misplacedness, was new and not easy to take.

The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of “black” writers, I ended up on the very distant and very “other” side of a line that is imaginary at best. [...] I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. […] But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.

[...] There were books by John Grisham and Tom Clancy, a paperback of John MacDonald and things like that. Those books didn’t bother me. Though I had never read one completely through, I had peeked at pages, and although I did not find any depth of artistic expression or any abundance of irony or play with language or ideas, I found them well enough written, the way a technical manual can be well enough written. Oh, so that’s tab A. So, why did Juanita Mae Jenkins send me running for the toilet? I imagine it was because Tom Clancy was not trying to sell his book to me by suggesting that the crew of his high-tech submarine was a representation of his race (however fitting a metaphor). Nor was his publisher marketing it in that way. If you didn’t like Clancy’s white people, you could go out and read about some others.

Poor me! A man without a religion, without a decent lie to call my own. Giving up life for life, loving as I knew I should, and, perhaps most importantly, attempting to live up to the measure of my sister. Time seemed anything but mine, as if I were sleeping, walking and eating with a stopwatch!

I went to what had been my father’s study, and perhaps still was his study, but now it was where I worked. I sat and stared at Juanita Mae Jenkins’ face on Time magazine. [...] I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?”

“I want you to meet him.” And suddenly Bill’s voice was different, but it was more than just the sound of a man in love. His pronunciation changed. It was not quite that he developed a stereotypical lisp, but it was close.

“Why are you talking like that?”

His voice went back to normal. “Like what?”

The news of the money came and I breathed an ironic and bitter sigh of relief. Maybe I felt a bit of vindication somewhere inside me. Certainly, I felt a great deal of hostility toward an industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel.

The letter was unsigned. That was all that was in the box. I had read a voice of my father’s that I had not heard directly in life, a tender voice, an open voice. I couldn’t imagine the man who had run off to New York to have an affair. I knew my mother had read the letters, but I didn’t know when. I knew she wanted me to read the letters. Knowledge of the affair gave me, oddly, more compassion for my father, more interest in him. Even when I considered my mother and her feelings I did not find myself angry with him, though I worried about her pain.

My mother’s maiden name was Parker and they lived on the Chesapeake Bay, south of where we summered. A couple of Parkers were farmers, others worked in plants of one sort or another. Mother’s brothers and sisters were considerably older and were all dead before I was an adult, leaving me with a herd of cousins that I never saw, never heard anything about, but kind of knew existed out there somewhere with names like Janelle and Tyrell. Mother had become an Ellison. As a child, I saw some Parkers only once, visiting a farm house near the bay. They frightened me. Big-seeming people with big smells and big laughs. Had I known more of life then, I would have liked them, found them thriving and interesting, but as it was, I found them only startlingly different.

I hung up and stared at the phone on my desk. It was black and heavy and had been used by my father and sometimes I imagined I could still hear his deep voice humming through the wires. Bill sounded so remarkably sad, so lost. When we were kids I had often felt, however vaguely, his sadness, but this hopelessness, if it was in fact that, this lostness, misplacedness, was new and not easy to take.

The fear of course is that in denying or refusing complicity in the marginalization of “black” writers, I ended up on the very distant and very “other” side of a line that is imaginary at best. [...] I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. […] But the irony was beautiful. I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be.

[...] There were books by John Grisham and Tom Clancy, a paperback of John MacDonald and things like that. Those books didn’t bother me. Though I had never read one completely through, I had peeked at pages, and although I did not find any depth of artistic expression or any abundance of irony or play with language or ideas, I found them well enough written, the way a technical manual can be well enough written. Oh, so that’s tab A. So, why did Juanita Mae Jenkins send me running for the toilet? I imagine it was because Tom Clancy was not trying to sell his book to me by suggesting that the crew of his high-tech submarine was a representation of his race (however fitting a metaphor). Nor was his publisher marketing it in that way. If you didn’t like Clancy’s white people, you could go out and read about some others.