In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with the veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

One of my favorite genres of literature to teach was the essay. Usually, the textbooks included some examples from the past such as something from Bacon or Montaigne--my favorite is Of Cannibals. And then there were the modern ones, you know, from the likes of E.B. White and Joan Didion. The modern ones became models for my budding writers. As I pondered the airing of today's Super Bowl, I remembered George Plimpton's essay capturing his brief appearance as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions. Plimpton, in fact, was known for his various adventures to experience this job or that sport so he could write about it, to provide the inside view of such a thing. The quarterback or center or lineman or halfback, obviously, cannot be relied upon to render in words the essence of what he does on the field. For that, we must rely upon the essayist. Plimpton was allowed to quarterback one play. He performed as well as an essayist could be expected to perform, which was not very well at all, but all applauded his courage to try. The following is a passage from that essay:

These pronouncements were accompanied by short, visual vignettes, subliminal, but which seemed to flash inside the helmet with the clarity of a television screen in a dark room—tumultuous scenes of big tackles and guards in what seemed a landslide, a cliff of them toppling toward me like a slow-moving object in a dream, as I lay in some sort of a depression gaping up in resigned dismay.

Raymond Berry, the knowledgeable Baltimore end, once told me that I would survive a scrimmage if I played his position (out on the flank) and was sure to stay out of what he referred to as the "pit"—a designation that often came to mind just before my participation in scrimmages. It was an area, as he described it, along the line of scrimmage, perhaps 10 yards deep, where at the centering of the ball the Neanderthal struggle began between the opposing linemen. The struggle raged within a relatively restricted area that was possible to avoid. Berry himself, when he told me this, had wandered into the pit only three times in his career—coming back to catch poorly thrown buttonhook passes falling short—and he spoke of each instance as one might speak of a serious automobile accident. The particulars were embalmed in his memory in absolute clarity: that year, in that city, at such-and-such a game, during such-and-such a quarter, when so-and-so, the quarterback, threw the ball short, his arm jogged by a red-dogging linebacker, so that Berry had to run out of his pattern back toward the scrimmage line so many yards to catch it, and it was so-and-so, the 290-pounder, who reached an arm out of the ruck of the pit and dragged him down into it.

"One thing to remember when you do get hit," Berry told me in his soft Texas accent, "is to try to fall in the foetus position. Curl up around the ball, and keep your limbs from being extended, because there'll be other people coming up out of the pit to see you don't move any, and one of them landing on an arm that's outstretched, y'know, can snap it."
"Right," I said.
"But the big thing is just stay out of that area."
"Sure," I said.

But when I arrived to train with the Lions at Cranbrook I disregarded his advice. What I had to try to play was quarterback, because the essence of the game was involved with that position. The coaches agreed, if reluctantly, and after the front office had made me sign some papers absolving them of any responsibility, I became the "last-string" quarterback, and thus stood in Berry's pit each time I walked up behind the center to call signals. He was right, of course. One of the first plays I called at Cranbrook landed me in the pit. It was a simple hand-off play. Opposite me across the line the linebackers were all close up, shouting, "Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!" which is one of the Lion code cries to red-dog, to rush the quarterback.

When the snapback came I fumbled the ball, gaping at it, mouth ajar, as it rocked back and forth gaily at my feet, and I flung myself on it, my subconscious shrilling, "Foetus! Foetus!" as I tried to draw myself in like a frightened pill bug, and I heard the sharp strange whack of gear, the grunts—and then a sudden weight whooshed the air out of me.

It was Dave Lloyd, a 250-pound linebacker, who got through the line and got to me. A whistle blew and I clambered up, seeing him grin inside his helmet, to discover that the quick sense of surprise that I had survived was replaced by a pulsation of fury that I had not done better. I swore lustily at my clumsiness, hopping mad, near to throwing the ball into the ground, and eager to form a huddle to call another play and try again. The players were all standing up, some with their helmets off, many with big grins, and I heard someone calling, "Hey, man, hey, man!" and someone else—John Gordy, I think, because he said it all the time—called out, "Beautiful, real beautiful."

I sensed then that an initiation had been performed, a blooding ceremony. Wayne Walker said, "Welcome to pro ball." Something in the tone of it made it not only in reference to the quick horror of what had happened when I fumbled but in appreciation that I had gone through something that made me, if tenuously, one of them, and they stood for a while on the field watching me savor it. But the trouble was that the confidence that came with being blooded did not last long. After 10 minutes, kneeling on the sidelines quaking with eagerness to be called again, one would feel it begin to seep away, and the afternoon would be gone, and when the night came, in the cubicle-sized rooms of the boys'-school dormitory where we slept, what was left would edge completely away, skirting the discomfiture and insecurity that waited, as palpable as cat burglars, to move in.

It made sleep at night difficult to come by—a problem not so much for me as for the rookies, who had their careers at stake. Frank Imperiale, in the daylight hours trying for an offensive guard position, told me that it was often 4 o'clock before he could get to sleep. He would lie and listen to the hands of the big clocks in the corridors click forward every minute, which I had noticed too, audibly, like post-office boxes clicking shut, and he would count from one click to the next, trying to match them to the count of 60. He got expert at it, mumbling his numbers in the darkness. There were variations he could switch to. His room was next to a latrine, which had a row of urinals that flushed automatically every 53 or 83 seconds, I forget which, and Imperiale would count the seconds off to whichever number it was, and when he got there a low moan of machinery would rise from next door and culminate in a harsh flush of water. Mainly Imperiale kept at his numbers to keep his mind off football and his chances of making the team [he did not] and to bore himself to sleep. But every once in a while his mind's eye would fill with a vision, always the same: an enormous phantom lineman opposite him on the line of scrimmage, down in his crouch, the hard eyes staring out from his helmet, and when Imperiale launched himself at the figure he did so with such an effort to establish contact, muscles straining, that in his bed he suddenly felt pounds lighter, not far from levitating himself completely, sailing up off the bed stiff as an ironing board, and then with a gasp he would collapse back, the sweat beginning to flow. He would blink his eyes open and shut to remove the image.

Imperiale had the fortune, nonetheless, of having a single illusory opponent to take care of. Mine, either in the closeness of my dormitory room or in my mind's eye as I sat gloomily on the bench at Pontiac, gaping vacantly out at the field where the contests were concluding, came in great numbers, cliffs of defensive linemen, toppling toward me, calling out, "Jumbo! Jumbo! Jumbo!" nearly loud enough to drown out, but not quite, the schoolmaster's pawky voice whispering close at hand, "Son, do this, son, do that," manifestations of insecurity so discomfiting that to cease being a captive audience to them I ripped off my helmet, despite the fact that game time was only minutes away, and let the outside noise of the crowd wash over me.

So Superbowl Sunday is upon us again, and it forces many of us to wonder what it's all about. On the surface, it seems to me to be much ado about nothing, or if not nothing, then at least very little; after all, I never played football in any serious way. True, we neighborhood boys did play touch most chilly fall evenings, and I did as president of my fraternity play for our team, Go Phi Gams, let's beat those bestial Theta Chis. Whatever. My sport, as you might imagine, is tennis, and I also like to run. Neither of those sports carry the kind of weight as football, and Grand Slams and track events never cause a stir as great as football meetings, especially the greatest of all sporting events--in America, anyway--the Super Bowl. What's it all about? Sure, anthropologists liken the contest and the attendant hoopla to primitive rituals where heroes fight to the death in honor of the gods. And like those rituals there are displays of sex, body bashing confrontations, and blood. Social scientists see in the contest something very American: the ultimate reenactment of the concept of Manifest Destiny or the steady march to garner more and more territory. And we can't forget that the Super Bowl showcases through showstopping advertising the major corporations of America and through exorbitant bonuses for the players the sports franchises. In other words, it is the biblical reenactment of the worship of Baal whose symbol is the golden calf. Finally, the ritual must include the observers whose appreciation of the excess and gore is always enhanced by imbibing for hours the mead that will intoxicate and thereby excite to a frenzy and thence to oblivion. Dear, bring me another brew.

I apologize for the length of this entry, but because it has been so long since I have written a critical essay, I had to share it. The story I am attempting to elucidate follows two girls who were thrown together in an orphanage because their mothers failed to care for them properly. And then at various stages of their lives, they run into each other, and much of what defines their relationship is race.

All Are Crucified

“Recitatif,” as Toni Morrison claims in the preface to her critical monograph “Playing in the Dark” is the only short story she has written, and she wrote it, she says, as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial” (xi). Given that the reader cannot finally determine which character is black and which, white, the racial codes must refer to specific racially identifying physical characteristics and behaviors or to the adoption of ones that apply to either race. So all we really know is that race matters for both whites and blacks; in other words, race is an everpresent and all-pervading reality—at least in America, it is. But there is a third character whose racial identification is also in question. She is described in the text as “sandy-colored” as opposed to the “salt and pepper” (2254) epithet applied to the obviously very white and very black main characters. This character is, of course, the deaf, mute, deformed Maggie who provides throughout the story a touchstone for the feelings involved in the search for personal and racial identity of Twyla and Roberta, the two orphans at St. Bonny’s where Maggie figures as a mere employee. In a number of the scenes of intersection in the lives of the two orphans (not really true orphans) as they grow up and mature, Maggie becomes for them an important and revealing topic of conversation and conflict, and underneath all of their recollections and interpretations of the past, Maggie becomes a symbol of victimization to these two, who are themselves damaged victims. What each girl and woman thinks of Maggie reveals something of her personality and the nature of her personal struggle. Simply put, Twyla runs from Maggie; Roberta embraces her.

Twyla, the narrator, does not fully grasp the significance of Maggie’s suffering, even though she is haunted by persistent dreams about the orchard, the place where the older girls hang out and across which Maggie with her bowed legs lurches and rocks her way to catch the bus home from her job as kitchen worker. The orchard is obviously meant to be Eden, but the fall is represented not only by the apple trees that look like wizened old women, but also by the presence of the bored, pubescent, cigarette-smoking teenagers and, yes, Maggie and her fall or felling one day, whichever is or was really the case. The fact that Twyla blocks out Maggie’s negritude and her mistreatment while she looks on but does nothing to stop the cruel attack or to help her up is symptomatic of not only her confusion and cowardice but also her general state of self-delusion. Twyla is a romantic, and as such, she rewrites her history to fit her needs for personal survival. For example, we chuckle at her misapprehension concerning her mother’s dancing. Later, we suspect that Twyla now knows better and jokes whenever she sees Roberta that her mother is still “dancing.” And we are not surprised that she seeks a husband who is “as comfortable as a house slipper” (2258). Twyla, especially as a child without any power, as a victim of her mother’s selfishness, ineptitude, and immorality sees herself in Maggie who is, she dismissively says, like a child, referring to her wearing a baby boy hat and being no bigger than she. If Twyla is the black girl in the story, then she feels a personal kind of shame at Maggie’s black victim role, though she prefers to deny it even exists. If she is white, she wants to disassociate herself from a person who illicits another kind of shame: her inability to overcome her subconscious prejudice to help her. Sadly, Twyla misrepresents and trivializes Maggie; in fact, she prefers to forget her altogether.

Roberta, on the other hand, is a hardened realist with a keener sense of the world in which she is forced to live. Twyla escapes into fantasy; Roberta takes reality head-on. She knows the teenagers—the gar girls (gargoyles appropriately)—are cruel and vicious; she knows that Maggie is a pathetic victim of those larger than she who wantonly use their strength, even invoking, as her pontificating, Bible-reading, mad, giantess mother does, the power of God to terrorize the innocent and weak and helpless. Roberta, unlike Maggie who cannot manage to move quickly or deftly, runs as far away from her victimization as she can, and she spends the rest of her life establishing her own control over herself and hers, even being willing to demonstrate on the streets for them, bravely trying to change the world, trying to protect the children. Why? Because she had known a world that did not protect her when she was a child. To her, Maggie is black, even though she admits later that she doesn’t know that for a fact. If Maggie isn’t black, well, she should be because being black is the same as being a victim. If Roberta is herself black, then she knows what Maggie suffers, and if she is white, it is the same knowing, which is that white or black people suffer unjustifiably and cruelly and inhumanely. Of course, Roberta was part of the hippie revolution: she wanted to fill the world with love, peace, and tolerance. Roberta wanted to save Maggie and still does at the end of the story, crying out the words of despair, “Oh, shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened to Maggie?” (2366). But Roberta also admits that she wanted to hurt Maggie back then, to join the other girls in their assault of the defenseless black dwarf. No doubt her primitive impulse stemmed from her own hatred of victimization and by extension hatred of the victim, hatred of Maggie who was the ultimate victim, the one who lies down and takes it, even invites it, who never questions, who never fights back, who, as Twyla says, hears the name calling and abides the beatings but because she is mute (or maybe not) can’t or won’t tell anyone. But we know there are ways to tell the truth, no matter what, and if not to the authorities who probably won’t do anything about it, at least to oneself. And maybe at some level Roberta’s hatred of Maggie as victim is bound up in her own self-loathing. Roberta, though, does find the will to fight against victimization. Maggie represents for Roberta all the victims in the world; Roberta suggests the Christ, the Man of Sorrows, who takes upon himself all the sins and sufferings of humanity.

When one looks back, one has to conclude that Twyla really never penetrates the veil she has draped over her past. Two moments in particular make this clear. The first occurs at lunch after the two women meet in the new gourmet store. In the face of the snub she felt she had received at the Howard Johnson’s restaurant years ago, Twyla celebrates their return to the good old days when they were little girls in the orphanage giggling in children’s happy-go-lucky ways and essentially ignoring all the evil that lurks outside in the real world, a world fraught especially with the evil of racism, and she says naively, “Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to question. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well” (2260). But what there is not in Twyla’s cosmology of politeness but is in Roberta’s cosmology of truth is the idea of acceptance and personal sacrifice. It is at this meeting that Roberta begins to challenge her friend’s understanding of what Maggie represents. But at the end of the story, the second crucial moment, clearly Twyla still fails to see this truth as is evidenced in her reversion to their old childhood ritual questions about their mothers, such nonsense finally seeming thoroughly insipid and irrelevant.

If you haven't already figured me out, then the fact that the following Zappa quote reverberates in my soul should give you a clue:

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it."

In the class I am taking at my local university, we are investigating the nature of the American fictional narrative, but specifically the way in which American writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been and are influenced by and challenged by and confused by and inspired by the presence of African-Americans. The course intro says, "Arguably, race (whether envisioned through color, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or caste) is the most persistent, if often covert, theme articulated in the American narrative. This course asks what role has race and identity played in the shaping of the American narrative?" So far there have been some very provocative and revelatory statements, but I think the one that stands out foremost in my imagination is that by James Baldwin paraphrased in Russell Banks's essay “Who Will Tell the People? On Waiting, Still, for the Great Creole-American Novel." Baldwin, he says, believes that the story of race in America will be told, if ever, only when it is told from the point of view of a white member of a southern lynch mob. My question is would such a person be able to write, let alone write a novel capturing such a transcendental, compassionate, liberating notion?

I have of late been complaining, oh so vociferously, about the impasse come about in our government, so that I worry that I may have driven my audience away. One can harp too, too much, like a dog that won't give up snarling and ripping at its shred of cloth or bone and so one takes the dog and tosses him out the window--forever! Anyway, I have resorted to the satirists who fortunately remind us that we are making complete asses of ourselves, especially when ourselves are the asses known as politicians, oh, and sometimes the voters too. But there is no finer representation of poltical asininity and the subsequent shenanigens than Twain's concoction based on his extraordinary twins, by which he means Siamese twins in his work of the title Those Extraordinary Twins. The irony and hilarity of this and other situations stem from the fact that the conjoined twins are polar opposites but occupy, of course, the same body and that the control of the legs of which there are only two switch from one twin to the other at the same precise moment from week to week. The political part of the humor derives from the fact that each of the twins represesnts a different political party, which leads me to the impasse that has so gotten my goat of late. I speak of Chapter X of Those Extraordinary Twins. I add the note that Angelo's inconsistency mentioned in the following passage stems from the fact that he, Angelo, represents the Teetotlers but because his brother twin, Luigi, likes to get drunk, which affects Angelo's behavior of course, Angelo appears to be a hypocrite, resulting in the election of Luigi instead of Angelo:

SO THEY HANGED LUIGI

Dawson's Landing had a week of repose, after the election, and it needed it, for the frantic and variegated nightmare which had tormented it all through the preceding week had left it limp, haggard, and exhausted at the end. It got the week of repose because Angelo had the legs, and was in too subdued a condition to want to go out and mingle with an irritated community that had come to disgust and detest him because there was such a lack of harmony between his morals, which were confessedly excellent, and his methods of illustrating them, which were distinctly damnable.

The new city officers were sworn in on the following Monday--at least all but Luigi. There was a complication in his case. His election was conceded, but he could not sit in the board of aldermen without his brother, and his brother could not sit there because he was not a member. There seemed to be no way out of the difficulty but to carry the matter into the courts, so this was resolved upon.

The case was set for the Monday fortnight. In due course the time arrived. In the mean time the city government had been at a standstill, because without Luigi there was a tie in the board of aldermen, whereas with him the liquor interest--the richest in the political field--would have one majority. But the court decided that Angelo could not sit in the board with him, either in public or executive sessions, and at the same time forbade the board to deny admission to Luigi, a fairly and legally chosen alderman.

The case was carried up and up from court to court, yet still the same old original decision was confirmed every time. As a result, the city government not only stood still, with its hands tied, but everything it was created to protect and care for went a steady gait toward rack and ruin. There was no way to levy a tax, so the minor officials had to resign or starve; therefore they resigned. There being no city money, the enormous legal expenses on both sides had to be defrayed by private subscription. But at last the people came to their senses, and said:

"Pudd'nhead was right at the start--we ought to have hired the official half of that human phillipene to resign; but it's too late now; some of us haven't got anything left to hire him with."

"Yes, we have," said another citizen, "we've got this"--and he produced a halter.

Many shouted: "That's the ticket." But others said: "No--Count Angelo is innocent; we mustn't hang him."

"Who said anything about hanging him? We are only going to hang the other one."
"Then that is all right--there is no objection to that."

So they hanged Luigi. And so ends the history of "Those Extraordinary Twins."