Just because a subject is serious, it doesn’t mean that the topic has to be presented in a somber way. Such topics can range from violence to racism to morals to mortality to religion. While the aforementioned topics should be taken seriously, it doesn’t have to mean that they can’t be presented in a new way that mesh or jive with the current culture and time period. It seems that authors are the best choice to present difficult topics in a new way that youth and adult alike are able to identify with; authors such as Toni Morrison in Sula, Gloria Naylor in Linden Hills, and, probably the best at presenting serious subjects in a new, interesting, and engaging way, Paul Beatty in The White Boy Shuffle.
In his début novel, Beatty shows readers the life and times of Gunner Kaufman, a young African American from Santa Monica who is uprooted to West L.A. . Gunner comes from a bloodline of “…a set of weak-kneed DNA to shuffle in the footsteps of a long cowardly queue of koons, Uncle Toms, and faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers. I am the number-one son of a spineless colorstruck son of a bitch who was the third son of an ass-kissing sell-out house Negro who was indeed a seventh son but only by default” (Beatty 5). So, Gunner comes from a long line of African American ancestors who bow to the great throws of powerful White America. And Mrs. Kaufman, Gunner’s mother, was hell-bent on not having another “ass-kisser” in her family, and when she saw that Gunner was beginning to become one, she snatched her family up and took them to Los Angeles, to which Gunner replies “Ma, you done fucked up and moved to the ‘hood” (Beatty 41).
But the “’hood” really isn’t that bad. True, it takes Gunner some time to adjust, but once he does, he makes friends that would stick with him through everything, friends that are more like a family than anything that Gunner’s ever experienced in Santa Monica. After Gunner and the gang the Gun Totin’ Hooligans steal the safe during the riots (and after Gunner gets out of the hospital no thanks to the Rodney King-esque beating from his “spineless” father), they all meet at Psycho Loco’s house where Psycho Loco’s grandmother tires to open the safe, even though she’s deaf (Beatty 139-41).
But even more so, it’s the way that Beatty writes the story of Gunner Kaufman: gang member, basketball star, poet; child, teenager, man; husband, father, college student, wary savior to a group of people, and, what Beatty is trying to get across, ultimately label-less. It’s the drawing of the shirt that the teacher Ms. Cegeny would wear that had everything crossed out but the word “human” (Beatty 28). When it comes right down to it, being colorblind is the best thing to be.
And even more than way that Beatty writes the novel, it’s how he writes it. Beatty uses witty and funny and snide phrases and rants to get his point across in a way that will make readers smirk at the irony of the situation at hand. It’s like the part where Gunner says that his father said that “Rodney King deserved that ass-kicking for resisting arrest and having a Jheri curl. He said some curl activator got into Officer Koon’s eyes and he thought he’d been maced, so he had to defend himself” (Beatty 125). Beatty then goes on to talk about the ways in which Gunner and Psycho Loco have been harassed by the police. But the aforementioned quote about King and the Jheri curl would make a reader pause and giggle and wonder, marvel almost, at whether or not Gunner’s father really believes that the entire graphic beating of King was justified because the man had a Jheri curl that needed activator. It also makes the reader shake their head at the blatant racism showed by Mr. Kaufman; Rodney King had a Jheri curl and needed to be arrested for it: “Rodney King deserved that ass-kicking for resisting arrest and having a Jheri curl.” It makes the reader wonder why the hell a hair style would justify such an intense beating and laugh hard out loud at the lame excuse Officer Kaufman gave, saying, “Heh, curl activator: sure, heh-heh.” The reader, should they know anything about the events of the King incident – or looked anything up on the incident, would know that it was a horrific show of what’s called “excessive force” by police, which is just a nice way of saying unneeded and unjustified police brutality.
While Beatty gives the novel those laugh-out-loud-aha moments, he also gives the text some sad overtones, one of which is the suicide of Scoby or the vulnerability of Psycho Loco just after Pumpkin’s death (206-7, 97-9). One of the saddest moments is at the very end of the novel where Gunner talks about the suicide of his father, and the reader has to wonder if Mr. Kaufman killed himself because Gunner was talking about suicide or because he couldn’t live with a son who was a real black man and not some white-ass-kisser, and the poem that was found in Mr. Kaufman’s locker, reading, “Like the good Reverend King/ I too ‘have a dream,’/ but when I wake up/ I forget it and/ remember I’m running lake for work.” (Beatty 226). This poem too makes the readers wonder if Mr. Kaufman believed in his son or not.
Another wonderful writer is Toni Morrison who gave readers the novel Sula. Morrison’s view of African-American life is a little bit different from that of Beatty’s and a bit more toned down, not having those laugh-out-loud moments, but she makes readers pause in a similar way that Beatty uses; Morrison’s approach is not to use great humor or irony so much as to make readers pause and say, “that was odd, but I kind of get it”.
The first pause-moment is where Morrison introduces Shadrack’s made up holiday Nation Suicide Day. The reader will do a double take, rereading the paragraph before admitting that they did indeed read it correctly. National Suicide Day is a day in which Shadrack decides that
It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He (Shadrack) knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day (Morrison 14).
Once the reader thinks about the concept of National Suicide Day, they can agree that it makes sense for a soldier who experienced death and dying and the suddenness of it all (Morrison 8) would want a nice wrapped package on death where he can predict it. And that’s exactly what Shadrack does, creating a day where he gets the package he wants on the macabre subject.
Another pause-moment for the reader is where Sula’s mother, Hannah, burn to death in the backyard (Morrison 75-8). There is some shock associated with such a traumatic event as witnessing a parent burn to death, but Eva, Sula’s grandmother, “disagreed and remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed (with shock), but because she was interested” (Morrison 78). As the reader reads on later in the novel, they’ll be able to connect this with the later beautifully poetic passage where Sula herself dies:
While in this state of weary anticipation, she (Sula) noticed that she was not breathing, that her heart had stopped completely. A crease of fear touched her breast, for any second there was sure to be a violent explosion in her brain, a gasping for breath. Then she realized, or rather she sensed, that there was not going to be any pain. She was not breathing because she didn’t have to. Her body did not need oxygen. She was dead.
Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she thought, “it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.” (Morrison 149).
These two passages connect because Eva was convinced that Sula was interested because Sula was wondering what death felt like. Her mother was burning to death in front of Sula’s eyes, and she probably wondered how intense the pain felt or what Hannah was thinking. In the later passage, Sula waits for the burst of pain to come, but she realizes that there isn’t any pain; she had slipped away in her pondering. It also makes the reader pause since Morrison still gives Sula consciousness in that Sula still has the state of mind to be able to realize that she has indeed died. Sula is so excited that there wasn’t any pain that she couldn’t wait to tell Nel of her discovery. This leads the reader to believe that the two best friends, Nel and Sula, have had many long and detailed discussions about what death means and what happens or what one feels when one dies.
Another author that deals with death and mortality as well as what happens in the underworld by transposing Hell into a “real life” town, Gloria Naylor wrote the novel Linden Hills. In this novel, readers have the echoing sense of the community of Morrison’s novel. The conjunction of these two novels ends there, for while Naylor’s community is close-kitted like Morrison’s community, Linden Hills was built by, in the novel, the Devil incarnate.
Naylor deals more with religious undertones, more specifically Christian undertones. Most readers have the ability to see that there is some muted sense of Dante’s Inferno: “The Divine Comedy”. The setting of Linden Hills is in the dead of winter; Dante’s version of Hell is wicked ice and snow. Linden Hills community is a spiral on a hill; there are nine spirals of Hell (Naylor 2-3). There are also other Christian over-and-undertones besides “The Divine Comedy”, such as “As the sun disappeared on the seventh day of his (Luther Nedeed) vigil…” gives readers the impression that Nedeed, the main antagonist, has some sort of god-complex (Naylor 3). More than that: if the white man is “God” and Nedeed is the devil, the comment, “A wad of spit – a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America.” makes sense (Naylor 9). And even Nedeed’s first name – Luther – makes more sense if Nedeed is paralleled to the Lucifer. God cast Satan out of Heaven when Satan wanted to take over; Satan, once known as Lucifer, created Hell to spite God, for it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, as religious scholars say. It is ironic to an extent because usually it is the slave master, the white man, who has the god-complex, and here in Nedeed, the founder of Linden Hills who only lets certain blacks into the community.
There is also sort of a sickly humorous play on the Seven Deadly Sins; the most easily seen is of the Seven Deadly Sins is the tale of Evelyn Creton, the second wife to one of the Nedeed’s sons – also named Luther. Evelyn is subject to the sin of Gluttony, the third level in “The Divine Comedy”. The current Mrs. Nedeed finds Evelyn’s cooking books while trapped in the basement of the Nedeed house, and the reader chuckles a little at the epic amounts of food that Evelyn buys : 50 pounds of potatoes, 16 pints of cream, 2 ½ quarts of butter, 8 quarts of milk (Naylor 139-40). Naylor also poses the question: “But how could you sell gravy? In one day she (Evelyn) had made forty quarts of chicken gravy, and the next day, turned around and made another forty quarts with onions instead of mushrooms” (Naylor 141). The reader wonders right along with Naylor where all the food went. Because Evelyn takes solace in foods and cooking, she suffers from the sin of Gluttony.
Different cultures have different ideas about a broad verity of subjects. Sometimes, based on the culture, serious topics such as racism or mortality or religion have to be presented in new ways that include humor – as seen in The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty – or irony as highlighted in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, or the ever elusive aha-moment presented in Sula by Toni Morrison. Mostly the way serious or heavy subjects are presented are based on what the current culture or population not only wants to hear, but can also identify with.
WORKS CITED
Beatty, Paul. The White Boy Shuffle. Picador, New York, New York, 1996.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. Plume, New York, New York, 1982.
Naylor, Gloria. Linden Hills. Penguin Books. New York, New York, 1986.
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