My Friend, Percival

My Friend, PercivalAuthor(s): Michael KnightSource: Callaloo, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring, 2005), pp. 292-296Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805650 .

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MY FRIEND, PERCIVAL

by Michael Knight

There are several points I'd like to make before I get this essay started:

1. I'm hard-pressed to think of a writer I admire more than Percival Everett. His fiction is genuinely intellectual without being pompous or deliberately difficult, without losing sight of the fact that what comes first in any artful piece of writing is the need to engage your reader on the level of the sublime. Plus, he's pretty funny. I want this essay to reflect his genius. I want it to be smart, scholarly. I want him to read it and call me on the phone and invite me to go fishing sometime. But because I am not a scholar, because my own writing is mostly fiction, because I dabble in creative non-

fiction, both of which tend toward personal rather than intellectual revelation, this

essay will likely turn out to be more about me than Percival Everett and that will be a shame.

2. It is possible that I am the whitest human being walking the planet at this time. I tell myself that because I love Robert Johnson and Miles Davis and Percival Everett that I must have a little soul in me somewhere but, in my more self-aware moments, I will admit that this probably isn't true. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. My family had

plenty of money. I went to a fancy private school. There were all of two black kids in

my graduating class. I wasn't good friends with either of them, though I liked them fine. Neither were they friends with each other, if memory serves.

This is what scares me: almost twenty years later and I still don't have a single real black friend. I have black acquaintances and my wife has black friends whose

company I enjoy. There's a new black guy in the English Department who I like, who has friend potential, but it's too soon to tell what'll happen there.

3.1 have a student right now who is such a fine writer, who is so filled up with talent that it makes me want to cry. This is a young black student. He keeps taking my classes, despite the fact that he has other options, and I like to think that speaks well of our relationship. It makes me feel better to think so anyway. In a year, he'll be gone and I will have written him a world-class letter of recommendation. I will use every superlative I can think of. He deserves it. The only thing holding this kid back?and it makes me nervous to commit these words to paper?is that he sometimes has trouble writing beyond his blackness, writing beyond his racial politics in such a way that his people live and breathe, that his characters do more than serve as vessels for social commentary. I hasten to add that this isn't a big problem and that he's getting

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better all the time and that he is generally quick to make things right in later draf ts and that a big part of the fire that burns in his writing has as much to do with youth as

anything else. Also, a big part of what's so gorgeous about his prose is the fire itself. His sentences are conflagrations.

About a year ago, I bumped into him while waiting for an elevator and we fell into our usual topic of conversation?writing. I had just finished Erasure. I had read it in a stretch, sitting under this big hemlock tree in my backyard and two days later, I was

reeling from it still. Right off the bat I was telling this student of mine that he needed to put down whatever he was reading and pick up Erasure. He remembered Percival Everett from my Introduction to Fiction Writing Class (we'd read a story called "The

Fix"), though he hadn't realized Everett was black and he seemed surprised that I hadn't made this known to the class. What's great about this student is he did it, he

put down what he was reading and plowed into Erasure and liked it almost as much as I did. Except I don't think he got it, quite. The book is about a writer who is black but who writes these intellectual novels that no one really reads. At one point, he gets so fed up with the prevailing wind in African-American fiction?namely that the more ghetto your book is, the more likely critics are to praise it?that, in a fit of anger, he knocks off a parody of an "authentic" black novel, which he publishes under a

pseudonym. Lo and behold, he becomes a critical darling for the first time in his life, all these white people heaping praise on a novel he wrote as a joke. The parody, which is one of the truly remarkable feats of American literature, appears whole in the pages of Erasure. My student, however, thought the parody was great. Not a great parody, a great book tucked inside a pretty good book about an intellectual African-American writer whose career is not so different from Percival Everett's.

4.1 have a fantasy about Percival Everett. In his novels Watershed and Erasure and

maybe other places that I can't remember right this minute, he features characters who are fly fishermen. I'm a fly fisherman. Not the kind of purist you see in the movies who won't stand for bait?I have no problem sinking a worm?but a fly fisherman nonetheless. When the weather's nice I'll hike up into the Smokies and float a Parachute Adams in the riffles on our little mountain streams. Once a year, my father and I take a trip to a more exotic location. We've fished Montana several times, on several rivers. We went bonefishing in the Bahamas. Most recently, we hit a kind of

angler's resort in north Georgia, of all places, where he caught an eight pound rainbow trout. Despite the fact that I tell my students all the time not to confuse characters with writers, I can't shake the notion that Percival Everett is a fly fisher?

man, too. He's coming here, Percival Everett is, to Knoxville, Tennessee, for a conference this Fall and in my fantasy, I invite him to go fishing. I take him up to the

Clinch, which is tailwater fishing, and both of us tear it up, catch and release, catch and

release, catch and release and so on all day long. On the way home, we stop off for a beer at this little place I know about and shoot a game of pool.

5. Twice in my writing life I have used the word "nigger" in a piece of fiction. Both times I felt justified. The stories were, in part, about race relations in Alabama. Once the word was spoken by a black character, the other time by a parrot. These are, I think,

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two of the best stories that I've written and they were published in magazines more

glamorous than the ones that usually take my work. This is what scares me: one time a terrific black writer named Anthony Grooms

approached me at a reading to tell me how much he liked one of these stories. I wanted to take his compliment at face value?what a joy it is to be praised by writers you admire?but there was a part of me worried about some subtext in his remark, worried that he was really trying to tell me something else.

Here's another thing that scares me: what if Percival Everett gets his hands on these stories and is offended?who does this white guy think he is??and won't let me take him fishing?

6. This student I've been talking about?for the reader's sake I should probably cook up a phony name?he's in my class this semester too, and a couple of weeks ago, he lead a discussion of James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son." He was great. He's an undergrad in a graduate level class and he's the only African-American student in the bunch, but he waded into the essay like he'd written it himself. He wanted us to understand Baldwin's anger. We all marveled at that closing paragraph.

"It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seem to be in opposition. The first idea was

acceptance... totally without rancor of life as it is and men as they are: in light of this idea it goes without saying that injustice is a

commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be compla- cent, for the second idea was of equal power, that one must never in one's own life accept these injustices as commonplace, but must fight them with all one's strength."

I asked him what he thought about Baldwin paralleling his relationship to his father, his own close-mindedness, to the inherent racism in white America, which, to my reading, is the genius of the essay. He thought that part was okay. I got the sense that, to him, it was mostly beside the point.

7. Last summer, I read Percival Everett's novel Cutting Lisa and it paralyzed me as a writer for a while. The book opens with a doctor, John Livesy, treating a woman whose husband, Thompson, has performed an amateur c-section. Thompson's rea? sons have nothing at all to do with desperation or emergency surgery and everything to do with power. He wants to bring his child into the world himself, with his own

hands, and he risks his wife's life to make it happen. After that, the book settles into less graphic but no less powerful territory, father/son stuff, relationship stuff,

infidelity stuff. Never once does Everett reference those opening pages, that horrible act. But by the end of the novel we discover that the event has been haunting Livesy all along, that we've been turning pages in its shadow. "He was not so much bothered

by the fact that he had just seen a woman so badly mutilated, nor was he terribly disturbed by the fact that a man could have done such a thing. What bothered him was that he was finding Thompson's act somehow beautiful." The reason it paralyzed me

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so was that I kept reading back over all the purposefully "meaningful" flashbacks in

my own work, thinking how obvious my fiction is, thinking how afraid I am to take real chances in my prose.

8. My wife and I invited the new guy in the English Department and his wife over to our house. We have a new baby and they have a new baby and we thought that was a good enough excuse to get together. What happened was our baby cried the whole time. Their baby crawled around like none of this was any big deal and laughed when I knocked over a stack of blocks. We had a pretty good time, I think, despite our baby's lack of hospitality. Drank a few beers. Compared notes on parenthood. But when they were gone, my wife and I hung our heads. What if they thought our baby was crying because they were black and she hadn't seen enough black people in her young life to know not to be afraid?

9. My student?let's call him John?and I swap reading recommendations now and then. I tell him to check out Marc Nesbitt and ZZ Packer and he tells me to check out writers whose names I won't mention because I don't care much for their work.

They're too single-minded for my taste, can't see the world except in terms of race? and I know there are plenty of reasons?which is my student's problem, too, which is why I wish he'd stop liking these people and start liking more of the writers I

suggest. Recently he had one of his character's using the phrase "stoopid nigga" in a line of dialogue: I asked him about the misspellings, told him I didn't think "stoopid" was necessary. He wanted to know why I didn't press him about "nigga." I told him that to my ear, "stoopid" and "stupid" sound pretty much the same so I didn't see the

point. "Nigga" and "nigger," those have distinctly different sounds. He looked at me like "yeah, right" and smiled this smile. That was the first time I'd ever really felt it between us, race. I thought it was his fault.

This is what scares me: now I'm thinking I'm the single-minded one. I mean a

journal like Callaloo asks me to write an essay about Percival Everett, whose work intimidates me to the point of silence, who I'd like to take fishing more than just about

anybody I can think of, and this is what I come up with: a piece about race. About my own insecurity. I mean look at the writers I keep telling "John" to read. They're all black. I want to suggest writers he can relate to, yes, but I also want him to know that I read black writers, want him to be impressed with his broad-minded teacher. Next time IT1 tell him to read Tobias Wolff. Or Antonya Nelson. Or Barry Hannah. Next time IT1 tell him Richard Bausch.

10. I'm pretty sure that I love Percival Everett's fiction for the right reasons. In other

words, I love the work for it's own sake. "He felt better when he could see the hills scissor-cut into the western sky. It was dark when he rolled home. The night smelled

good. When he entered the house he found that there was little need to tell Cora

anything. She looked at his swollen face and started to cry. She begged him not to die." There it is, the whole world, image and mystery, rendered hard and fast. That's from a story called "Throwing Earth" in his collection, Big Picture. While I imagined that most of the protagonists in the book were black, it occurs to me now that I can't recall

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a single specific reference to the color of anybody's skin. I may be misremembering but I hope not. I'm afraid to look. I'm also pretty sure that I want Percival Everett to be my friend because I admire his writing so much and because we both love standing knee deep in swiftly running water, getting lost in the rhythm of the cast, love the jolt that almost comes as a surprise when a trout rises to the fly. Not because he's black and it would make me feel better or something. But this too could be a lie I tell myself. I don't even know for sure he likes to fish.

All right, I've made my points. At last this essay can begin.

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