Snow Days!
Snow, Lightning, Names, Rats, and Breaking Expectations
What’s the point?
When I was an undergraduate student in Idaho there were two consecutive days when the college, and subsequently the entire town shut down. We got a lot of snow overnight. It wasn’t the volume of snow it was the speed at which the snow dumped. The college, the city, nobody had time to prepare. Everything functions with certain expectations and when things break or exceed expectations everything either copes, adjusts, and carries on, or it collapses and shuts down. The weather exceeded expectations and nobody could handle it. The city shut down.
That morning I woke up and walked to my 8AM class. Nobody was around and the building was locked. I was confused. I had a message on my phone from my boss that said, like the college, the restaurant would be closed today. The snow didn’t seem that significant to me. I’m pretty sure we had that amount of snow before. But whatever. I wasn’t going to say no to a surprise day off of school and work. My boss told me to enjoy the snow day. I did.
Most of the roads were closed. We rode bikes down the biggest hills in town and crashed into fluffy snow banks. We stole lunch trays from the Arby’s I lived behind and used them as sleds. My neighbor built an igloo and we spent the evening hanging out inside it drinking hot chocolate. It was a good day.
Years later I moved to a small town in central New York. The amount of snow that shut down the University of Idaho was a commonplace in my small town in New York. Rarely did the school or the town shut down because it snowed a couple feet overnight. The expectations were different. The expectations were created to accommodate large amounts of snow in small amounts of time. One night while it was lake effect snowing a couple feet I saw lightning. I had to search the internet to find out if it was possible for lightning to happen during a snowstorm (it is). Even though I was seeing it, what I was seeing was so far outside my expectations, outside my mental categories for snow storms or lightning that I needed external validation. I couldn’t handle or trust what I was seeing.
Last week it snowed a couple inches in Richmond, Virginia, where I live. By any standards, it did not snow very much. Still, the snow caused a power outage at a water treatment facility. As a result of the power outage large portions of the city were without water for five days. As a result of the power outage those with water needed to boil the water vigorously for one minute before consuming it. We used boiled water to do dishes, brush teeth, drink. Everyone was asked to conserve water. No showers. Six days later we were given the okay to drink water again.
The meager winter weather far exceeded the expectations of the city of Richmond. They have a category of weather that they are set up to deal with it, and one night of four inches of snow broke the categorial confines and broke the city. It was pathetic.
I mention all this because both of the books I read this month have people exceeding the categories and expectations imposed on them.
Enjoy!
James by Percival Everett. First published in 2024 by Doubleday.
Jim is a slave owned by Judge Thatcher. Tom and Huck are two adolescent boys who love to play “some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy” with Jim. Jim plays along, plays the fool, gives the boys and all other white folks what they want. When white people aren’t around Jim is not a fool. He calls himself James. He is well spoken, well read, an intellectual. Other slaves are as well. Jim and Luke, another slave, for example, discuss irony
“So, when we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?
“Could be both.”
“Now that would be ironic.”
The language and behavior of slaves as perceived by white people is learned. Inauthentic. Jim teaches his kids how to properly speak to the Thatchers
“Let’s try some situational translations. Something extreme first. You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”
“Fire, Fire,” January said.
“Direct. That’s almost correct,” I said.
The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”
Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
February said, “Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.”
Slaves work hard to reinforce slave owners’ beliefs, their expectations. Also, white folks need to name everything. Names are important.
All slaves code switch, but Jim is particularly articulate because he sneaks into Judge Thatcher’s library and reads. In his dreams he has conversations with Candide. Plenty of folks writing about James have pointed out that Jim couldn’t have read all the books he claims to have read and some of them realistically couldn’t have been contained in Judge Thatcher’s library because they hadn’t been translated into English at the time the novel is set. Such criticisms are pointless.
Through Jim’s hyperbolic literacy Everett tries to underscore that slaves had a complex and fruitful intellectual life completely unknown to white slave owners. Everett himself has never been a slave in 19th century America so it would be impossible for him to truly, realistically depict what the intellectual life of an actual slave looked like. Any representation of the inner life of a slave from someone living in the 21st century would be inaccurate, inauthentic, unrealistic. So Everett does the only thing he or anyone can do. He imagines it. Invents it.
In addition to demonstrating the gap between what slave owners believed their slaves thought and what slaves thought, Everett places Jim in a tradition of Percival Everett protagonists. Most of Everett’s protagonists are overeducated men. Most of them are fathers. In Wounded the narrator is a horse rancher in Wyoming who is also an art historian. Telephone a professor of Geology who also loves hiking, camping, and playing chess. So Much Blue an abstract painter. Erasure a philosophical novelist who is also a fly fisherman. James is no different. If at times the novel is untrue to history, it isn’t untrue to Percival Everett.
The plot follows fairly closely The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or so I’m told. I think Huck Finn was the subject of class on the snow day. So I missed it. Jim runs away from the Thatchers. Hides on an island. Runs into Huck. They make a raft and float down the Mississippi river. Early on Jim sees Huck’s dad dead and hides the fact from the boy. They encounter a couple grifters, The Duke and The King. Huck claims to own Jim so to protect him from The Duke and The King, but he’s unsuccessful. Huck disappears for a big chunk of the novel and Jim has his own adventures and this is where James diverges from Huck Finn.
Jim gets away from The Duke and The King but ends up enslaved as a blacksmith. He joins a traveling minstrel show where he has to put blackface on to hide from audiences the fact that he’s actually black. He runs away. He ends up caught with The Duke and The King again. Eventually Jim returns to Judge Thatcher only to find his wife and daughter have been sold. He confronts Judge Thatcher. Judge Thatcher tells Jim he cannot imagine the trouble he’s gotten himself into. Jim responds in his own language saying:
“Why on earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?
He squirmed in the chair.
“Could you have imagined a black man, a slave, a nigger, talking to you like this? Who’s lacking in imagination?”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ‘cided, Massa.”
I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.
The novel opens with lessons in how to speak in a way that aligns with whites’ expectations of slaves. The novel ends with a slave refusing to adhere to those expectations. Finding out that Jim, and Black folks more generally, are not what he believed them to be is the most frightening thing he can imagine. Suddenly Judge Thatcher is confronted with the fact that the people he owned, mistreated, abused, tortured, and sold were in fact humans. Humans with an inner life like his own. Slaves went from being subhuman to being human capable of thought, and revenge. The novel ends by the narrator asserting his name, something we’re told at the beginning of the novel white people need to do. His name is not Jim. It’s James. In asserting a name, Everett asserts slaves had humanity, language, thought and interiority, the same as white folks.
Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man by Joshua Bennett. First published in 2020 by Harvard University Press.
Everett’s novel insists that slaves had humanity. The way James asserts himself is through language and naming. James tells his children that white people need to name things. In the end James names himself. For James humanity is important and comes from language. To name is human.
Language and names are human tools. In contrast to Everett, Joshua Bennett suggests that being unhuman can be a positive mode of survival for oppressed people. Bennett notes that comparisons between Black people and animals are present throughout African-American literature. Bennett, however, doesn’t necessarily see the comparison between Black folks and non-human animals as dehumanizing. Or he does see it as dehumanizing, but in dehumanization he finds new possibilities for what it means to be human. The literature of Black dehumanization is a locale for possible alternatives of being. James asserts his humanity using the tools of the people who oppressed him. Bennett is searching for all together different tools.
In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass says that he doesn’t know his actual age because he’s never seen a birth certificate. Expanding, he says, “the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs.” Likening slaves to horses is the starting point of Joshua Bennett’s Being Property Once Myself. In the works of Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jesmyn Ward Bennett uncovers a “vision of life that is profoundly ecological, one that takes place in a social field made up of dynamic relationships not predicated solely on domination or exploitation.” These dynamic relationships are not predicated on “humanity.”
The relationship between slave owner and slave is one of domination and exploitation. Similarly the relationship between human and animal is one often defined by domination and exploitation. Rather than examining these relationships of dominion, Bennett focuses on the relationships between Black people and animals. Each chapter focuses on a different animal in a different work of literature: Horse (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass), Rat (Native Son by Richard Wright), Cock (Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison), Mule (Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston), Dog (Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward), and Shark (poems by Robert Hayden and Melvin Tolson).
Critics writing about Native Son by Richard Wright have long identified the violent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, with the rat, which is expected. Both are pests. They disrupt the comfort of white folks. Bennett finds simple identification between rat and Bigger unsatisfying. Wright was not suggesting Bigger was a pesky animal causing trouble for white people. Instead Wright was offering pest as a category of being, a way of life under oppression:
He [Wright] provides his readers with characters that both encounter pest animals and live into a kind of pestiferous life themselves that is full of unfettered possibility. In Wright’s hands, the pest is not only that which is stalked by death but that which evades it, that which destabilizes life and death altogether, giving us something in its place akin to fugitive life, black life on the lam.
To think of Bigger as a “powerless victim” is limiting. Through being a pest Bigger finds a way to live, or at least avoid death (for a while anyway), that’s only possible because he is dehumanized, he’s considered a non-human animal. By being animal-like Bigger is able to survive. In very plain terms, being compared to an animal isn’t a bad thing because being a human forces him into submission, victimhood, and certain death. Being an animal, in this case a pest, offers an alternative.
Subsequent chapters follow a similar template. A novel or poem contains a Black person and an animal. One or more critics have written about the comparison and identification between the Black person and the animal. Nothing surprising or unexpected here. Bennett finds these interpretations overly simplistic. Too narrow. Too limiting. These interpretations ignore more complicated implications. They foreclose so many possibilities. Bennett offers an alternative interpretation where the comparison goes deeper than identification and presents the reader with a different way of understanding of comparisons to non-human animals. These different understandings offer alternative futures, ways of being, ways of relating.
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon uses birds to examine how it feels to be a black man. Bennett uses the birds in Song of Solomon to imagine “alternative black masculinities.” As with nearly every chapter, Bennett is extremely compelling in the way he lays out what he is doing, but what he actually does is far less compelling. As I mentioned, there’s a scholar that has written about the same animal Bennett is writing about and the scholar’s reading of the animal is disappointing to Bennett. Bennett is great at explaining why these earlier scholars are unconvincing. He has convinced me to be unconvinced. However, Bennett’s alternative never comes out as clear and as strong as it sounds when first introduced. In the Cock chapter, I am convinced that earlier readings of Song of Solomon don’t allow for the varied possibilities of black masculinity. At the same time by the end of the chapter I remain unsure what the varied possibilities of black masculinity are that Bennett has in mind. Maybe he doesn’t have a form for the possibilities. Maybe he just wants to assert that they exist.
Around the time Being Property Once Myself was published Zakiyyah Iman Jackson published Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World, which doesn’t make the same arguments as Bennett, but similar. They were reviewed together in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Of the two Bennett is much more approachable and readable. Both balk at the idea of humanizing the dehumanized. It’s a human-centric impulse that for different reasons both find troublesome. Both search for alternative ways of being and relating in a non-human animal state. I find the impulse to push against humanizing because it gives short shrift to non-human animals extremely appealing. Important even. Maybe because I’m a natural born contrarian and am drawn to anything that at first feels counterintuitive. Or maybe it’s actually important. Unfortunately I’m not sure either book fully delivers. Still, I appreciate what they’re doing and think more people should do the same.