Groton, the elite New England boarding school, often invited in orators who would deliver rhetorical flourishes meant to entertain, enlighten, and/or speak to the cultural politics of the time. In February 1963, they hosted Martin Luther King, who delivered an impassioned update of the Civil Rights movement. Back in 1973, while I was a student at the prestigious school, Dan Rather of CBS came and talked about the Nixon administration and its legacy of executive office abuses. That was intriguing -- at the time. But the best speaker that year, and well-received by the mostly white, privileged crowd, was comedian and activist Dick Gregory. Though populated with boys of privilege, Groton was Episcoplian, and strove to incorporate making 'a positive difference in the world' as part of its school mission. The school had graduated Teddy Roosevelt, who championed manifest destiny, and his relative, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who went on to establish the New Deal.
Dick Gregory had run for president in turbulent 1968 -- the year MLK and RFK were gunned down, and protests in Chicago, outside the Democratic National Convention, led to brutal beatdowns by fascist police and the arrest of Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago 8 (seven, after Black Panther Bobby Seale, who had been gagged in court, was tried separately. Hoffman said at the time that he and his co-defendants were being "tried for their thoughts." Gregory had released his bestselling autobiography, n-word, in 1964. The in-your-face provocative title recalled, for me, the words uttered by the legendary boxer on Miles Davis's classic album, A Tribute to Jack Johnson: "I'm Black, they'll never let me forget it. I'm Black alright -- I'll never let them forget it."
And in the introduction of The n-word Bible by Robert H. deCoy, a book which influenced the nascent New Left, Gregory wrote, "In abolishing and rejecting the Caucasian-Christian philosophical and literary forms while recording his 'Black Experiences,' [deCoy] has removed himself from their double-standard, hypocritical frames of reference." The word needed to be accounted for, Gregory averred. With an arch levity that was emblematic for the time, Gregory figured he might as well cash in on his 'biblical' experience. He wrote to his momma, "Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word 'n-word' again, remember they are advertising my book."
Collecting my thoughts after a viewing of the late-2023 film, American Fiction, I recalled those, in many ways, more gallant times, when a vibrant counterculture confronted The Man head-on, taking back the pejorative. In an interview with Larry Sloman (Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America), a couple of years ago, I axed him to compare today's counterculture with yesteryear's. He said: "What counterculture? Point me in that direction. All I see is dark eyes doing Tic-Toc videos." That's about the size of it. We do not use The Pejorative, if you is white, and it's discouraged if you is Black. I'm not even sure if it is safe to use the word ebonics, let alone practice them. The title of Dick Gregory's book today would have to be changed to N-word. It's a confused, surly, and, maybe, more cowardly cultural zeitgeist today. We be ripe for the embedding of poltergeist chips between our ears, wearing a cellblock bandana, some AI's waggling bee-atch, doin' time.
We in critical race theory times. CRT and banned books. MAGA dogmatists. Sixties leftovers lookin' all Bill the Cat. Postmodernism ushered in the likes of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and John Wideman, but also gave us the Samuel L. Jackson mo-fo phenomenon: Imagine him reading a book to get your kid to sleep.
American Fiction stars a largely Black cast (white characters are almost all foils). Stars include Jeffrey Wright (Thelonious "Monk" Ellison), Tracee Ellis Ross (Lisa Ellison), John Ortiz (Arthur), Erika Alexander (Coraline), Leslie Uggam (Agnes Ellison), and Sterling K. Brown (Clifford Ellison). Wright has been in two Wes Anderson films, The French Dispatch (2021) and Asteroid City (2023), and seems quite comfortable delivering stylized, understated lines. He is detached, but is it because he is disaffected or because he is a writer, who "must not judge"?
The IMDB site provides a quick approximation of where to begin understanding the narrative that will unfold in American Fiction:
A novelist who's fed up with the establishment profiting from Black entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of the hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain.
"Claims to disdain" will prove to be a crucial point of dramatic tension. With a name like Theolonius "Monk" Ellison, our author of obscure literary fiction would seem to have a lot to live up to. The name suggests Theolonius Monk, the great but controversial jazz pianist. It also hints at Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man (1952), the classic literary portrait of the Black experience, in which academics Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland "recognize a black existentialist vision with a 'Kafka-like absurdity'." [
American Fiction centers on the Ellison family, at a time when unfolding stressors will test the cohesiveness of the unit. Monk is in trouble at his respectable college, and as a failing writer (ready: not selling); he is estranged from his sister, Lisa, a doctor in Boston, and from his brother, Cliff, a plastic surgeon living in Tucson. Their mother, Agnes, is quickly sliding into dementia and will soon need placement in a facility. This move would mean finding new digs and money for Lorraine, an aging, longtime live-in housekeeper with nowhere to go. The dramatic tension includes sibling rivalries: Monk was the favorite of Mom and Dad. Lisa and Cliff were close growing up, and Monk was resented for how his being 'different' made him special to his parents -- implicitly diminishing their status. All this comes to a head at a funeral and a wedding.
American Fiction is largely about the misuse and misappropriation of language. It's about fatigue. It's about double-standards. It's about being bourgeois. It's about selling out or fearing it. It's about commodification. It's about academic jargon so dense and abstruse that no mental machete, no matter how sharp its edge, can cut through to the promised El Dorado on da udda side. And because it's American, it's about race relations and the progress made since Rodney King got hissef all beat up by da po-lice and wondered like a kid, "Can't we all just get along?" (And who didn't find a reservoir of innocence within and wonder that same gosh darn thing? Until George Floyd. And the broken mirror was back.)
CRT tells us that racism is systemic and we (er, whitey) must spend some remedial time getting that through our thick skulls. American Fiction opens with a classroom scene in which Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is teaching a university survey course in Southern American literature. Up on the whiteboard he has written the title of a story under discussion, "The Artificial n-word" by Flannery O'Connor. The class is a mix of cultures and colors and genders, but one young white woman, Brittany, is outraged that Monk has exposed the class to the Pejorative. Monk asks, doesn't she know you can't teach that story, by a major American, writer without mentioning its title? (Should the story be referred to as "The Artificial N-word"?)
Nor, he tells the class, can we ignore the milieu of racist thinking the author grew up in. He goes, "You're going to encounter some archaic thoughts, coarse language, but we're all adults here, and I think we can understand it in the context in which it's used." This closely echoes the rationale Toni Morrison used in defending the teaching of Huckleberry Finn, her initial naive "fear and alarm" when exposed to the narrative extinguished eventually by tender and wise instruction. (See her introduction to Twain's volume). Contextualization becomes a way of confronting da demons, of measuring how far we've come. Perhaps, Brittany could have forced a discussion around the racist motivations of the author and argued that her ugly side outweighs her literary value. Certainly, there is potential evidence that could see Flannery O'Connor shot out of the Canon, but the moment turned all reactionary and little by way of didactics was accomplished. Hmph.
The lass storms out, teary, and unable to comprehend how a Black man could be okay with that word. Indifferent to its long reign of terror. Gulp, grown comfortably numb. She reports his sorry ass to the English department, which invites him to take "a break," reminding him that not long ago he'd chucklingly inquired of a student of German extraction if he was a Nazi, the query suggesting that Monk may be losing it. But he's not losing it; he just doesn't seem to give a sh*t. "When did they all become so goddamn delicate?" he wonders aloud.
Monk is heading to Boston anyway for a literary festival where he will read a paper. and where he can visit family (elderly mother, sister who's a doctor), he hasn't seen for a while, so he rolls with the judy-and-punches. f*ck'em, he'll make the best of it.
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