Race and Gender, But Class, Too

One of the things I like about Tayari Jones's novels is that they're not about race and gender only, though they do explore both of those things, and explore them well.  They're also about class issues within the black community and how differences in income, options, and social capital inflect people's interactions with one another.  We see this clearly in the different households of Tasha, Rodney, and Octavia in Leaving Atlanta, and it's also an important factor in The Untelling, as blogger Anne Fernald writes: 

Ariadne, the protagonist with the burdensome, ambitious name, is a young Spelman grad, drifting through her twenties. She doesn’t really know herself if her job teaching literacy for a community organization is a testament to her commitment to social justice or a symptom of her lack of ambition. She has a nice boyfriend, a locksmith and this character, Dwayne, is one of the book’s real pleasures: a lovely, lovely, settled young man, utterly confident of himself and his place in the world in all kinds of ways that unsettle Aria.

Tayari is really genius in writing about class: the scene in which Aria sits and watches as the pregnant teen from her literacy class does calligraphy to address envelopes for her roommate's wedding invitations is so rich. A regular middle-class girl, newly graduated from college but without family money to draw on, Aria looks in wonderment at both women and sees clearly how strange each is to the other, and, most distressingly, how far she is from either. This seems utterly right to me: so often, we skate along assuming equality and suddenly someone mentions their sailboat, or that they’ve reached the time of the month when it’s down to Ramen and tuna, and we’re brought up short—or, worse, see that we’ve brought someone else up short. Again and again in The Untelling, Tayari captures those economic complexities and brilliantly articulates the specific prism of the young, gifted black women who’ve gone to Spelman and remained in Atlanta, expecting their Morehouse man, expecting a lot of themselves, and caught in a richly conflicted relationship to all the various neighborhoods of their city—this one too bourgie, that one too ghetto, this one uneasily gentrifying, that one stubbornly down at the heels.

It's great that Anne Fernald is writing about this; I think some reviewers (white reviewers, maybe?) focus exclusively or predominantly on racial issues in books by writers of color because those are the issues that are most different and striking for them.  Class differences tend to get elided, smoothed away, as they read about "black women"--as though that group were monolithic.

Class is such a key issue in how we relate to one another, and I know I've had those moments Anne Fernald describes, when "we skate along assuming equality and suddenly someone mentions their sailboat, or that they’ve reached the time of the month when it’s down to Ramen and tuna, and we’re brought up short—or, worse, see that we’ve brought someone else up short."   These moments are often so memorable--and sometimes painful.  I remember once in graduate school a fellow student described a neighborhood she'd decided she'd never rent in.  She and her mother had driven through it and agreed, No way.  It looked too dirty, too rundown.  Too dangerous, even?  It took me a while to realize she was talking about where I lived with my son. 

And that was in graduate school, where everyone makes a pittance!  Clearly, the assumptions and expectations we bring with us have to do with much more than the bottom line on our paycheck.

These moments of class friction can often spiral outward into interesting analyses.  My friend Lorraine López is currently editing a collection of essays by women writers from poverty and the working class, and one of them, written by the inimitable Heather Sellers, is named "Sails with Good People," after the way her dean introduced one of her colleagues to her.  "He sails with good people," the dean said, and Heather spun off into the myriad associations about the poverty, instability, and mental illness that dominated her childhood and that make her essay about working in the academy so riveting. 

The book's coming out in 2009 from University of Michigan; I think the working title is An Angle of Vision.  Full disclosure:  I have an essay in it, too.  So does Dorothy Allison, who'll be here at UNL next week (yay!). 

Tayari Jones reads this Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Great Plains Art Gallery here in downtown Lincoln.  Everyone's invited.  It's free, and her books will be available for sale and signing afterwards.   And Tayari's super-nice, too, so come meet her and say hello.