A Drop of Patience, Jews&Blacks

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8) A Drop of Patience is my second William M. Kelley novel, after the previously reviewed A Different Drummer. Like that first novel, it's heavily allegorical. It's fantasy, though not Fantasy.

The book tells the story of a blind jazz musician named Ludlow Washington and his path out of Kelley's unnamed Yoknapatawpha to jazz stardom in New York City.

And it's one of those books where EVERYTHING is a symbol. The introduction to my edition lays it out schematically, how Ludlow's journey parallels the black experience in America from slavery through the 1960s, and having read that introduction, everything fit the schematic pretty exactly.

The characters were interesting beyond the schematic, but beyond Ludlow, only marginally so. There's not as much to get excited about here as in A Different Drummer, which is an incredibly enticing novel.

Ludlow, though, is great. He's a jazzman, which he understands means he's on an inevitable, quasi-mythic journey of discovery. After all, that's what the book is about. But he moves through it with strength and a free will that overwhelms the narrator frequently. His naivete is even a powerful naivete.

His friend Etta-Sue falteringly tells him at one point, "But you've seen more than I have," and though she tries to cover her gaffe, the words ring clearly. Ludlow, blind though he is, has seen much. Much pain, much suffering, much casual cruelty, and also much music, which brings joy. Ludlow is a sufferer who purveys happiness.

The introduction also mentions Tiresias as a model, but I don't think it's necessary to compare Ludlow to every single blind character in literature. Ludlow is not a prophet and he isn't plagued by visions of the future- just a desperate desire to understand more about a world he is blind to.

Ludlow understands that there is a difference between white people and black people- he's not stupid, and you'd have to be stupid not to see the difference in how whites and blacks are treated- but he cannot see it. This makes all the difference.

I think, in the conclusion, he figures it out. Which is what makes the conclusion so fascinating and so maddening, because every word out of Ludlow's mouth in the final chapter is an obvious lie, the lies of a man trying to protect those around him from his newfound, dangerous knowledge. But it's exhilarating to follow Ludlow on his journey of discovery anyway, even if he doesn't share it all with the reader.




9) Jews & Blacks is a series of transcripts of conversations between Cornel West and Michael Lerner about the tensions between the Jewish and Black communities in America and ways to better understand, negotiate, and improve the situation.

I've read sections of the book before, but I never sat down and read it cover to cover before, but I picked it up yesterday and worked through it almost in one sitting. Which is fairly intense, because West and Lerner don't pull punches. They speak about the problems they have with their counterpart's community in blunt and honest terms.

The book is frustrating in that it offers very little in the way of resolution. It felt in some ways like a Talmudic argument, where there is back and forth for pages on end only to see the resolution be, "Well, at least we know where the two sides stand now." But that's also a brave and powerful way to tackle daunting problems. Because they were willing to let things be unresolved, they could take on the Crown Heights Riots and really look at where the disappointments on both sides come from and how the situation could have been handled better.

I'm Jewish, but I'm a very different sort of Jew from Michael Lerner. And I found myself offended by some of the ways he characterized traditional Judaism, as soulless, materialistic, selfish, constructed on fantasy, blindly conservative, etc... It's frustrating to spend a whole book with his ideology, wondering how he could take such a narrow view of the Talmudic tradition's significance, but in a lot of ways I'm glad to have a speaker like Lerner represent the Jewish perspective. He is intellectually adventurous in ways I couldn't be. And he is honest and thoughtful, and in the end, that's all I can ask for.

West's perspectives are harder for me to pick on because I don't have the background in the African-American world. He identifies himself as sympathetic to Black Nationalist ideals but critical of their separatist impulses, coming from the universalist ideas he imbibed growing up in the Black Church community. And I gained a lot of insight into the Black community's needs and perceptions from his half of the conversation.

One small complaint is that both Lerner and West apparently speak in this sort of lofty intellectual tone. They don't speak to each other. They 'dialogue' with each other. The phrase 'vis a vis' must be used about twenty times in the text. It gets annoying.