"Wrapped in Rainbows": An Appreciation

Because there is a hole in my education (one of a many), I bought a paperback edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God to fill it.

Because the novel’s setting and dialect were such a shock, I needed more help to appreciate the work than came with the paperback, a forward by Edwidge Danticat, an afterward by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and a brief bio of the author by Valerie Boyd. I therefore checked out Boyd’s full biography, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.

Published in 2003, biography was the result of nearly five years of research and writing. Boyd detailed Hurston’s life from her birth in 1891, her upbringing in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Fla., her literary activity during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s and her anthropological explorations of African-American folklore, and her death in 1960 in Florida, where she was buried in an unmarked grave.

Boyd told an interviewer for the online magazine In Motion, “I wanted to give readers a sense of what it was like to be Zora, to walk in her shoes, to live inside her skin. “Because I am a Black Southern woman, I felt very close to Zora, as if I could paint a picture of her life almost from the inside out,” I was so impressed by Boyd’s biography that I was about to write her a fan letter when I read that she died on February 12, 2022 at age 58, much, much too young.

I needed help with Their Eyes Were Watching God because it took a while to adjust to Hurston’s dialogue, which is written in dialect: “You behind a plow!” says Janie Crawford’s suitor. “You ain’t got no mo’ business wid uh plow than un hog is got wit uh holiday! You ain’t got no business cuttin’ up no seed p’taters neither. A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo’self and eat p’taters dat other folks plant just special for you.”

With Boyd’s deeply researched account of Hurston’s life, it is possible to see—or infer—the elements Hurston incorporated from personal experience in Their Eyes Were Watching God: daily life in Eatonville . . . being raised by her grandmother . . . banter by the locals on the porch of the general store . . . marrying a man younger than herself . . . following him to work in the Everglades. 

Yet Boyd points out, Janie is not Hurston. Janie “is more conventional than Hurston ever was; consequently, she seeks her identity, her selfhood, in the eyes and arms of men. Hurston, on the other hand, sought her identity in her own self, in her work in writing and speaking her mind. Not coincidentally, the capacity to know her own mind—and to speak it—is a large part of what Janie seeks in the novel, and eventually finds.”

With Boyd’s history and explication, Their Eyes Were Watching God became a much richer and satisfying. I was not fighting with Hurston over the dialect and was able to recognize what she was trying to do. And Hurston’s straight writing is marvelous.

Hurston was much more than a one-book wonder. Her life, wrapped in rainbows as it was, was full, fascinating, and ultimately heartbreaking. She was a graduate of Barnard College, a student of anthropologist Franz Boas, a student and practitioner of New Orleans hoodoo and Haitian voodoo. She became one of the most important folklore collectors of her time. She was—until a deplorable rift—a close friend of poet Langston Hughes, and was a friend of actor Ethel Waters, the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten, and was briefly secretary to and continued as a friend of best-selling novelist Fannie Hurst. (And who reads Imitation of Life, Back Street, or any one of Hurst’s other seventeen novels these days?)

Wrapped in Rainbows is a superb biography and history of the Harlem Renaissance, of the Great Depression’s effect on writers and artists, and the incipient civil rights movement after WWII. It is fill with revealing anecdotes about Hurston who died in Fort Pierce. FL, in 1960.

Hurston’s writing made a profound impression on writer Alice Walker who managed to locate Hurston’s unmarked grave in 1973 and commissioned a marker for it. I cannot improve on Walker’s comment on the biography, which “will be the standard for years to come. Offering vivid splashes of Zora’s colorful humor, daring individualism, and refreshing insouciance, Boyd has done justice to a dauntless spirit and a heroic life.” 

Did the teacher sexually abuse the student?

The Head of School asks Sam Brandt, a former student at the exclusive Leverett School and now a long-time English teacher at the school, to investigate a letter from one of Brandt’s classmates which alleges that he was sexually abused by a teacher when he was a student.

That’s the setup for School Days. An exclusive boy’s prep school in Connecticut. Two time lines—the 1960s and the present. Fifteen characters—Sam’s friends and teachers during his student days at Leverett and today’s colleagues. The reader sees the school from both student and teacher perspective. How it was, and how it is.

The plot—was the student abused or not—is secondary. Rather, the novel is a consideration of love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student. As the publisher notes, “Sam is flooded with memories of attending Leverette in the sixties: the beautiful reaches of the campus, the constellation of boys whose lives were, at one point, knit up with his own, the support and friendship of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson, and above all his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie.”

Jonathan Galassi is the chairman of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, the former poetry editor of the Paris Review, a former chairman of the Academy of American Poets, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. He has published three books of original poetry and translations of the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi. His first novel, Muse, set the world of publishing, was published in 2015.

With Galassi’s background as poet and editor, the writing in School Days is superior without calling attention to itself. The book is filled with interesting observations and thoughts. Although Galassi has never been a teacher, here is a representative paragraph:

“Sam loved teaching. True, the kids were unchanging, predictably fresh-faced and self-preoccupied while he and his peers grew ever hoarier and more crotchety. What kept him engaged was the hunger of some of them, their desire to take hold. To devour life whole, with the help of a well-timed nudge or two from their mentors. The moment when a student understands how a book makes its impact not frontally but by stealth, how it imperceptibly changes us, when it does, forever, was for him, as the saying goes, better than sex. He’d seen kids literally come alive, as had happened to him: slough off their families’ need to shroud them in security and open themselves up to riskier ways of becoming themselves, at times with spectacular results. These were the achievements he was proudest of.”

On reflection, School Days seems to spend a lot of time on sex and the adolescent confusion of sex with love, entirely expected in the hothouse of a private boy’s school and turbulent teenage hormones. Sam as a middle-aged man still seems undecided about his own sexuality. He was married, but retains sexual feelings for Eddie and, late in the book is hooking up with men he finds online. (Although, where is it written that you have to decide your own sexuality? That you can be sexually attracted only to people of your own sex?)

Perhaps more importantly, Galassi explores the issue of teacher/student power relations and the opportunities and dangers of abuse. There is also the issue of entitlement. Leverett’s students are entitled. They have affluent, if not wealthy, parents. They are on escalator to an ivy league school; Harvard welcomes them. It influences the way they see themselves and the world.

(I once asked a friend on the staff of a private girls’ school what percentage of their graduates go to college. She looked at me with surprise at my innocence. A hundred percent, she said.)

In an author talk, Galassi said, “Sam has a lot of unfinished business in his life,” and in the last quarter of the book we follow him as he looks up former classmates to try to finish some of that business. I’m not sure he does. In a last, first-person chapter, Sam muses, “We were all . . . trying to slough off the selves we’d been handed and become someone else: to rise and fly where we like, break fully out and away. We never could, though, try as we might.”

Nevertheless, Sam’s effort to do so makes School Days superior and engaging literary fiction. 

Riding Compton's very mean streets with a black officer

Frederick Douglass Reynolds is the son of poor sharecroppers from rural Virginia. When his family moved north, he associated with the Errol Flynns, a street gang founded on the lower east side of Detroit during the 1970s. He was a criminal, receiving six-months probation for a fight in juvenile hall where he’d been confined for stealing a bicycle.

He joined the Marine Corps and served for four years. When he tried to re-enlist the Corps would not have him because he’d been reduced in rank twice. He ran through his savings and became homeless, worked two jobs, and slept in cars and all-night movie theaters, unable to earn enough to house, clothe, and feed his growing family. And just when the rent “was two months past due, the city of Compton offered me a career as an armed security officer.” 

Black, White, and Gray All Over: A Black Man’s Odyssey in Life and Law Enforcement is two books in one: Reynolds’s memoir as a cop and a history of Compton, CA. The memoir elements of this self-published book are much more interesting than the details of Compton’s growth, decay, and politics. Although, given the city’s history in the last twenty-years and Reynolds’ position, that could have been a fascinating separate story.

Reynolds was a cop and detective for 32 years in Compton, a 10-square mile city in southern Los Angeles County. In 1991 the city had 87 murders for a rate of about 90 per 100,000 people. The entire county rate that year was 9.8 per 100,000. “And the Compton total didn’t include those labeled suicides because the city’s four-man homicide unit was too overburdened to investigate them.”

Most of the murders were the work of the gangs—Black gangs, Hispanic gangs, and splinter gangs from larger gangs. “At least one gang claimed every neighborhood and they were always fighting,” Reynolds writes. “Piru gangs fought Crip gangs. Crip gangs fought other Crip gangs. Piru gangs fought other Piru gangs, and Hispanic gangs fought them all. At least three people were shot on average every day. And someone was murdered on an average of seven times a month.” (Piru gangs are African-American; they originated in Compton.)

We ride with Reynolds and his fellow officers as they do their best to keep the peace or pick up the pieces after a drive-by shooting. He is candid about his personal history, his marriages, his weakness for alcohol and gambling. The life sounds brutal, and as a result “I believe that every cop who worked at Compton PD suffers from various degrees of PTSD. In addition to all the violent crime incidents I also responded to horrific fatal traffic accidents, including hit-and-runs involving pedestrians, some of whom were children.”

Much of the memoir is made up of war stories, which are well-told and fascinating, while at the same time “TV shows and the movies make it seem as if police work is nonstop shootouts, car cases, and fighting, real police work is long bouts of boredom, mundane conversations, and insults interrupted by short bursts of fear.” Which does not make for exciting television.

Reynolds carrying an historic name has interesting things to say about race relations. He writes that when a white Jewish landlord began renting him a condo for less than the going market rate, he began to realize the color of your skin is irrelevant. “Nothing matters except the content of your character. People of good character don’t see race. And I’m talking about the so-called ‘liberals’ who call themselves helping Blacks because we can’t help ourselves. We don’t need your pity, your condescension, or your extra test points because of our skin color. In my eyes, to accept such help is an admittance that Blacks need help because Whites are superior. We just demand the same opportunity. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

In July 2000, the Compton City Council voted to disband the police department and hired the LA Country Sheriff’s Department to replace the police. The reason: the Compton PD was “powerless to stop the out-of-control violence.” As one of the officers who traded a police badge for a sheriff’s, Reynolds argues that disbanding the department had more to do with city corruption and politics than the over-worked and underfunded police. The violence, by the way, continued.

Reynolds is not a professional writer and the book could have used better editing. In an attempt to recognize his fellow officers, he gives a thumbnail description of virtually every one. These do not help the reader keep the large cast straight but tend to slow the book. I would also like to better understand the motivations and needs of the gangs. They’re protecting sources of income from crack and other drug sales, but are there other reasons for the violence?

But Reynolds sounds like a guy that a mystery writer like Michael Connolly could use as a source to understand the life of a cop in a high crime neighborhood. The rest of us will enjoy reading about an absorbing life in Black, White, and Gray All Over.

Can you steal a plot? What happens if you do?

I believe it was John Updike who remarked that two terrible things can happen to a writer: She can fail. Or she can succeed.

Jacob Finch Bonner, the writer-protagonist of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s best-selling (a New York Times bestseller!) novel The Plot begins the book as a failure, writes a runaway best-seller and becomes a towering success. It does not go well. 

Here’s what the publisher say about the story which I quote so I do not even inadvertently give away spoilers (far be it from me to spoil The Plot, which depends on surprise for the greatest effect):

“Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written―let alone published―anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

“Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that―a story that absolutely needs to be told.

“In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.”

Korelitz has nailed the writing biz. The wannabe writers who attend MFA programs and writer’s conferences. The disappointing second book. The unpublishable third book. Then, shazam! A blockbuster! The twenty-city book tours with a minder from the publisher. Taking a meeting with a famous movie director and an interview with Oprah. Fans lined up at book signing events. One can only dream.

The worm in the bud, of course, is Jake’s original transgression and it raises an interesting question: Is there such a thing as an original plot? Apparently, you cannot copyright a plot any more than you can copyright a title, a recipe, or an idea. There is plagiarism, of course, and that is a clear no-no. 

But is it stealing to use the framework of a story on which to hang your own characters, their thoughts, motivations, and actions? When does appropriation cross a line into illegal, immoral, or fattening? 

Nevertheless, Jake feels guilty as sin, and the anonymous You are a thief message starts him careening toward disaster. I became impatient with him because he becomes such a liar. But if he didn’t there wouldn’t be a book. Or not this book.

He could have said something like, “My book is based on a story a former student once told me,” and avoided a mess of trouble. As Korelitz writes, “Stories, of course, are common as dirt. Everyone has one, if not an infinity of them, and they surround us at all times whether we acknowledge them or not. Stories are the wells we dip into to be reminded of who we are, and the ways we reassure ourselves that, however obscure we may appear to others, we are actually important, even crucial, to the ongoing drama of survival: personal, societal, and even as a species.”

Late in the book, Jake talks about a story’s theft, migration, or appropriation. “In my world,” he says, “the migration of a story is something we recognize, and we respect. Works of art can overlap, or they can sort of chime with one another. Right now, with some of the anxieties we have around appropriation, it’s become downright combustible, but I’ve always thought there was a kind of beauty to it, the way narratives get told and retold.”

Insights like these (and there are more) set The Plot apart from other mysteries. Writers and wannabe writers especially will enjoy Jake’s struggles and triumph in his chosen career. I have only one caution to readers: Don’t assume you’ve figured it out too soon.