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A
Response to
Black Mama, White Son
By
Lewis
Lawson
Dear Rudy,
I just finished reading your "Mary
Lewis" piece. It's remarkable. You get inside that woman's
head and do a fine job of showing how her relationship with each
of her sons depends on that son's strength or weakness.
I know you've read Faulkner's As I Lay
Dying , but I doubt that you were using it as a model, for I
think you were driven not by a literary text but by your
memories.
Anyway, Mary Lewis reminds me so much of
Addie Bundren, who also was driven by her own passion to
experience her life to the fullest, then had to experience the
consequences of her passion in her children (only five of then,
though).
Rudy, you've got a great novel in you, and
the seed of it is in the story of Mary Lewis.
At the risk of generalizing and vastly
simplifying the unconquered--and perhaps never to be
conquered--American tragedy. I think that collectively the
American whites (particularly the Southern tribe) have a core
personality of guilt, experience a sick soul for something they
did. maybe that's why so many seek a fundamentalist religion
that stresses forgiveness. maybe that's why so many others,
despairing of forgiveness, decide, like Flannery O'Connor's
Misfit, to seek even greater guilt in violence.
On the other hand. collectively, Blacks must
have a core personality of shame, for which there is no
forgiveness, too often only some kind of defense (denial,
grandiosity, rage [against whites, which is understandable, but
also against Blacks, which is not understandable, unless they're
seeing their own image when they look at another Black and
instinctively want to shatter that mirror].
What makes Mary Lewis singular is that she
understands the shame that her sons experience and the various
kinds of guilt that white men bring to her bed. For we usually
only think of temptation after we experience guilt, then look
for something that will excuse our guilty behavior. So her white
lovers, born with guilt, are programmed to go looking for
temptation or provocation, be it ordinary sexuality embodied in
the Black woman or some kind of perverse sexuality of pain of
death embodied in the Black man.
Through it all, Mary Lewis is trying to
assert her freedom, which most of us think can be asserted by
seeking total freedom of our body--few people ever take on the
challenge of having a free mind.
When you do the novel, you'll have to show
that Mary Lewis intuitively understands the various motives that
bring white men to her bed and you'll have to personalize each
of them. It'll be complicated, but so is the white man's
fascination with the Black woman. Otherwise, you'll just wind up
with a collective stereotype, a stick figure (pun intended).
You won't have to make Mary Lewis much more
articulate about herself, for she's already reached the point
that Ellison's Invisible Man reaches when he says, "I am
what I am." The Popeye declaration "I yam what I
yam."
For all of this generous,
guaranteed-successful direction, advice, and counsel, I ask no
fee. When your book becomes a best-seller, I simply request that
a small royalty to be paid annually ad infinitum to my heirs and
assigns, say 5% of sales on the first hundred thousand copies.
We will negotiate a royalty for the book sale tot he movies at
the appropriate time.
Congratulations, Lewis 1997 * * *
* *
update 16 June 2008 |
