Loving day A novel

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson's ribald, incisive novel "Loving Day." Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it's a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia: "I look at the buckling floors. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again." The house is haunted. There are ghosts, mostly of neighborhood crackheads - that is, if we take Warren's word for it; our narrator's psyche is as wrecked as his inheritance. An "inept" comic book artist - "My work is too realistic, too sober" - he has moved back to America from Wales after a failed business and broken marriage. He's wrecked, too, by his liminal racial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither - call him a man divided against himself. "I am a racial optical illusion," he says. Warren lives and breathes what W. E. B. Du Bois called double consciousness, by which the American black person is "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.... One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." Except Warren's body is white, making things even thornier; he's perpetually performing a black identity that isn't written all over his face - as when he describes "letting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Let the bass take over my tongue. Let the South of Mom's ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off." In "Loving Day," Johnson, author of the graphic novel "Incognegro" and the novel "Pym," delivers an extended literary metaphor about race and mixed-race in America. It's a semi-autobiographical one - he has called the book "my coming out as a mulatto" - that can at times feel belabored, but the novel ultimately triumphs because it is razor-sharp, sci-fi-flavored satire in the vein of George Schuyler, playfully evocative of black folklore à la Joel Chandler Harris - yet it never feels like a cold theoretical exercise. "Loving Day" is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos. The vitality of our narrator deserves much of the credit for that. He has the neurotic bawdiness of Philip Roth's Alexander Portnoy; the keen, caustic eye of Bob Jones in Chester Himes's "If He Hollers Let Him Go"; the existential insight of Ellison's Invisible Man. He's prone to deadpan cynicism and such highbrow racial discourse as "I don't know if I'm the byproduct of a racialized eroticism or a romantic rebellion of societal norms." His self-laceration is endearing: "I never managed the duties of 'son' particularly well, in regard to both my parents. At 'husband' I was an even grander disappointment, and I stink of divorced man so bad that even I can smell it, as if every nose hair reeked of its own disappointment. I've been failing at 'father' for years without even realizing I could claim the title." Claiming that title is what "Loving Day" is largely about. In Philadelphia Warren meets Tal, the teenage daughter he never knew he had: "It's a white girl. My white girl. It's my black girl who looks like a white girl with a tan and a bad hair day." They move into the decrepit haunted house together, where Warren turns father and racial-identity therapist, schooling Tal with gems like "There's Team White, and there's Team Black, O.K.? You probably didn't even know you were on Team White before, most of Team White's members never do. They just think they're 'normal.'" Warren tries enrolling Tal in an Afrocentric school where a recruiter "speaks three languages: Street, Caucasian and Brotherman." Then they fall under the spell of the Mélange Center, a "mixed-race community organization" that Warren calls "Mulattopia." It's populated by over-the-top characters whose "aspirational black-ness" is "clear in their aesthetic choices. The teenage boy to my left wears a do-rag, presumably so you do-not see the straight brown strands peeking out from around his ears." There's a character named One Drop, a dreadlocked "WASPafarian," and an entrance exam that includes questions like, "Was O.J. Simpson guilty?" and "What are your feelings about mayonnaise?" Father and daughter are awed: "The people whose appearance matches the identity they project, they have a place in society that they fit into with minimal cramping. But here, standing next to us, is everyone else. The human equivalent of mismatched socks." As Warren and Tal learn to wave the mixed-race flag, Warren has an affair with a Mélange Center stalwart, whom he idealizes for reasons both shallow and deep: She has an attractive rear end, she can mother his daughter, she has the conundrum of race all figured out. Tal, meanwhile, videotapes ghosts of the Mélange Center's "first couple" - the husband and wife behind Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage; in their honor, the Center prepares to celebrate "Loving Day," which Warren dubs "mulatto Christmas." In the end he is booted from the Center, its members set up camp on his lawn - he dubs it "Mixed Mews," "Halfie Heights" and "Little Halfrica" - and his nagging fantasies about burning down the house he's been burdened with come to a climactic head. So what of this outsize symbol at the crux of "Loving Day" - the house and its ghosts? "Sure, they were ghosts. Ghosts of who they once were. You could say that about half of the city of Philadelphia," Warren remarks. In one respect the decaying house is a metaphor for urban America, for the ghettos of Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago: phantoms of the palatial African-American meccas they once were. The house is also America itself, as relentlessly haunted by the obdurate, divisive specter of race as Warren is. Race, after all, is ghostlike: a dubious entity invested with immense power by believers. When "Loving Day" ends with Warren surveying the "first couple" phantoms on his lawn and concluding, "I'm not scared. I see them. I see what they are, or what they were. Just lovers. Just people," it's an exorcism of sorts: the moment Warren demystifies his ghosts and forges peace with his racial struggle, the moment he sees humans and not raced humans. At that moment, too, he is close to his daughter and thus closer to finding the elusive thing that his house also represents: home. While the Mélange Center is the target of satirical barbs, it also stands as a bona fide utopia, beckoning with community, family, belonging-ness. "It is a little thing, saying 'I'm mixed' instead of 'I'm black,"' Warren says, "yet it's like the difference between the comfort of wearing shoes that fit as opposed to bearing the blisters of shoes just one size too small." Such claims potentially cast Warren as a "tragic mulatto," that longstanding literary trope whose grand tragedy is an inability to fit in. But really "Loving Day" is playing with that tired trope; Warren is tragic, yes, but not because he is a "mulatto" - he's tragic because he, like mostly everyone else in the novel, is haunted by ghosts of painful pasts and broken families: ex-partners, dead parents, rotted loves. Warren dreams of burning down his house because he longs to rid himself of these ghosts - "to be free of the past in a blaze of glory" - and thereby "regain the privilege to love like a fool." The true tragedy of his narrative is that it's a tragic story trapped, on account of Warren's racial status, in the framework of a tragic mulatto story. And that's perhaps the most tragic thing about the grand ghost that is race in America: It denies human suffering its universality, confining it to the lens of color. The narrator is perpetually performing a black identity that isn't written on his face. BAZ DREISINGER is an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her book "Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World" will be published in 2016.

Politically correct attitudes regarding racial identity get a satirical skewering in Johnson's (Pym) latest droll turn. Comic book illustrator Warren Duffy, the light-skinned son of a black mother and a white father, has always considered himself black and has benefited from working for publishers who want "an authentic ambiguous Negro for political cover." When Warren returns to his family home in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown to settle his father's estate, he discovers that he has a teenage daughter, Tal, from a brief high-school fling with a Jewish girlfriend. Tal, unlike Warren, embraces her biracial status and enrolls at the Mélange Center, a learning institution dedicated to finding "the sacred balance. An equilibrium that allows you to live a life that expresses all of who you are and hides none of it." Warren's efforts to placate Tal without sacrificing his own convictions concerning race pit him between friends who see the world (as he does) in terms of black and white, and the more militant members of Tal's "Mulattopian" fringe who treat any challenge to their beliefs as a racist affront. Johnson skillfully navigates his novel's sensitive subject matter, seeing the humor in the more absurd behaviors around race. The wit and shrewdness of his approach perfectly handle serious themes. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

1 In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father's house. It sits on seven acres, surrounded by growling row homes, frozen in an architectural class war. Its expansive lawn is utterly useless, wild like it smokes its own grass and dreams of being a jungle. The street around it is even worse: littered with the disposables no one could bother to put in a can, the cars on their last American owner, the living dead roaming slow and steady to nowhere. And this damn house, which killed my father, is as big as it is old, decaying to gray pulp yet somehow still standing there, with its phallic white pillars and the intention of eternity. An eighteenth-century estate in the middle of the urban depression of Germantown. Before he died, my father bought the wreck at auction, planned on restoring it to its original state, just like he did for so many smaller houses in the neighborhood. Rescuing a slice of colonial history to sell it back to the city for a timeless American profit. His plan didn't include being old, getting sick, or me having to come back to this country, to this city, to pick up his pieces. This house is a job for a legion, not one person. It would kill one person. It did--my father. I am one person now. My father's house is on me. I see it from the back of the cab, up on its hill, rotting. Donated by the Loudin family after the Depression, the mansion was used by the city as a museum until a fire that created repair costs beyond its means and interest. At one point in my life, decades before, I was a boy. As such, I knew this house. I used to ride the 23 trolley past its absurd presence and marvel at this artifact of rich white folks' attempt at dynasty. A physical memory of historic Germantown's pastoral roots, before the larger city of Philadelphia exploded past this location, propelled by the force of the industrial revolution. Most things from childhood get smaller with age, but Loudin Mansion towers, because now I have to take care of it. So I want to run. I sit passively in the taxi as I'm driven closer, but my thighs ache and my bowels are prepared to evacuate, and I want to open the door and run. I'll run. I'll run through North Philly if I have to, all the way downtown. Run along the highway back to the airport, then run away again from the whole damn country. The white cabdriver makes no move to get out with me when he finally stops, just pops the trunk open with one button and with another relocks the doors after I open mine. That lock clicks hard. I'm on the street with my bags, and I can't get back inside. I'm not white, but I can feel the eyes of the few people outside on me, people who must think that I am, because I look white, and as such what the hell am I doing here? This disconnect in my racial projection is one of the things I hate. It goes in a subcategory I call "America," which has another subheading called "Philly." I hate that because I know I'm black. My mother was black--that counts, no matter how pale and Irish my father was. So I shall not be rebuked. I will not be rejected. I want to run but I refuse to be run off. A kid walks by, about seventeen, not much younger than I was when I escaped this neighborhood. He looks up, and as I lift my bags I give him the appropriate local response, an expression that says I'm having a bad life in general and a headache right now. Welcome home. There are blocks around here where you can be attacked for looking another man in the eyes, and other blocks where you can be assaulted for not giving the respect of eye contact. I could never figure it, which blocks were which, until I realized these were just the excuses of sociopaths. The sociopaths, that's the real problem. The whole street demeanor is about pretending to be a sociopath as well, so that the real ones can't find you. When I get to the porch, the front door opens. I can hear it creak before I see someone emerging from behind its paint-cracked surface. Sirleaf Day is carpeted in cloth. He's got a Kenyan dashiki, Sudanese mudcloth pants, and a little Ghanian kente hat. It's like Africa finally united, but just in his wardrobe. Last time I saw him, he dressed the same, but he only had one leather medallion. Now he has enough to be the most decorated general in the Afrocentric army. I give him a "Howyadoin," and the Philly salute, a hummingbird-like vibration of my forehead, the most defensive of nods. He gives me a hug. He hugs me like he knows I'm trying to get away. "So you had your first divorce. That just means you a man now. Which kind was it? She stop loving you, or you stop loving her?" "It wasn't like that," I tell him. Sirleaf grips me closer. "Oh hell no. I hope it wasn't one of those where you both still love each other, but it's broke anyway. Those are the worst. My first, fourth marriages, they were like that. At least you didn't have any kids with her." "Uncle Sirleaf, I really don't want to talk about--" "Don't give me that 'uncle' mess. You're too old for that shit. And I'm way too young," he says, pushing me back for another look before pulling me in once more. "Your pop was waiting for you to come home, you know that? This house, it was going to be for you. You and your wife, your children. Bring you back to the community." Sirleaf's voice cracks with emotion. It makes me feel guilty for wanting to break free of his musky grasp. "And it did. You got to give that crazy honky that." I look over Sirleaf's shoulder: there's a rusty Folgers Coffee can sitting on the porch, by the wall. It's there because my dad never smoked in a house. This can of ashes is full of cheap cigar butts, mixed with the cigarette butts of whoever visited. I know without looking inside it, because there was always a can like that on the porch of wherever my dad was living. "He knew I wasn't coming back. He was just going to fix it up to sell it, like he always did." This gets him to release me, partially. He still holds my shoulders, pushes me back as far as he can to take a look at my face. "Wasn't his fault you ran off, was it? My daddy left me when I was four and gave me nothing but my stunning Yoruba features. So stop bitching." Sirleaf is a lawyer, a realtor, a griot, and a kook, and he's good at all of those things. My dad was his white friend, because they had the kook thing in common. For three decades, they would get together to sell a property or drink whiskey and get kooky together. My dad had his own realtor's license, but he wasn't good with most types of humans. Sirleaf is the people's man, knows everyone that matters in Germantown, from councilmen to people looking to buy their first homes. He speaks three languages: Street, Caucasian, and Brotherman. Sirleaf's getting old and finally he looks it. Some people age, and some just dehydrate. Sirleaf looks like someone let the water out and the creases dried in its absence. I can't imagine how old my dad must have looked. They were the same age but my father was one of those pasty Irish people with no melanin to protect his skin from time. He could barely manage enough pigment for a mole. "We should really have a funeral," I tell him. "Or a memorial or--" "He ain't want one, and we're going to respect that. You know your pop--he wasn't one to spend good money on a bunch of bullshit. His legacy, it's this house, this property. And it's you. Now let's look at your inheritance." With great flourish, Sirleaf turns back to open the front door. But it's stuck. The wood's swelled and it takes a lot to jar, a lot of effort to protect so little. Hell's lobby waits on the other side. If my father's soul is left in the physical world, it's in the tools he left behind. Sandpaper, ladders, and scaffolding. Plaster and tarps, rollers and paint tins. At the back of my nose I can smell the Old Spice and Prell even though he hadn't used either since I was eleven. I will be buried here too, I just know, and then I fight that thought with the words I have been thinking in the days leading up to this moment: paint and polish. Paint it, polish the wood floors, tidy up whatever basic visual problems might get in the way of a buyer's imagination. Build on whatever my father managed in the months since he'd taken ownership. Use all the tricks he taught me. That's what I thought, packing to come back Stateside; that's what I thought waiting for the plane. That's what I tell myself now. Paint and polish. I even say it out loud. "There ain't no roof," Sirleaf says back to me. "Go on, take a look at that jawn. That shit's crazy. The wiring in here is, like, seventy years old. And exposed--I seen that old fuse box in the back pop sparks twice in the last hour. It's a miracle he didn't burn the place down running his power tools. I don't know how your pops lived up in this mess. Craig was one cheap bastard. No offense," and he wags his head at the shame of it. I don't remind him about a childhood camped out in many a shelled home. My dad had been doing the same thing since my mother kicked him out, and that was twenty-seven years ago. I don't tell him about pissing in paint buckets and dumping it out the window. "You sure you want to sleep here? I mean, what about Tosha's? They still in the house I sold them. Six bedrooms. Maybe you could stay there." "I'll stop by, but I doubt her husband wants me under the same roof for an extended period." "Up to you, but I'm out of here. This place creeps me out. You better see what you're dealing with on the second floor, before it gets dark. Power's iffy up there." He points to the stairs. I get the message that he wants me to go up. I also get the message that he's afraid to. That at least he understands the limits of his age. As he leaves, Sirleaf stares at his feet with every step, as if he's worried the old beams might give out on him. "How soon can you get it listed?" I ask. He sighs. I've missed something. "I told you. You can't sell this place the way it is, not without taking a huge loss. You can't sell it for the land; it's historic so it's hard to get permission to build on it. You going to have to pick up where your pop left off, and it's going to take a while to get it together. At least, the basics. You got shoes to fill, boy," he tells me. I just happen to look down when Sirleaf says it. His shoes have at least two-inch heels on them. He catches me staring and says, "I'm engaged to this new jawn: young sister. She likes me tall." "Sirleaf, look: I just got divorced. My comic-book shop, I had to sell it. I owe my ex half of that, but I'm still living off the money. Whatever we got to do, whatever we can get, let's just get it soon, okay? I don't care if we take a loss, I just want out." "Yeah. Sure. Right. You seeing the same house I'm seeing, are you not? I mean, take a look around," he implores me. I don't need to do that. "My ex is a lawyer. A really, really, good one. And she'll sue the living shit out of me if I don't pay back the money I owe her. I'm already late on the payments. You read my emails, right? I need that cash, man." "Your ex isn't an American citizen, so she can't sue you here. I'm telling you, Warren, it might seem like a big deal to get sued, but that ain't your major problem right now. You got other things to worry about," and he lifts a mudcloth-adorned arm and motions in a slow sweep around the whole damned building. Sirleaf is right: there is no roof. There are walls. It has floors. Just no real top. In my book, that barely qualifies it as a house, makes it more of a massive cup. I brave the stairs, shining a flashlight above me as I pace the hall of the second story. In most parts of the ceiling, there's nothing but blue tarp separating the interior from the elements. There are a few charcoaled beams in those rooms where my father hadn't knocked the remains of the fire damage down. In the master bedroom, there's a green canvas tent, the old Coleman tent my dad used when he took me on trips to the Pine Barrens and the Appalachian Trail. Now its yellow plastic spikes are nailed directly into the blackened, fire-ravaged hardwood. Instead of camping out in the room of the house least damaged, as I would have done, as any normal person would have done, my father took up residence in a room that looks like a hollowed out piece of charcoal. There's a tarp on the floor to match the one glimpsed through the burnt shingles above, but besides that, the space is nearly unprotected to the heavens. It's the nineteenth of August, about 80 degrees outside and 90 in this room. The windows up here are covered with brown paper, taped to the glass, but the sun's heat gets in anyway. This is the place he grew sick in. Made the decision to not go to the doctor in. Then died in. Quietly, of pneumonia. I always assumed he would die on the streets of Germantown itself, loud. Knocked over the head for being the wrong race in the wrong neighborhood in the wrong century. In the gloom, I drag everything--the foldout table and chair, the lamp connected to the car battery, the propane grill, the five-gallon jugs of water, and eventually the tent itself--one by one downstairs to the dining hall, the least damaged room in the whole house. My father managed new drywall in here, matched and replaced sections of the crown molding, and had gotten as far as laying out cans of primer for painting. With the sliding doors to the hall closed, the room almost seems habitable. Excerpted from Loving Day: A Novel by Mat Johnson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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