Lewis Nordans Wolf Whistle Account of the Till Murder - Essay Example

Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle account of the Till Murder In "The Making of a Book," an essay written not long after the publication of his novel Wolf Whistle, a fictionalized re-imagining of the Emmett Till murder, Lewis Nordan explains the difficulty that he had in approaching his material and the eventual solution that he found. Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was murdered for allegedly wolf whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. The event had a profound effect on Nordan, who, at the time, was a young boy growing up in the nearby town of Itta Bena, but he never felt comfortable overtly writing Till into his fiction. He claims that his "racial identification with the murderers" troubled him and that he felt "by race and geography [...] somehow implicated." He adds, "[M]aybe I believed that as a white guy who knew the [murderers] and never spoke out against the injustice, or even asked a question about it at the dinner table, it was simply not my story to tell". Eventually he realized that he could use his fiction to explore his feeling of implication and the society in which he feels so implicated. In Wolf Whistle, he has written what he calls "the white trash version of the Emmett Till murder": " [...] the story of the people who were on the periphery of this terrible thing, who didn't know what was going on, didn't quite understand their own culpability in the situation". Nordan's project in Wolf Whistle has an affinity with that of Toni Morrison and other social theorists and literary critics who in recent years have begun to turn the gaze of race theory toward the construction of white identity. A brief examination of their contributions to the field may help us to understand better Nordan's novel. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison describes her project as "an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject, from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers" and to "examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions". Morrison proposes not to treat whiteness in American literature as natural and self-sustaining but rather as something "sycophantic", constructed, contingent on an Africanist presence. She hopes to refute the conventional wisdom that "because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States". Many other literary critics have taken up Morrison's cause and have reexamined the American literary canon with a different gaze. Jerry Phillips discusses how "certain literary texts illuminate the pedagogy of whiteness, the way one learns to experience oneself as a member of the 'white race'" and goes on to discuss a few of the "countless ways in which United States literary works aided in the naturalization of whiteness". Phillips argues that "we critics should commit ourselves to illuminating issues of contingency, historicity, and arbitrariness" in the construction of whiteness. Rebecca Aanerud calls for "the development of a critical reading practice that foregrounds the construction and representation of whiteness and will challenge the way in which many texts by white United States authors are complicit with the discourses of white supremacy". She further argues that "Whiteness, like race in general, cannot be understood simply as a natural phenomenon [...]. The recognition of whiteness as not a set fact--that is, having white skin--but instead as a product whose meaning and status must be sustained by a process of reproduction along pre-established lines is crucial to an interruption of whiteness as the status quo". Phillips and Aanerud also lay the burden of deconstructing and decentering whiteness at the feet of literary artists. Phillips claims that literature can challenge the very "concept of race, through its critical revelation of the contingent, historical, and arbitrary nature of all human identities"; moreover "the artist is obliged to reveal the relative aspect of power, the fact that a regime is made and therefore can be unmade". Aanerud argues that when white writers take white identity as their "central theme," "a self-conscious narrative" can have significance "in challenging white supremacy". I argue that Wolf Whistle strives--with admittedly arguable success--for the goal that Phillips and Aanerud describe and thus seems ripe for the type of critical inquiry that they and Morrison have delineated. To understand fully how we may read Wolf Whistle as a text that deconstructs whiteness, we may find it useful to examine further some of Nordan's claims about his writing in general and about this novel in particular. Nordan claims that in his work he often attempts to dramatize "how hard it is to grow up white in the South" (Growing Up White in the South 2). As his claim indicates he does not treat his whiteness as an invisible, unexamined, privileged state but rather as an extremely visible and problematic condition of which he remains keenly aware and which he foregrounds in his writing. He states that "I like to think of myself, in some ways, as an ethnic writer" (Ingram 89); he says elsewhere that "what I think Southern white people write is a kind of ethnic writing" (Maher 116). He does not see this as an essentialist label, an inherent and intangible quality that infuses the works of all Southern writers but rather as a shared geographical and racial experience that provides many disparate writers with a common fictional vocabulary and connects "writers who are vastly different in what they believe and what they are interested in, and what they write about" (Maher 116). However, Nordan does not conceive of race as an independent, self-contained form of identity. When he calls Wolf Whistle "the white trash version of the Emmett Till murder" and says that his novel is "the poor white version" ("The Making of a Book" 84), he crucially emphasizes not just race but class as well. As the novel and others attest, Nordan's work focuses on how hard it is to grow up poor white in the South, a theme dealt with, in very different ways, in the fiction of other southern novelists such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and Erskine Caldwell, to name only a few. Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray argue that "all too often in discussions of racial identity, class is ignored, dismissed, and left untheorized". However, they continue, examining a manifestation of whiteness such as poor white trash, which "signals something other than privilege or social power", can undermine homogenous white identity. Although, as Newitz and Wray claim, "most people understand white trash as [...] an amalgam of well-known stereotypes", Nordan refuses such superficial characterizations. His work examines the social, racial, and economic pressures under which ostensibly stereotypically white trash individuals live. In Wolf Whistle, Nordan uses the re-imagined Till murder as a means of examining and analyzing the complex and contradictory nature of Southern white trash culture; and in doing so, he denaturalizes whiteness, exposing white racial identity as contingent, constructed, and precarious, thus exploding the notion of a hegemonic, self-sustaining white identity and (perhaps) pointing the way toward alternative identities. We can perhaps see this process at work most clearly in the maddeningly complex character of Solon Gregg, one of the men who eventually murders Bobo (the novel's Till character). Solon, perhaps the most markedly "white trash" of the novel's major players, mediates white identity through his complicated interactions with African American characters in general and with Bobo in particular. He, along with assorted other "damaged rednecks and maniacs with pistols" lives in Balance Due, also known as "Scumtown", the "white trash ghetto" of the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. The name "Balance Due" underscores the economic disenfranchisement of the poor whites living there. Balance Due and the African American slum, the Belgian Congo, sit on one piece of real estate. They were once part of the same "big field, a significant Mississippi defeat". Nordan drives home the hopelessness of this area by repeatedly describing it in deathly terms: a "corpse-stench" lingers, and "belt buckles and maybe a finger joint still turned up." Buzzards named after Mississippi governors watch over the inhabitants. However, their shared condition of oppression engenders no feelings of unity among the inhabitants. Indeed, many of the citizens of Balance Due, the most socially and economically marginalized white people in the town, wear their racial supremacy more ostentatiously than anyone else. Their yards feature "junker cars with White Knights bumper stickers," and a "woman wearing a swastika" assaults passers-by. The attitude of these white people may correspond roughly to that of many nineteenth-century working-class whites described by David Roediger (following W. E. B. DuBois): "[W]hiteness provided compensation for exploitative and alienating class relationships. According to Roediger, "nineteenth century workers prized whiteness to such an extent that instead of joining with black workers with whom they shared common interests, they adopted a white supremacist vision". That formulation has a specifically Southern antecedent in the "proto-Dorian bond" of which W. J. Cash speaks in The Mind of the South. Of the "common white," Cash says, "If he had no worth-while interest at stake in slavery, if his real interest ran the other way about, he did nevertheless have that, to him, dear treasure of his superiority as a white man, which had been conferred on him by slavery; and so was as determined to keep the black man in chains [...] as the angriest planter". Because of economic depravity and social marginalization, white trash people cling fervently to their identities as white, but their classification as "trash," as the white Other, complicates that whiteness. Thus, white trash individuals must constantly reassert their bonds with whiteness. As Constance Penley observes, "If you are white trash, then you must engage in the never-ending labor of distinguishing yourself, of codifying your behavior so as to clearly signify a difference from blackness that will, in spite of everything, express some minuscule, if pathetic, measure of your culture's superiority". Certainly Solon has little to feel superior about: he makes his living as an armed robber, "though he was not adverse to other honest work either, you know, extortion, for example". Moreover, he lives in a "clapboard shack" in the worst part of town, where he beats his wife and mocks her "hill accent, and the color and texture of her hair, her thinness, her height and small breasts, the poor clothes she wore", although (or perhaps because) he possesses many of these characteristics himself. Nordan describes him as "a skinny man, with thin, greasy hair" who "had been sleeping in his clothes for six months". Solon's cruelty toward his family results in his son Glenn's attempting to incinerate him (a plot that backfires, lethally burning Glenn). The material conditions of Solon's existence would seem to align him with the similarly deprived African Americans of the Mississippi Delta, but he takes great pains to separate himself from them, even to the extent of disowning his own sister, Juanita, who, he tells his eventual co-defendant Lord Poindexter Montberclair, "run off and married a nigger pimp and set up for a ho and broke our mama's heart, you can imagine... she's about to die she's so happy, she's so much in love with this nigger pimp, and she's so glad to be out of Mississippi". Although he calls her the "[o]nliest woman in the world [he]'d die for," her willing contribution to the violation of "America's greatest taboo: the sanctity of white womanhood" (Hudson-Weems 37)--not just by marrying a black man but by reproducing with him as well and further undermining the artificial and arbitrary separation between the races--has placed her completely beyond the pale. As Abby Ferber has argued, "In white supremacist discourse, whiteness is elaborated and defended because it is perceived to be threatened," and "this threat was almost exclusively articulated as the threat of interracial sexuality" because any intermingling of the races, social or physical, makes assertions of essential white difference untenable. Solon uses the defense of the ideal of Southern white womanhood---in the person of Lady Sally Anne Montberclair, Poindexter's wife--that his sister has disrupted to reaffirm his "whiteness," and he uses Bobo, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, as a foil. However, when Sally Anne enters Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro., it becomes clear that she does not conform, even superficially, to typical standards of idealized Southern womanhood--pure, chaste, and firmly ensconced on a pedestal. Indeed, she functions as a problematic, disruptive presence for the men at Red's. Sally Anne, "rumored to be modern", comes brazenly into the bar apparently wearing only a trench coat and a pair of slippers. Her disheveled state and her casual transgression of strictly prescribed social mores make her an obvious symbol of desire: "She wont wearing no makeup, eyes looking like a raccoon, make you want to kiss her right on the durn mouth". Sally Anne further places herself outside conventional Southern feminine norms when she makes her errand at Red's known: she has come to buy tampons. Although Red carries tampons, "this was the first time a woman had ever asked Red for such of a thing". Red generally sells these only to men and then through a carefully euphemistic transaction that preserves female idealization. Works Cited Hudson-Weems, Clenora. Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb in the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Bedford, 1996. Ingram, Russell, and Mark Ledbetter. "An Interview with Lewis Nordan." Missouri Review 20.1 (1997): 73-89. Maher, Blake. "An Interview with Lewis Nordan." Southern Quarterly 34.1 (1995): 113-23. Nordan, Lewis. "The Making of a Book." Oxford American. March-April 1995: 74-88. Read More