#732 Blues- John Keene

#732 Blues- John Keene

As with all the stories found in John Keene’s excellent collection Counternarratives, "Blues"challenges the reader with an interesting and off-beat format. The narration is fed to us one sentence at a time separated by ellipses. I’m not sure how it effected other readers, but for my experience I found myself speeding up as I read, making the story more and more frantic as I went. This was made even more so on the last page as the sentences gave way to smaller phrases and single words.

This is the world through the eyes of a traveler, a lover of the arts, perhaps an artist him (her) self. The teller of the story jumps from city to city, enjoying the sites and the history as he goes. There is some pretention, at times a lot of it as he references artists and poets often just by first name in a manner than seems more like name dropping than homage.

The last lines mention solitude and the blues, but there is a definite sadness among the excitement felt throughout the running script. 

Rating: 8-8-7-8 Total= 31

#704 Cold- John Keene

#704 Cold- John Keene

You have to know a little about American Music history to get the full meaning of this one. This piece is a tribute to a great and tragic musician around the turn of the 19^th century. 

Bob Cole was a composer/songwriter/entertainer with much success, having written and published a couple hundred songs. His music was known to the general public but outside of the black communities he would not have been as recognized physically or by name as well as he should have been. He and his partners, brothers James Weldon and J. Rosamund Johnson wrote minstrel music, some of which has been used to perpetuate negative black stereotypes. After gaining success and creating his own black production company, he used his position to change the entertainment industry, trying to stop the use these stereotypes, of black characters as villainous or aggressive. 

He killed himself in 1911 while staying at a Hotel in the Catskills. The “Cold” of the title represents the creek water in which he drowned himself. This story is the last day of his life. We see his embarrassment at having to change rooms because a white guest requests it, we see his mental anguish at realizing some negative messages in his own songs, and we see the torture of his songs haunting him as they fight to be let loose.

“Then somewhere along the way after the first terrible blues struck you tried to hum a new tune, conjure one, you thought it was just exhaustion, your mind too tired to refresh itself as it always had, that’s why the old ones wouldn’t go away.”

Fantastic story. I love both the music and the history here, and the artistic manner in which Keene delivers a lecture on both.  It’s a shame that Cole’s memory is lost to most people, but I am grateful to Keene for reviving the name in such a meaningful way.  Knowing the reference helps, but even without it, this story stands as masterful.

Notable Passage: “I’m coming until the music breaks into a screaming silence that if you could describe it in a word would be no word or no note or sound at all but fleetingly, fleetingly cold…”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#669 Acrobatique- John Keene

#669 Acrobatique- John Keene

Reading a short story about a trapeze artist, you immediately think of Kafka. Whether this is an homage or merely a wink at the old master is of no matter, the seed is planted in your mind. Like Kafka’s artist, the acrobat here is tragic performer, trapped in her own success. She feels the glamour of attention and accolades from great composers, statesmen, and painters—but she also feels keenly the seedy stares and gropings of drunken stalkers. Her fear is not of falling from her high-wire act but of losing the freedom of the act itself.

“How am I to exceed every limit placed on me unless I place it there, because that is what I think of when I think of freedom, that I have gathered around me people who understand how to translate fear into possibility, who have no wings but fly beyond the most fantastical vision of the clouds, who face, death daily back out into the waiting room, and I am one of them.”

Great writing.

Rating: 10-8-9-8 Total= 35

#641 Persons and Places- John Keene

#641 Persons and Places- John Keene

This is a very creative idea for a story about two students—one black and one Ibernian—both highly intelligent, accomplished, and yet isolated Harvard men that quietly cross paths near campus. The year is 1890. Each one is in his head and in a very contemplative mood, thinking hard about their studies, their situation and the other as they pass without physical acknowledgment. 

This story is written as complementary journal entries, presented side by side, a counter-narrative I suppose. Being people of color at a very conservative institution in the late nineteenth century, they are understandably standoff-ish and careful with whom they associate. They recognize that being on a social one-man island is something they could appreciate about each other. Maybe next time they will cross paths they will strike up a conversation.

Notable Passage: “He observes me as if he has already examined the catalogue of ideas and impressions which I shall tell him when we eventually speak, of the gulf between the true-self and the world outside and how the mind, through its exercises, bridges it…”

Rating: 8-9-8-8 Total= 33

#613 Rivers- John Keene

#613 Rivers- John Keene

This is a great idea for a story, and very executed. If written by somebody else about a more modern topic, I suppose this would fall under the genre of “Fan Fiction” but I wouldn’t dare call this that. Seeing as Keene is a professional, maybe it’s “Peer Fiction.”  In any case, this is a story about a famous fictional character, Mr. James Alton Rivers, aka Jim Watson, or the “slave” that was on the raft with Huckleberry Finn.

He is a freed man now, and runs into Huck and Tom Sawyer in the street. They are now in their early 20’s. Tom is a proper southern gentleman and a lawyer, Huck is still a bit of a troublemaker and an adventurer. They start talking about their lives and it becomes clear right off that Tom has no interest in seeing Jim as anything but an inferior person. Jim sees this and decides not to tell him about his life, his travels to Chicago, St. Louis, becoming a shrewd businessman, etc.

The country is on the brink of the civil war and race tensions are high and Tom has certainly taken a side on the matter. Jim is probably smart not to talk about his family escaping north, or the reality of living in the shadow of the Dred Scott case for instance.

“Though I’ve always made sure to have an escape route and a safe house on the other side of the river ready to flee given the trials the courts are putting Mr. Dred and Mrs. Lizzie Scott through.”

Tom and Huck are the ones to bring up the name of Abolitionist heroes:

“Well sounds to me like Jim is keeping himself out of trouble, and the worst thing for anybody these days is getting caught up in all that trouble, getting involved with people like Lovejoy or Torrey or that new agitator writer Mrs. Stowe what likes to stir up a whole heap of trouble too.”

Before parting we see the two youths as something different, and Keene I think writes them as two white archetypes in the struggle for racial equality. This is illustrated by the warnings Tom and Huck each give Jim as they say goodbye. Tom’s warning is straight out “know your place:”

“You’d better watch yourself, Jim, you hear me? Good thing we know you but you walking these streets like they belong to you, and they don’t to no nigger, no matter what some of you might think these days, so you watch it, cause the time’ll come when even the good people like me and Huck here have had enough.”

Huck’s warning is softer, and if not coming from a friend necessarily, it’s at least from a fond acquaintance; one that doesn’t want to see harm come but also doesn’t want to get involved:

“You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is about ready to break wide open, and I sure don’t want to see you swallowed up.”

Overall I think this story is brilliant. The allegory wrapped-up in characters we are acquainted with is a great idea. Keene fills-in a perspective to the Mark Twain story that historians and critics have complained are missing in the original tales. I’m not sure if this story works as well without the original, but  I think it would be great if this story was read side by side in schools (or like I’ve said earlier teaching Henry Dumas side by side with Twain to show two different perspectives on classic Americana).

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#578 An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution- John Keene

#578 An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution- John Keene

This is a period fiction short story. We are in Massachusetts pre-independence. A slave owner hides the birth of a child born of one of his slaves. The child’s father is unknown but light of skin, he has been named Zion. Zion’s mother died giving birth, so is kept in the care of another woman, an insolent woman that was eventually sold to another family. This rebelliousness may have been passed on to the child:

“So it is said that one’s sense of law, like one’s concept of morality, originates in the home.”

When Zion is a teenager, he first begins his life filled with escapes, crime, punishment and defiance. Instilled with a sense of freedom and self-worth, Zion’s repeated captures and beatings only fuel his resolve.

“The local authorities again captured, tried and imprisoned him, not only for his crimes but for his defiance of the social order, yet his realization of his own personal power had galvanized him, making life insufferable under any circumstances but his own liberation.”

As the social and political landscape rapidly changes in the northeast in the 1770’s the clasp on the punishment of those once enslaved loosens, but Zion’s crimes mount and he is sentenced to die. Defiant till the end, he pleas to other’s such as him to fight for freedom not to fall to crime or drink. His cell is found empty before he is hung…but somebody must hang, justice may be blind, but so is society.

I am enjoying Keene’s style in this book. After the last story, I mentioned he reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marques. This strengthens that comparison for me. Add also historic fiction works like Edward Jones’ Known World or New York by Edward Rutherford to that list of comparisons.

Notable Passage: “Under duress, one’s actions assume a dream-like clarity.”

Rating: 9-9-10-8 Total= 36

#550 On Brazil, or Denouement: The Londonias-Figueras- John Keene

#550 On Brazil, or Denouement: The Londonias-Figueras- John Keene

This is a wildly ambitious story that hits its mark with a hammer. Spanning four centuries in the development of Brazil, this is like something out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. The tale is bookended by a murder notice of Sergio Inocencio Maluuf Figueiras, whose nude, headless body was found in an alley in one of Sao Paulo’s worst neighborhoods.

The rest of the story reads like an historical record of Brazil during the 17^th century. We learn of the lineage of the Figueras clan and much about the Portuguese colonial ruling class; How the family gained wealth through sugar plantations, gained fame through military heroics against the Dutch and Native populations, and gained notoriety through abuse and slavery.

Although a complete story and one filled with rich detail, I wonder if there isn’t more than enough here for a larger work, something akin to 100 Years of Solitude. I would certainly like to see that.

Notable Passage: “To the connected and ruthless flow the spoils.”

Rating: 10-10-9-8 Total= 37

#522 Mannahatta- John Keene

#522 Mannahatta- John Keene

Mannahatta is the Lenape word for “Land of Many Hills,” the name taken in New Amsterdam for Manhattan and the name of a great poem by Walt Whitman. A man from Santo Domingo, who had bought his own freedom, now finds himself alone scouting land in the “New World.” He is having a spiritual experience and stakes down a cross hoping that the First People don’t remove it before he can return.

This is the first story in the new collection, Counternarratives by John Keene. It is a powerful opening look at what is already being talked about as one of the best books of the year. I like the rich descriptions of the riverfront and the landscape; the power of a man by himself in the woods near the water, in a place unknown and ready to be explored.

There is a good lineage of literature that has tapped into the emotional history of early American “discovery” in the lower Hudson. Besides the obvious Whitman reference, great art and literature has sprouted from this very place; names like Asher Durant, Thomas Cole, and more recently TC Boyle or Edward Rutherford have used the beauty and spirit of this region as springboards for great art.

“A thousand birds proclaimed his ascent up the incline; the bushes shuddered with the alarm of creatures stirred from there lees; insects rose in a screen before his eyes, vanishing. When he had secured the boat and settled onto a sloping meadow, he sat, to wet his throat with water from his winesack, and orient himself, and rest. Only then did he look back.”

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33