Last month I described how James McBride, in his brilliant novel, Deacon King Kong, goes about creating unforgettable characters. The example I sighted was the case of The Elephant, a shady character who enables timely shipments of illicit goods, yet nevertheless cares for his mother's garden while wistfully lamenting how time has passed him by.
This month we examine another triumph of James McBride, as he takes an encounter between a white Irish New York City cop by the name of Potts. ("Just Potts. It's better than pans.") and "Sister Gee, a tall, handsome black woman of forty-eight…" and makes time stand still.
Their conversation crashes through racial stereotypes and turns intimate, at least in McBride's cosmic-comic sense as Sister Gee, a black maid gets to comment on her opinions about dirt.
"Then she [Sister Gee] turned to him [Police Officer Potts] and said, 'We was talking about something before now?'
"'Dirt,' Potts said.
"'Oh yes,' she said, sitting down again. He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather a cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who've seen so much and done little about it but pray.
"Her face was firm and decisive, with smooth milky brown skin; the thick hair with a bit of gray, neatly parted; her slender proud frame clad in a modest flower-print dress. She sat erect in the pew; her poise was that of a straight-backed ballet dancer, yet her slim elbows dangling on the rail in front of her, jingling her keys lazily in one hand, eying the white cop, she had an ease and confidence he found slightly unsettling.
"After a moment, she leaned back and placed a slender brown arm on the top edge of the pew, the small movement graceful and supple. She moved, Potts thought, like a gazelle. He suddenly found himself struggling to think clearly."
That was admittedly a long quote, but notice the plain descriptive language used to describe this encounter between an older, white New York City policeman and an older churchgoing black woman from South Brooklyn.
I should tell you the scene does take place in the Five Ends Church near "The Cause" housing projects in south Brooklyn. Officer Potts and his partner, a younger police officer have entered the church as a choir rehearsal is ending in order to investigate and get the goods on an elderly perpetrator who shot a drug dealer. So when the woman leans back in the pew, it's not Officer Potts' ["better than pans"] imagination that she's in a pew. She actually is.
Notice that McBride places his "gazelle" and her admiring interrogator in a church where "no funny stuff" is supposed to happen. I'll bet you sense where this scene is going, with all the verboten sexual desire heaped on top of it; but I couldn't help but notice the calm and grace with which James McBride pulled it off.
Just before this point, Potts had made a reference about "cleaning up some dirt." He's talking of about a crime, but that reference allows Sister Gee, to discuss cleaning dirt as a way of life.
"You said some kind of dirt's harder to clean than others," she said. "Well, that's my job, Officer, I'm a house cleaner, see, I work in dirt. I chase dirt all day. Dirt don't like me."
That might have been quite enough about dirt for some writers, but not for James McBride. He has his character Sister Gee launch into a philosophical discourse on the subject.
"It [dirt] don't set there and say, 'I'm hiding. Come get me.' I go out and find it to clean it out. But I don't hate dirt for being dirt. You can't hate a thing for being what it is. Dirt makes me who I am. Whenever I try to rid the world of it, I'm making things a little harder for somebody. Same with you. The fellers you see, crooks and all, they ain't saying, 'Here I am. Come get me…' You and me has got the same job, in a way. We clean dirt…"
Potts found himself smiling, 'You oughta be a lawyer, he said."
The black house-cleaner talks about herself being a "country woman" from North Carolina. She asks Potts if he's "ever been to the South?" He tells her, "No, but my folks were from Ireland."
She asks him, "Is that an island?" which perhaps tells us she knows more than she's letting on, and he tells her, "It's a place where folks can stop and think. The ones with brains, anyway," which I find to be highly revealing to how the character feels about his forebears' native land.
This is McBride's launching pad, the place where this mutual exploration of two strangers from two remote worlds takes off just as his writing soars. Yet if you examine how he does it, he never varies from his basic stylistic strategy—one simple, declarative sentence piled on top of the next. On the face of it, you'd never think such a literary contraption could never get off the ground, no less fly but, in fact, as I already mentioned, it soars. That's why in my view no one else I know of comes close to McBride's writing accomplishments.
In the middle of all this McBride's writing makes a sharp left turn to a magical place. We're told, "Potts felt as if he were watching a dark, silent mountain suddenly blink to life, illuminated by a hundred lights from a small, quaint village that had lived on the mountainside for a hundred years, the village appearing out of nowhere, all the lights aglow at once."
I love that McBride allows himself these indulgences, insists on not editing out all those little detours; in this case he's describing a woman's face coming alive metaphorically as a village lighting up at night. It's ridiculous, of course. A writing/stylistic perfectionist (such as I used to be) would reject it, leave it on the cutting-room floor. It's awful indulgence. Intolerable! Strictly speaking it makes absolutely no sense, only, to my way of thinking, it's absolutely perfect in a highly flawed way. (I love it, in other words.) Then McBride tells us, "Every feature of her face glowed."
This commonplace meeting between a white policeman and a black woman has already been lifted out of the everyday. But McBride refuses to leave well enough alone. He now launches into outer space, into legendary literary orbit by writing what we're all thinking but wouldn't have the courage to write: "He found himself wanting to tell her every sorrow he ever knew, including the knowledge that the Ireland of the vacation folders wasn't Ireland, that the memory of his ancient grandmother from the old country walking down Silver Street, holding his hand when he was eight, clasping her last nickel in her palm, biting her lip as she hummed a sad song from her childhood of poverty and deprivation, wandering the Irish countryside, looking for home and food, would kick through his arteries and burst into his heart until he was a grown man:
The grass waves green above them; soft sleep is theirs for aye;
The hunt is over, and the cold; the hunger passed away….
Instead, he said simply, 'It wasn't so nice."
James McBride refuses to play "editor cop" in the name of succinctness or literary restraint, something for which I am deeply grateful. Instead, he "goes all in" on behalf of "indulgence" trying for even greater effects:
"She chuckled uneasily, surprised by his response and watched him blush. Suddenly she felt her heart flutter. A charged silence descended on the room. They both felt it, felt themselves being propelled along a great chasm, feeling the irresistible urge to reach out, to reach across. To stretch their hands from opposite sides of a large cavernous valley that was nearly impossible to cross…"
And then:
"She was silent now, the smile gone, looking away, the spell broken."
Just as the spell is broken, McBride's writing lesson is over. He has just taught us—those of us open to learning—how to turn an everyday, commonplace moment into a timeless meeting that, like a butterfly accidently flying too close to your nose, came and went before we had the slightest notion something important had just happened.
