...The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long look into a pair of human eyes. Even the eyes of the enemy.
I picked up Carson McCullers' novel Clock Without Hands--the only work of narrative fiction I hadn't read of hers--at a used bookstore in Atlanta. It was a lucky find, I thought; I love reading books set in the places of I'm traveling, and few people capture Georgia and the South in general as well as McCullers. But McCullers' Georgia, even moreso here than in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is hardly picturesque--it's fetid, corrupt, swamplike.
The novel focuses on four men: J.T. Malone, a small-town pharmacist who learns he has terminal leukemia; Jester Clane, an idealistic teenager; Sherman Pew, an angry black teenager and orphan with blue eyes (paging Toni Morrison) whom Jester falls in love with; and Judge Fox Clane, a genteel old racist who employs Sherman as a servant. It's the Judge that's really the central character here. He's an icon of the old Southern guard: vociferously opposed to integration even as he gets on well with Sherman, and his other black servants, on a personal level. His political ambitions center around a plan to recognize Confederate scrip money, which he just happens to have an enormous stash of in his attic. He considers himself upright, objective; but we know that he has sent innocent black men to their death, telling himself "he, himself, was only an instrument of the law. So, no matter how grave the miscarriage was, he could not pine forever." We also know that he keeps the secret of Sherman's parentage to himself in an act of misguided paternalism.
His bigotry puts him at odds with his grandson, Jester, whose beliefs are newly developed and crude but passionate. But Jester's nascent liberalism doesn't extend to his own homosexuality, which torments him: "If it turned out he was homosexual like men in the Kinsey Report, Jester had vowed that he would kill himself." I was surprised, actually, how explicit Jester's sexuality is dealt with here: after meeting Sherman for the first time he races to a brothel, where he loses his virginity to a woman but while thinking about Sherman the whole time. The relationship between the two young men is a bravura bit of character work: they clearly care deeply about each other, but the difference between their station in life transforms that care into endless petty sniping and one-upsmanship. Jester tries to get Sherman to admit they are friends, but Sherman is too angry to admit such emotions into his life:
All Sherman's life he had thought that all white men were crazy, and the more prominent their positions the more lunatic their words and behavior. In this matter, Sherman considered he had the sober ice-cold truth on his side. The politicians, from governors to congressmen, down to sheriffs and wardens, were alike in their bigotry and violence. Sherman brooded over every lynching, bombing, or indignity his race had suffered. In this Sherman had the vulnerability and sensitivity of an adolescent. Drawn to broodings and atrocities, he felt that every evil was reserved for him personally. So he lived in a stasis of dread and suspense. This attitude was supported by facts.
Sherman is a capable servant for the Judge, who lets him have free reign in the house. But he refuses, when asked, to write letters for the Judge about segregation and the Confederate money. While the Judge tries to soften the conversation, returning to old tired tropes about "happy peonage" and the faithful slave who stayed with his master after emancipation, it's refreshing to hear Sherman call literal bullshit: "Still, a n----- would rather be a lamppost in Harlem," he tells the Judge, "than the governor of Georgia." In many ways, Sherman is a kind of substitute son for the Judge, who has lost his own son and is in the process of losing, metaphorically speaking, his grandson, but the Judge's rigid bigotry prevents him from really hearing Sherman. And in the end their relationship crumbles, and the worst occurs: Sherman moves into a house in the white part of town, in a pique of indignation and--spoiler spoiler spoiler--the Judge leads a band of vigilantes in bombing his house.
It's the pharmacist, J. T. Malone, who draws the assignment, but he refuses. Close to death, he realizes that the easy racism he has embraced his entire life is morally hazardous, and he doesn't want to endanger his immortal soul. "What the fuck is an immortal soul?" someone asks, and Malone replies: "I don't know... But if I have one, I don't want to lose it." Later, Jester, enraged at the loss of his friend, almost murders the eventual perpetrator, a poor white named Sammy Lank, but a flash of empathy even for Sammy, his poverty, his idiocy, makes him reconsider.
I found myself wondering: How is this book, which focuses on white men considering and reconsidering their own racism, different from something like Green Book or Driving Miss Daisy? I think it's because those movies are meant to make white people feel better, and Clock Without Hands actually wants you to feel very bad. And it did make me feel bad. I can't remember the last time a book made me feel something so viscerally. The racism that seems so violent and intractable in this novel remains so violent and intractable. Even before Sherman's murder, there's a scene in which Jester, trying to chase down a young black man who has stolen a few dollars from another, causes the man's death at the hands of the police. And while the narrative just kind of barrels past it, McCullers seems to say, look at the way we just barrel past deaths like these. It seemed so horribly fresh, sadly current. (And as an aside, I couldn't read this story without thinking about the plot in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in which Willie loses both his legs because he gets frostbite in jail.) Though Clock Without Hands ends with the news of federally mandated school integration, it's ultimately pessimistic about our national ability to root out and deal with the rot of racism.
McCullers is better than anyone else at finding the intersection between the political and the universal. One of the book's big themes is grief: the Judge can't get over the deaths of his wife and son. Sherman grieves for the mother he has never known, and J. T. experiences a kind of anticipatory grief as he faces his own death:
But now he dwelt on inexplicable deaths. He thought of children, exact and delicate as jewels in their white satin coffins. And that pretty singing teacher who swallowed a bone at a fish fry and died within the hour. And Johnny Clane, and the Milan boys who died during the first world war and the last. And how many others? How? Why? He was aware of the knocking sound in the basement. It was a rat--last week a rat had overturned a bottle of asafetida and for days the stench was so terrible that his porter refused to work in the basement. There was no rhythm in death--only the rhythm of the rat, and the stench of corruption. And the pretty singing teacher, the blond young flesh of Johnny Clane--the jewel-like children--all ended in the liquefying corpse and coffin stench.
Yikes! But at the same time McCullers challenges us to interrogate whose deaths exactly we find inexplicable. We're saddened by the death of children, and the "blond young flesh" of the Judge's son, but who takes time to mourn for Grown Boy, killed by the police, or Sherman, killed by a judge? Or the many sentence to death by the Judge through entirely legal means? Death is so very sad, and empathy is so necessary--that's what McCullers says over and over again, in every novel--but it is so easy to extend empathy only to those who look and think like us. What would radical empathy look like? How would it transform our communities, ourselves? Clock Without Hands doesn't really seem to believe that it's possible, as necessary as it is.
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