Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
I was definitely more together than I was at the start of the summer. It didn’t seem like that much time had passed, but I had to be a bit smarter. Just a little. Look at the way I was last Labor Day. An idiot! Fifteen looks at fourteen and says, That guy was an idiot. And fifteen looks at eight and says, That guy knew so little. Why can’t fifteen and three quarters look back at fifteen and a half and say, That guy didn’t know anything.
I had read Whitehead’s award-winning The Underground Railroad last year and was planning on trying his new one, Nickel Boys this fall, and I certainly still will, but my son read Sag Harbor and left it on my desk one afternoon when he had finished it. I thought I would give it a try and almost from the first sentence (“First you had to settle the question of out.”) I was hooked. Sag Harbor is a coming of age novel set in the black vacation enclave on eastern Long Island of the title. It is sweet and slightly bitter, with glimpses of the serious just visible through the goofiness and the laugh-out-loud fun.
Benji and his brother Reggie are having their usual summer vacation except that this year their parents have decided they are old enough to be there alone during the week and only come out for the weekends. Benji relates their adventures and misadventures with charm and energy in a voice that makes the frequent tangents into neighborhood history, music appreciation, teenage power dynamics and male ritual thoroughly enjoyable. The novel is set in the mid-eighties (after my time) and it captures this period and its Long Island environs brilliantly, with many guest appearances by Hamptons folk and a special guest appearance by Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam Crew.
The boys are all from prosperous black families and attend private or suburban schools – so that for most of the year they are the only black kids in their social circles. They are learning to be teenagers, trying to learn to be men, but they are also specifically black teenagers trying to learn to be black men. There is a deceptiveness to the humor and sweetness that dominates the portrayal of this communal growth, but the humor and nostalgia dominates. We are given a chart that explains how black teens insult each other, explanations for how to deal with your parents’ nosy friends, confessions about enjoying music that is silly and soft and long discussions of how to deal with peer pressure and girls. There are moments when the seriousness of the future stains the nostalgia a darker, sharper tone of sepia – when the boys fool around with BB guns, Benji lets us know that for some of them this is their first of several encounters with guns; the freedom from parents morphs into a growing knowledge that the family is falling apart while Benji’s father’s loquacious authority after a drink edges toward bullying.
Much of this sense of foreboding comes from the fact that Benji knows this will be his last summer at Sag. Like his older sister and all of the other teens from other families, sixteen year olds do not come out, but get summer jobs or internships and hang out in the city with their school friends. The passage I quote above is from the last paragraph of the novel and by then you know Benji (who has been trying for 360 pages to get everyone to drop is childish name and start calling him Ben) is unreasonably confident in his future even as he is unreasonably anxious about his present. His plans for 10th grade will fall apart with the same exactitude his plans have been falling apart all summer. In fact, we know from the various hints he has dropped, that he is moving into a much more difficult future, that Sag Harbor has been an annual respite from the real world, a respite he will no longer have. In another writer’s hands, this sense of foreboding could dominate the end of the novel, but I felt mostly gratitude that I got to spend Benji’s last summer of childhood with him.
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