Lover Man by Alston Anderson

Lots of girls were leaning on the sills behind the screens in their windows. Some of them were smiling and others were just looking at us. I was about to help load the trash barrels on to the truck when I saw her. She had long, black hair curling down around her shoulders, but what with the screen and all I couldn't see her face properly. So I walked over and stood below her kitchen. As I stood there looking up at her it looked to me like she was saying 'yes' with her eyes. I didn't know yes what; just yes. I thought she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen; even prettier than Maybelle, the first girl I ever loved. I just stood there, looking at her, much as a starving man would a ripe orange that's just out of his jumping reach.

'I'm going marry you,' I said.

She laughed as if she'd been goosed. 'You and who else?' she said.

The stories in Alston Anderson's Lover Man stretch from small-town Alabama to a residential school in eastern North Carolina to the streets of Harlem. Their heroes are a loosely connected gathering of Black men and women engaged in the petty business of small town life: courting, drinking and playing games, marrying and cheating, razzing one another in the slightly formalized fashion known as "the dozens," working, working, working, pining, dying. Their voices are marked by the off-kilter music of vernacular speech, which, for Anderson, is made of malapropisms made good: scrucial for crucial, innercent for innocent (and of course, doesn't that reflect something of the spiritual coin that innocence provides?). As the stories move northward, the vernacular is overlaid with the language and patterns of jazz, with man and kats and pad and mother-hubbers.

Lover Man, written in the late 50's, is published here by McNally Editions as a kind of lost text, and the afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa describes its falling out of favor as a consequence of its apolitical nature at a time when the pointedly political work of writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright was in ascendance. But as they say, the personal is political, and all the great world-turning themes of class and race and sex boil just beneath the surface. Sexuality, in particular, sits just behind the narrative of a story like "North Carolina School Days," about Aaron (or "Lil One"), who, shortly after a tearful goodbye to his roommate, finds himself in bed with the girlfriend he idolizes, unable to perform. As an ending, it's--pardon me--anticlimactic, but perhaps only because Aaron must face it mutely, with a lack of understanding; he's no Baldwin character. As the reader, it's not lost on us--or it least it shouldn't be--that the roommates at this particular boarding school call each other "old gal" as a custom. Similarly, the protagonist of "Dance of the Infidels" does not, and likely cannot, explain why he gets on a train to travel hundreds of miles uninvited to the Harlem apartment of an acquaintance with whom he shared a passing love of jazz LPs.

The two characters that interest me most among these stories are the title character of "Old Man Maypeck" and the German Herr Schaub of "Comrade." The former is black, the latter white; yet, in a way, they share a worldview that makes them stand out among the "apolitical." Old Man Maypeck is the oldest man in town, and the only one who can remember slavery; he describes to a younger man (Lil One/Aaron again) the difference between "house n--ers and field n--ers": "Field n--ers walk like they ain't a care in the world, and house n--ers is right nervous and prissy-like, most like a white man. You is a house n--er. Eat up, son." It's meant to be a complement. Maypeck encourages Aaron, 
"Don't you be letting nobody put no race problem foolishness in your head up North; else you'll be just like Conscrucious"--a cautionary tale with a suspicious-sounding name--"The first thing you got to learn about the race problem is that there ain't no race problem. People ain't like cattle or hosses what you can breed and put labels on."

In "Comrade," the protagonist is stationed in Germany after the end of World War II, and helps nurse a stray dog to health before locating its owner, Herr Schaub, and returning it. Schaub is genial and appreciative, and invites the narrator into his home, but nearly provokes a fight by using the German word for "Black man," neger. Herr Schaub explains, and the narrator feels foolish, but he goes on to explain that the "N-word" itself is a Cockney corruption of German, and so it's not worth getting so upset about that either. The etymology is as dubious as the moral claim, but the narrator ends the story by saying, "But if Herr Schaub ever reads this I'd like him to know that Comrade is OK by me, and I hope we never have to fight one another no more."

What interests me about both Old Man Maypeck and Herr Schaub is that their moral outlooks are layered in irony, and not so easily dismissed. We turn away from Old Man Maypeck's toadyism, his love for the "Old Master," but we must admit that he's right that people "ain't like cattle or hosses," and the narrator's father's assertion that he's simply crazy doesn't sit right, either. Herr Schaub's wisdom curdles quickly with his bad etymology, but the narrator seems to understand that behind even this misguided claim there is a deep desire to show friendship and acceptance, to hope that fighting will end. In both figures there is a straining to understand, and find sympathy for, the "Why can't we all just get along" approach to racial reconciliation, even as it seems deeply misguided. Although, as the afterword notes, Anderson once wrote a letter in support of William F. Buckley's beliefs regarding civil rights, so what do I know? Maybe we're supposed to take Old Man Maypeck at his word.

But I don't think so. Irony is Anderson's bread and butter, and it appears throughout these stories as a kind of verbal trickery, even warfare. It's there in "The Dozens," about a boy who drowns in the middle of that teasing game that skirts the line between irony and truth, and the guilt that his friend must live with thereafter. It's there most often in the conversations between women and men, especially the Lover Men of the title, whose thickly layered irony is a ploy toward getting a woman into bed. One of the best stories is "A Sound of Screaming," about a man who takes his mistress for an abortion, and who must sit with her for the next several hours as the fetus is painfully passed. The conversation between them teeters on an ironic edge; in a moment of crisis they are simultaneously desperate for and despising one another. In "North Carolina School Days," Aaron's ironic capacity fails as surely as his libido; stuck one-on-one with Del he can think of nothing to say. By contrast, the muteness of the friendly jazz-lovers in "Dance of the Infidels" seems to suggest a total failure of irony in the face of a kind of relationship that, for the Alabamian at least, has no social governance because it's simply too unthinkable. The stories of Lover Man may seem at times quite simple. ("That's it? He couldn't get it up?") But I think those who pay close attention to the dialogue will see how multi-layered they are, and what's happening just beneath the surface.