‘Emancipation Day’ by Wayne Grady

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn  (originally posted Dec. 9, 2013)

Back in 1949, the unsurpassed director of American actors Elia Kazan made a movie called Pinky. It starred Jeanne Crain as a nurse, African American by blood, who chose to pass for white as that allowed her to enter nursing school and in general lead a far easier and accepted life than being a ‘woman of colour.’ Flash forward two decades and there was a bit of scripted dialogue on the American sitcom All in the Family, where the bigoted Archie Bunker was confronted by his liberal step-son Mike Stivic about the former’s enjoyment of the black singer Lena Horne as evidence against Archie’s racism against blacks. Archie’s reply – and I may be paraphrasing slightly, but Google search has its limits – was, “Lena Horne is no Negro! She’s a good-looking white woman dipped in caramel!”

Let us state the shriekingly obvious as it is at the core of Wayne Grady’s novel: of all the causes wherefrom one chunk of humanity feels frightened or threatened by another chunk of humanity, the most ridiculous of these fears and prejudices is skin colour. Skin itself has never expressed hatred, mugged an innocent or started a war; skin requires a human inhabitant to do any of that. Skin itself is as ambivalent about greed and violence as are fingernails.

However, racism does persist. The Italian philosopher, essayist, and occasional novelist Umberto Eco wrote a quite brilliant piece called “Inventing the Enemy” a few years ago about how we, the Western European and our descendants tend to exaggerate and essentially turn into monsters any different culture we do not instantly understand or that – perhaps more to the point – does not instantly capitulate to us. I shan’t go quoting extensively from Eco as we have a novel to discuss here; however he notes that throughout Western history differences in skin tone, shapes of skulls, religious beliefs (particularly between Jews and Muslims) and so forth have been seen as evidence that these Others are most certainly Satan’s advance guard. Oh yes, and they tend to smell something awful too. It is of course the rankest of stupidity, even though pointing out the stupidity of man is rather like proclaiming one’s latest discovery, whereby night tends to be dark. Hey, who knew until someone pointed it out?

Emancipation Day steps boldly into the land of Pinky. Windsor, Ontario native Jack Lewis is black by blood yet white by skin and everything in the novel is a riff on that essential fact. Who on Earth, the story asks, would choose to be black (or ‘coloured’ as the adjective was in the time frame of the 1940s) if one actually had a choice in the matter?

Perhaps the most riveting interview I ever saw in my life – and this bit of television I actually can recall word-by-word – was between the late tennis champion Arthur Ashe (who died of AIDS) and Roy Firestone on ESPN’s series Up Close. Firestone asked a brilliant question of Ashe: “Which is harder; having AIDS or being black in America?” Ashe’s answer was instant, which gave it power. Being black was much harder. When he walked into a room, people there did not instantly know he had AIDS, but they instantly observed the colour of his skin and all their interactions with him were tailored by skin colour. Colour. Mattered. First.

So what Grady does in Emancipation Day is to create a hypothesis of choice. Jack is the son of an evidently black man and a fairer skinned yet also Negro woman who happens to be born, shall we say, on the palest end of the spectrum. Jack (short for Jackson) not only can pass for white, no one ever questions whether or not he is white. He is therefore allowed to play with kids he might not have otherwise been allowed to play with, take jobs he might otherwise not have been considered for, even live in neighbourhoods – in dear old Canada yet! – he could not have lived in had he been obviously and declaredly black. And oh yes, he marries a nice Newfoundland girl, while stationed there during World War II, whom he never tells that he is coloured. When Vivian eventually, and I mean eventually, after years of marriage, learns that her husband is black she says it would not have mattered. Jack remains in denial.

It is that continuing state of denial that may well be the flaw in an otherwise enjoyable novel. Northrop Frye, that great analyst of the pantheon of English literature whom we all had to quote at length in our university essays, was absolutely adamant on one point. The principal character in a novel must – Must! – go through a catharsis. There must be a journey; he or she must end up different as a result of that cathartic event. Hamlet sees a ghost, Gatsby says in astonishment, ‘You love me, too?’ etcetera and so forth. No one ever ends up where he began. Yet except for the last chapter, which in all honestly feels stapled on like Eeyore’s tail, Jack remains as defiantly in denial as Cleopatra’s barge. Do forgive the pun.

The reader can accept, enjoy and even admire obstinate characters – that has held true at the least since Sophocles came up with Oedipus Rex – but even Oedipus eventually has his well-drawn convergence of truths that leads him to finally admit ‘Holy crap. I banged Mama.’ For a novel to work as a novel, the reader insists on that ‘I banged Mama’ moment. Shoving it in as a quasi-epilogue just doesn’t quite get it done as we readers want to play along and feel that moment. When and how and with what words does Jack admit his truth to the noble and (cliché alert) long-suffering Vivian? Well, beats the hell out of me.

Those who love this novel – and it is thoroughly entertaining, don’t mark me wrong – will castigate me by saying that I am a prey to formula and insisting on theatrics. Well you know what? You’re absolutely correct. If I am going to journey at sea with a character (Jack in the Navy suffers from grotesque seasickness in a sledgehammer metaphor moment), I sure don’t want to miss the arrival in port where everyone shouts ‘Hurrah!’ and thrown ribbons arch from the dock into the sea. I want to feel and not simply observe. In Emancipation Day – I observed. The view from the observation deck is great; the view from the tiller is critical. I like critical.

Last point and I’m afraid it is not a good one. Jack is also a trombonist who because of his adamant insistence on being as white as possible chooses to only love the likes of Tommy Dorsey and a theme song of Blue Moon rather than that of the jazz of say Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Louis ‘Pops’ Armstrong etc. I have seen this terrain explored before, in Roddy Doyle’s ‘Oh Play That Thing’… and you know… if a white guy from Dublin could really grasp and express the psychedelic swamp of jazz music in the club scene of inner city America decades ago … I wish Wayne Grady could have done it as well. Doyle had decades and an ocean to contend with; Grady, the same decades and just the Detroit River. Doyle made us feel; in Grady, we observe. It may not sound like much, but brother, the difference really is an ocean.

Doubleday | 336 pages |  $24.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0385677660