Don’t judge a book by its category.
At least not Brent Staples’ new book.
He’s the author of “Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White” (Pantheon), a memoir about his youth in Chester, Pa., his years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctoral degree in behavioral sciences in 1982, and his emergence as a journalist.
Staples complains that what he has written is seen by many as primarily an example of what is often called “the black experience,” a designation he regards as confining and misleading.
“I despise the expression,” says Staples, interviewed in Chicago during a recent book tour. “There is no such thing. Black people’s lives in this country are too varied to be reduced to a single term.”
“Parallel Time,” he says, has kinship with coming-of-age memoirs by writers such as Willie Morris (“North Toward Home”), Russell Baker (“Growing Up”) and Frank Conroy (“Stop-Time”), all of whom are white. (Conroy’s 1967 memoir inspired Staples’ title.)
“My book is a literary work,” Staples says. “Being black enriches my experience; it doesn’t define me.”
He hopes to have the subtitle changed for the paperback edition. “I’d prefer `An American Story’ or simply `A Memoir,’ ” Staples says. “I’m writing about universal themes-family and leaving home and developing your own identity-which all Americans can enjoy and understand.
“All of us in this country have more in common than we have differences. Our skin color may not be the same, but we’re the same people, the same biological unit.”
This fact tends to get lost, Staples has written, because “when the news, entertainment and publishing industries embark on a `black story,’ they often focus, with a kind of perverse romanticism, on the swaggering urban criminal.”
Thus, Staples says, the “black experience” is usually a shorthand reference for an angry, urban black. “Typically, it’s someone who has been treated badly by white society and is furious about it: `I was a teenage criminal.’ “
He cites “Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member” about Kody Scott, imprisoned in California, but he also could mention another recently published memoir, “Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America” (Random House).
Its author is fellow journalist Nathan McCall, who was sentenced to prison for armed robbery when he was 19 and writes about the crimes he committed while younger and his struggle to go straight, complete college, find a place in the “white mainstream” and overcome the rage he once felt toward all whites.
“I was afraid and distrustful of whites,” says McCall, also in Chicago recently to promote his book. “It took time for that fear to soften and for me to learn to trust and be more receptive to people as individuals. It was a long, difficult process, but it’s been rewarding.”
Despite Staples’ objection to having “Parallel Time” relegated solely to the “black bookshelf,” his and McCall’s books have been treated by some as chips off the same literary tradition.
Time magazine paired them for a review in its March 7 issue, and Publishers Weekly, in a Jan. 3 article, included them in a list to illustrate the diversity in black non-fiction in 1994 in 1994.
The linkage of their books is understandable:
– The authors are almost the same age and toil at two of the country’s best newspapers. Staples, 42, once a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, is an editorial writer for The New York Times, and McCall, 39, is a reporter for The Washington Post.
– Each book’s dust jacket features a picture of its author, who gazes at the camera with a countenance that could be described as pensive, brooding-even smoldering. And each subtitle makes a point about race.
– Both were released in February for Black History Month, which Staples would like to abolish. (“It ghettoizes literature.”)
The same muse?
In its review, Time asserts, to Staples’ chagrin, that he and McCall are marching to the same muse as W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright and Malcolm X, who “wielded their autobiographies like emancipating swords.”
McCall, in fact, was profoundly influenced by Wright’s novel “Native Son,” about Bigger Thomas, a young black man convicted of rape and murder.
For Staples, the most important writers are Conroy of “Stop-Time” and novelist Saul Bellow, who taught at the U. of C. when Staples was there.
“Stereotypically, a black writer is automatically ascribed a mentor like James Baldwin or Richard Wright,” Staples says. “They’re both interesting, but they’re not modern in the sense I strive to be.”
He aspires to Bellow’s “cool, analytical prose,” even though he is repelled by what he sees as Bellow’s penchant for demonizing blacks.
“I would be really excited by his writing, then he’d suddenly have some black guy step out of the shadows and cut some woman’s throat,” he says. “My admiration of Bellow and my contempt for his treatment of black people were always rubbing up against each other.”
What may be most intriguing about coupling the two books is to ponder the futility of predicting any child’s future and to marvel at the utter disparity of the authors.
McCall’s tortuous path
“My intent was to be brutally honest,” McCall says. He writes with unsparing detail, raw language and sustained anger.
One of five children, he grew up in a gracious development of single-family homes in Portsmouth, Va. His stepfather, retired from the Navy, was a security guard, gardener and reliable provider; his mother was a homemaker.
At 9 he endured racial taunts and fisticuffs in his year at a predominantly white school. In his teen years, hungry to belong, he would run with the wrong crowd “out of immaturity and a perverted concept of manhood.”
At 14 he took part in the first of numerous gang rapes. At 15 he acquired a handgun (“I was smitten by its power”). At 16 he engaged in a drive-by shooting at a rival gang; the same year, to demonstrate his hatred of whites, he fired a shotgun into the picture window of a living room where a white family was gathered in front of a TV set.
At 17 he moved from burglary (“I felt good as I rifled through those people’s most private possessions, I felt a peculiar power over them, even though we’d never met”) to street stickups ( they “gave me a rush I never got” from burglaries).
He would try to drop drug dealing (“too time-consuming”) and would be sentenced to 30 days for shooting and almost killing a gang rival who spoke disrespectfully of the unmarried mother of his son (yet, he says, “responsibilities that came with parenthood were a bummer”).
In jail at 19, he learned chess, which taught him that actions have consequences. After three years in prison he entered college in Virginia, graduated and worked for the local newspaper. He later joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, then the Post, married, divorced, had two more children out of wedlock, then married and divorced their mother.
A New York Times review, while lauding McCall’s “uncompromising candor” and his “enormous willpower” in righting himself, is distressed that the author’s “fury” prevents “any real analysis of why his early life turned out as it did and of what can be done to save a generation of young black men from the same fate.”
In addition, the review says, McCall “seldom gives a shred of credence to the point of view of anyone else, white or black. . . . Mr. McCall does not sound like an easy person to live or work with.”
Staples, second oldest of nine children, grew up with a truck driver father who drank heavily, sometimes beat Staples’ mother and occasionally moved out. The family, often strapped for cash, had seven addresses by the time Staples was 14.
Staples writes with humor and insight about the warmth and the tyranny of family and the wondrous and frightening expedition through childhood, his serendipitous decision to attend college, then gain a graduate fellowship at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities.
Writer Toni Morrison was especially supportive when he began his memoir. “She said publishers and the press say to black people, `Tell us how angry you are about things,’ ” Staples says. “Toni said: `What about love? We have love.’ That’s all she needed to say.
“I loved the people of my (black) neighborhood, and I loved the Ukrainians and Polish people we lived among too. I don’t have rage at them, although as a little boy, they caused me some hurt. But I was raised in my mother’s tradition of being compassionate toward people.”
His account of his time at the U. of C. is absorbing. “When I arrived in Chicago at 22 and entered this new world, all those Gothic towers and drama, I was frightened, of course, but I was also filled with a sense of possibility.”
A Tribune review describes Staples as “a writer of cool detachment”-thank you, Mr. Bellow-“and brave introspection” and his memoir as “elegant” and “affecting.” And nowhere is it judged as a reflection of the “black experience.”
Still, Staples says, “My next book won’t give anyone even the remote possibility of labeling it `black.’ I think I’ll write about Baroque art.”
