The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  In the August 1940 issue of The New Republic, Richard Wright compared McCullers to Faulkner, writing, “To me the most impressive aspect of ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.”

  Dr. Copeland’s house, while more substantial than those of other African American characters in the novel, lacks the warmth and comfort of a real home. It is bare and dark, for although the doctor has electricity, he barely uses it, even at night. Even on very hot nights, he sits close to the fire, in a straight-backed chair, “motionless. . . . Even his eyes, which stared from behind the silver rims of his spectacles, did not change their fixed somber gaze.” Then he picks up a book and, because the room is very dark, he has to hold it close to the stove to make out the print. “Tonight he read Spinoza. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, true purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.”

  Dr. Copeland is an educated man, familiar with Spinoza and Karl Marx, an honest and hardworking physician, and yet the sense of injustice is so strong and deep in him that he cannot find the words to express it. His frustration is exacerbated by the silence of his own people, even his children, who refuse to participate in his social protest, who do not understand him and take refuge in the church and in God, trying not to step on the white man’s toes. His rage and their silence feed upon each other. His daughter, Portia, who works for Mick’s parents, tells Mick that her father is not like the other “colored” men, explaining that “most of the time he were very quiet. But then some nights he would break out in a kind of fit. He could get madder than any man I ever seen.” Her diagnosis is that “he full of books and worrying. He done lost God and turned his back to religion. All his troubles come down just to that.”

  Dr. Copeland has tuberculosis and must take his temperature four times a day and get an X-ray once a month. He begins work very early in the morning, going “from one house to another and the work was unending.” “All his life he knew that there was a reason for his working. He always knew that he was meant to teach his people. All day he would go with his bag from house to house and on all things he would talk to them.” If he were able to rest, he might be able to heal, but he cannot. “For there was another thing bigger than the tiredness—and this was the strong true purpose. He would think of this purpose until sometimes, after a long day and night of work, he would become blank so that he would forget for a minute what the purpose was. And then it would come to him again and he would be restless and eager to take on a new task. But the words often stuck in his mouth, and his voice now was hoarse and not loud as it had been before. He pushed the words into the sick and patient faces of the Negroes who were his people.”

  Dr. Copeland’s father was a preacher, and his mother a slave who, after securing her freedom, became a washerwoman. They had taught him and made enough money, out of their weekly savings of two or three dollars a week, to provide him with eighty dollars to go up north. He had made money in a blacksmith’s shop, then as a waiter and a bellboy, then he had gone to school and after ten years become a doctor. He married the woman he loved and had four children whom he also loved, but his mission, his desire to set his people free, would get in the way of his personal feelings. “The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction. At times he drank strong liquor and beat his head against the floor. In his heart there was a savage violence, and once he grasped the poker from the hearth and struck down his wife.” She took the children, went to her father’s house and never returned, leaving him “an old man in an empty house.”

  During a family gathering, his relatives all talk of miracles and God. His father-in-law, a crafty tenant farmer and the family patriarch, explains to his children that while working the fields, he likes to dream of Jesus appearing to him and his telling Jesus that “us is all sad colored peoples.” Jesus would then place “his holy hand upon our heads and straightway us will be white as cotton.” Portia’s husband, Highboy, when sick with pneumonia, had seen God’s face looking at him through the fireplace, and God had “a large white man’s face with a white beard and blue eyes.”

  Dr. Copeland, listening to them, “felt the old evil anger in him. The words rose inchoately to his throat and he could not speak them. . . . These are my people, he tried to tell himself—but because he was dumb this thought did not help him now. He sat tense and sullen.” He stares at them with “angry misery” and knows that if he could find a way to tell his children how “the sight of their faces made a black swollen feeling in him,” the act of telling them “would ease the sharp ache in his heart. But they would not listen or understand.” So he sits in silence, and leaves the house without saying goodbye, because “if he could not speak the whole long truth no other word would come to him.”

  Unlike her father, Portia tries to stay clear of racial issues. She lives with her brother Willie and her husband, Highboy, and is proud of the way they work and live together. She finds every opportunity to repeat how Highboy pays the rent, Portia provides the food and Willie pays for their Saturday-night outings. “Us has always been like three-piece twinses,” she says. But the churchgoing and the God fearing, the not stepping on the white man’s toes—none of this will save them from the white man’s wrath. One night, Willie gets into a fight with another black man, whom he injures. The police arrest him and send him to prison, and from there to a chain gang near Atlanta, and then the family hears that he and two of his friends whom a white guard kept picking on had been punished for fighting back and that all three had been locked in an “ice-cold room” with their feet bound by a rope suspended from the ceiling. Their cries for help went unheeded for three days. When their jailers finally came for them, their legs were frozen and they had gangrene, so both of Willie’s legs were sawed off. This incident brings Copeland the kind of peace that comes with the loss of all hope. “In this he knew a certain strong and holy gladness. The persecuted laugh, and the black slave sings to his outraged soul beneath the whip. A song was in him now—although it was not music but only the feeling of a song. And the sodden heaviness of peace weighted down his limbs so that it was only with the strong, true purpose that he moved. Why did he go onward? Why did he not rest here upon the bottom of utmost humiliation and for a while take his content?”

  15

  In the Kellys’ kitchen, Portia tells Mick what happened to Willie. Her father is with her, sitting on a stool in the corner. Soon Singer also comes in. As Mick hears the story, she becomes more and more angry. Mick is concerned; she asks questions; she wants those prison guards to be punished. She says, “They ought to be treated just like they did Willie and them,” she says. “Worse. I wish I could round up some people and kill those men myself.” Portia believes that this is unchristian and takes consolation in her belief that “us can just rest back and know they going to be chopped up with pitchforks and fried everlasting by Satan.” Mick is unconvinced. She hands Dr. Copeland a cup of coffee and says, “I wish I could kill them.”

  In her outline, McCullers writes that the four main characters, although very different, share a great deal in spirit. They all have something to give without expecting anything in return. Portia expresses the same idea more poetically. She says that Mick “favors” her father more than anyone Portia has known. Then she goes on to clarify: “I don’t mean in the face or in any kind of looks. I was speaking about the shape and color of your souls.” This is what Richard Wright must have meant when he wrote that McCullers’s portrayal of African Americans was rooted not in any polit
ical belief but in an attitude, one that is very difficult to preserve in real life, and which, in a sense, is the essence of the novel. Because a great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.

  Jake responds more politically. He wants to capitalize on the event and to use it to mobilize people, rushing to Dr. Copeland’s house and asking a startled and uncomprehending Willie to go on a tour with him so he can tell his story and thus agitate and educate the masses about the injustice of the system. Mick’s reaction, like Huck’s response to Jim, is more from the heart. It is rooted in Willie’s wound. A month after she hears the story of what happened to Willie, she still has nightmares at night.

  Throughout the years of Carson McCullers’s childhood and adolescence, Dr. Mady Copeland, his daughter, Portia, her brothers and husband and the whole African American community around them were growing inside her. Like Mark Twain, she had her first encounter with racial injustice during childhood, when her maid Lucille, “who was one of the kindest and youngest of our nurses, she was only fourteen and a marvelous cook,” worked late one night and called a cab to go home. Carson and her brother watched as Lucille left and the cabdriver refused to drive her, yelling, “I’m not driving no damn nigger.” Seeing “Lucille’s embarrassment, and the feeling of ugliness of the whole injustice” made her brother run under the house, weeping, but Carson, “torn with fury,” screamed to the driver, “You bad, bad man.” Then, she recalled, “I went to join my brother, and we held hands in order to comfort ourselves, because there was nothing, nothing else we could do.” Decades later, not long before her death, she would write, “We were exposed so much to the sight of humiliation and brutality, not physical brutality, but the brutal humiliation of human dignity which is even worse. Lucille comes back to me over and over; gay, charming Lucille. She would stand at the window and sing a current tune which went ‘tip toe to the window.’ Blues tunes were not her taste as she was much too gay for them.”

  Dr. Copeland feels that something more should be done to protest Willie’s treatment. For him it is a matter of “the strong, true purpose, the will to justice.” He goes to court and asks to see the judge. The deputy sheriff and two other white men make fun of him, and when he insists, he’s taken in and booked and beaten with clubs, but “a glorious strength was in him and he heard himself laughing aloud as he fought.” He was kept in jail overnight, his fever came back and the next morning he was freed. Portia, Highboy, the pharmacist Marshall Nicholas and Mr. Singer were there when he was released.

  “Dignity” is the password that links the young man Ramin to the young girl on 60 Minutes to the fictional Mick and Mady Copeland. For Ramin and for Dr. Copeland, worse than the physical pain inflicted on them was the humiliation they had to suffer, and the added shame of having to remain silent. Dr. Copeland tells Jake Blount, “In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul. I know now how wrong I was. I have been a traitor to myself and to my people. All that is rot. Now is the time to act and to act quickly. Fight cunning with cunning and might with might.”

  But Dr. Copeland, despite his rage, is wiser than that. He later tells Jake, “The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.” Despite his fury, his solution is “to lead more than one thousand Negroes in this county on a march. A march to Washington. All of us together in one solid body.” He is mocked by Jake, as he would have been by many. Years later, close to her death in 1967, McCullers was reminded that she had anticipated the 1963 March on Washington—another instance, as Nabokov would put it, of life imitating art.

  16

  I tried to find Mike Wright in 2012. He was the only person I could think of who might be able to help me track down “the other Mike”—that was what we called him back then. We were all in the movement against the war in Vietnam together, and “the other Mike” was a Vietnam veteran. He seldom talked in any of our numerous meetings, formal or informal, where almost everyone had something to say and few were too shy to interrupt and make themselves heard. Only Mike would sit in a corner and withdraw into a fetal position, or as close as one can come while sitting in an upright chair. Sometimes it seemed as if his body were curled to prevent an imminent imaginary blow. This made me notice him. I wanted to know what had made him so withdrawn, what it was that he was trying to avoid or hide. He was the gentlest among us, quiet, soft-spoken, kind, and he seemed so very vulnerable.

  Perhaps I would have forgotten him were it not for an incident that refused to be forgotten. One day I was told by a friend that Mike had forced his beloved dog into a sack, tied the sack tightly, and begun furiously beating it with a stick. The act seemed all the more violent because it was committed by such a mild and gentle person. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and afterwards, all those times we were arguing, planning protests and denouncing the war atrocities, I wondered in the back of my mind, What is Mike thinking? Did he ever talk to anyone, to his veteran buddies, at least, about what had happened?

  I had not kept Mike Wright’s information, so I went online and the first thing that caught my eye was a blog post on which someone had written, “I heard 2 or 3 days ago that local Norman ‘character’ Mike (Michael Phillip) Wright was found unconscious on a bench in Norman and that he was not expected to live. And I just heard that he has died and already been cremated.” This was followed by a few comments about this “town character,” Mike Wright, and the confirmation of his death. With a few more keystrokes I found an obituary, which stated blandly that Michael Phillip Wright had died on “September 16, 2009, consequent to a stroke.”

  I thought I knew Mike, but I learned from his obituary that he had been a National Merit Scholar at OU, that he had a master’s in sociology and that he had “developed a social science and market research firm. His work has been published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, AIDS Education and Prevention, and the Proceedings from the Oklahoma Symposium on Artificial Intelligence.” As I sought, now that it was too late, to retrieve Mike, to learn more about him, I discovered that in his later years he had become obsessed with the president of the University of Oklahoma, former senator David Boren. When I left Norman, he had been an activist and a loner, but in time protesting seems to have become his profession in life. His mild manner made me think of him as a Woody Guthrie type, not a “character” or a nice, if a little crazy, man.

  It was only after his death that I discovered Mike’s website, In Michael’s Opinion, and began to read his posts. They were filled with conspiracy theories about the CIA and the FBI, with David Boren somehow always in the middle of it all. Mike had theories about 9/11 and AIDS research, about air pollution and noise pollution, and he believed that Nick Berg, a University of Oklahoma graduate who became an American contractor and was killed in Iraq, was a CIA infiltrator who provided Zacarias Moussaoui—the would-be “twentieth hijacker” on 9/11—with his airline ticket. Later, the theory went, the CIA had set him up in Iraq so that he would be killed and “the secret would die with him.”

  The one unifying thread throughout was David Boren. Mike believed that the OU president was gay and that he had both favored and harassed young men in the workplace. He believed that Boren’s friend and protégé George Tenet was either gay or bisexual and that they were coconspirators. In Michael’s Opinion offers up gossip and “facts”: Boren and Tenet were “reported by TIME to be having a ‘leisurely breakfast’ together in a Washington hotel on the morning of the 9/11 attack.” In the ceremony in which George W. Bush presents Tenet with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Bush “talks about the fact that Tenet was always seen around the CIA with an unlit cigar in his mouth.” Mike asks us to no
te “the knowing smile from General Tommy Franks” in the video and the fact that Boren, sitting in the audience, is seen “rubbing his hand over another man’s back and resting it on his shoulder.” There was no way I could fully understand his treatises on AIDS, the CIA or 9/11. Minute details were meticulously marshaled and assembled into a text packed with equal parts facts and fantasy.

  I found a post on another website about this “old” lonely man, who one person claimed had had a heart attack and died on a bench at his favorite haunt, the OU campus library. One recent graduate remembered him “quite fondly.” He mentioned that when he had worked at the library for three years, Mike would come in to use the computers, typing his “latest conspiracy theories.” To this young student Mike was “by and large benign.”

  17

  Carson McCullers loved the snow. It became the symbol of her elsewhere, a place of tranquillity, as opposed to the restless rage of the southern heat. She loved to live in cold places, and despite the fact that the cold was so inimical to her fragile health, she took every opportunity to walk in the snow and often paid for it by becoming sick. She gave this love of snow to the two characters closest to herself, Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Frankie in The Member of the Wedding.

  “Early in the mornings it was a little cool and their shadows stretched out tall on the sidewalk in front of them,” Mick muses. “But in the middle of the day the sky was always blazing hot. The glare was so bright it hurt to keep your eyes open. A lot of times the plans about the things that were going to happen to her were mixed up with ice and snow. Sometimes it was like she was out in Switzerland and all the mountains were covered with snow and she was skating on cold, greenish-colored ice. Mister Singer would be skating with her. And maybe Carole Lombard or Arturo Toscanini who played on the radio. They would be skating together and then Mister Singer would fall through the ice and she would dive in without regard for peril and swim under the ice and save his life. That was one of the plans always going on in her mind.”