White Tears
Page 25
Something breaks. My knife seeks Corny’s back, finds only air. Blade cutting through smoke. I am elsewhere, in some other time and place. My eyes take a moment to adjust. Through the haze I see a well-furnished suite, a green baize card table laid out with an ashtray and a tray of fresh glasses, as if later on there is going to be a game. A man is sitting in an armchair, next to a standing lamp. He wears old-fashioned lace-up boots under his seersucker suit.
—We’re stag here, so we can afford to relax a little.
The room is full of cigar smoke. I cannot see his face. Then he moves and the light catches him and I see it is Jack Wallace. There are other people in the shadows. Big Jim Wallace, Carter’s father, Don. Wilbur, the judge. All the generations here and now. Cornelius stands at the back, whispering in the ear of another man I don’t know. Time is flattened here in the back room. Tight collars are loosened. A discreet button on the pants. Drinks are poured, though not for me. Jack Wallace sighs.
—Look, son. The Judge and I were thinking that there must be a way to work things out. You seem very agitated.
He gestures with his cigar at the knife in my hand. The Judge nods.
—You’re right, Jack. He looks upset. What’s on your mind, son?
I am dead. I am down in the levee.
—Probably not anymore. Flood control system’s been upgraded several times since then.
One or two of them laugh at that. What happened to me did not happen. For me, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently or don’t remember it at all. Whatever I tell them, it will always slip their minds. Your family made a fortune, I say, because money is what they understand. They talk to each other. They pour more drinks. When I speak I am not speaking. When I speak, it dies away into silence. Still, I carry on, because dimly I am aware that this is only a screen, and something else is happening behind it, something I am unable to look upon directly. Captain Jack carries on in a bantering tone.
—Seems like you’re hung up on the old days, trapped in the past. A lot of things happened back then that—well, let’s just say those were different times.
The Judge leans forward, the ice cubes clinking in his glass.
—It’s a post-racial America now. The only thing we care about is supervision.
He wags an instructing finger.
—You don’t have to work ’em anymore. You don’t have to walk the line with a rifle. All you got to do is get them into the system. Don’t matter how you do it. Speeding ticket. Public nuisance. Once they’re in, your boot is on their neck. Fines, tickets, court fees. And if they can’t pay, well. Days or dollars, one or the other. Either way, we get ours and they stay in their rightful place. Same as it ever was. So put down the knife, son. There’s no purpose to it. You can’t kill something that ain’t got no head.
Big Jim Wallace moves his bulk through the veil of cigar smoke towards a phonograph, a substantial upright walnut chest sitting in the corner of the room. I had not noticed it before.
—Enough talking, let’s play some music.
He slips a 78 out of a paper sleeve and angles it towards me to show the label.
—This is what you want to hear, right?
I shake my head.
—Sure you do. It’s about balance. Fairness. You ought to hear our side of the record.
The needle hits the groove, and into the room rises crackle and hiss. Then all I hear is laughter, hollow, forced, mechanical, accompanied by a jaunty piano. It is the sound of a body undergoing discipline. It is the sound of someone who has been told to jump and is trying to work out how high. Charlie Shaw’s laughter, my laughter. It is the most terrifying sound I have ever heard.
ha ha ha ha
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HOW I FOUND MYSELF ON THE FRONT STEPS of the Saint James Hotel, covered in blood, is not something I know how to speak about. I was dazed, like a man emerging from an anesthetic. The world was new and I was slick and red in the flashing light, looking out at the horrified faces, at the guns pointed, all on me, all down on me. I wondered how I could have done the things I remembered, the chopping and the carving and the slicing and the sawing and the cutting.
Cornelius going back up to his room. Pushing him inside. Begging me, backing away. My blade working like a piston, making a dead man, dragging his corpse into the bathroom. I changed into one of his shirts, a clean shirt, crisp and white. I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign out on the door handle and went looking for the parents.
Carter was only the gate through which it walked. Carter paid the price. Throwing himself at the darkness, begging to be torn up. I was not to blame. Carter opened the gate thro
ugh which it walked into me. For the first time my way was clear. I stalked the corridors and the ground was steady under my feet. No stones in my passway, nothing to trip me up, except the drunk by the elevator, angling for conversation. You have any of those little shrimp appetizers at the cocktail party? Where you in from? Want to go get a nightcap at the bar? I told him I had no time to talk.
Another floor, another empty corridor. The repeated pattern in the carpet marching away in either direction. I knocked on the heavy wooden door.
—Room service.
Candy Wallace opening it, wearing a toweling hotel robe. A little crest embroidered on the breast. Don lying on the bed, a pair of reading glasses balanced on his nose. Candy and Don, safe in their white cocoon. Don, did you order food, she asked.
I spared them nothing. My blade, working. I could not hear the screams, the pleading. All the time I was in another room, far away in the past, listening to that dreadful laughter. And then the blue lights came and I was returned to myself, drenched in blood, sitting on the front steps of the hotel, as the police circled wide around me with their guns.
Believe I buy a graveyard of my own
Believe I buy me a graveyard of my own
Put my enemies all down in the ground
Charlie watched me, sitting there. A skinny white boy, covered in blood. All ridden out. If I’d been black they probably would have shot me, just put me down right there and then. Instead they hung a coat round my shoulders as they led me to the car.
WHEN YOU LISTEN TO AN OLD RECORD, there can be no illusion that you are present at a performance. You are listening through a gray drizzle of static, a sound like rain. You can never forget how far away you are. You always hear it, the sound of distance in time. But what is the connection between the listener and the musician? Does it matter that one of you is alive and one is dead? And which is which?
Living things are those which resist entropy. They possess a boundary of some kind, a membrane or a skin; a metabolism; the ability to react to the world. And to make copies. To pass something on. That’s all Charlie Shaw wanted, to reach forward, to obey the urge of life. I have made no copies. I am a punctum, an end. A point, not a line. I do not know if I have ever been alive. How would I tell? Where in the living creature does life actually lie? No single part of a cell is alive. And life itself is just an aggregate of non-living processes, chemical reactions cascading, birthing complexity. There is no clear border between life and non-life. Once you realize that, so much else unravels. Death walked into me through Carter, but even before that I’m not sure. My blameless suburban childhood and its small pains: none of it felt real to me. And then I brought death back to those I loved, to Leonie, to Carter. I thought I wanted life, but maybe that’s not true. Maybe I never wanted it, was never even capable of wanting it. And now I am here. If this is not hell, it is what comes before it, its antechamber, its downward slope.
The irony, of course, is that in here skin is everything. The color line is absolute. You may not believe in race, but in prison it believes in you. I am supposed to stand with the white man and I have not done that. Here I am the lowest of the low. They have abused me in every possible way.
On your record deck, you played the sound of the middle passage, the blackest sound. You wanted the suffering you didn’t have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk, the admiring glances of your friends. Then came the terror when real darkness first seeped through the walls of your bedroom, the walls designed to keep you safe and dreaming. And finally your rising sense of shame when you admitted to yourself that you were relieved the walls were there. The shame of knowing that you would do nothing, that you would allow it all to carry on.
That is not me. I had darkness enough already. Carter was the one. I never wanted the authority of suffering—I suspected it would have a bitter taste. The needle vibrates, punctures my face just below my left eye. The tattooist’s homemade gun is powered by a motor from an old CD player. The ink is made out of soot. Four tears, one each for Carter, Leonie and their parents. I listen to the buzz of the motor and think of what I learned by listening through the crackle and hiss, into the past: they either add dollars or days and if you don’t have dollars, all you have to give is days.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, without whose support this book would not have been written. I owe a debt to many writers, scholars and collectors, but the work of Douglas A. Blackmon, Marybeth Hamilton, Michael Taft and Bryan Wagner has been particularly important. I’d also like to thank Herman Bennett, Sasha Frere-Jones, Chris King, Amanda Petrusich, Michael Zilkha and Katie Kitamura, my first and best reader. Above all, I would like to acknowledge the singers, poets and musicians whose artistry flows through the blues tradition, particularly those whose names have been lost.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men, as well as a short story collection, Noise, and a novella, Memory Palace. He was a 2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in New York City.
An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Guide
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about White Tears, Hari Kunzru’s dark and powerful novel about two young men whose lives are forever changed by the discovery of a forgotten blues record.
Discussion Questions
1. In the first chapter of White Tears, Seth describes listening to a field recording, saying he felt “I was slipping, that if I wasn’t careful I’d lose my grip on the present and find myself back there, seventy or eighty years in the past” (this page). How do the temporal shifts in the novel often blur the lines of reality or destabilize the narrative? How are Seth’s experiences with blues records—in particular, listening to Charlie Shaw—otherworldly?
2. When Seth meets Carter, he is “in awe of” him (this page). Did you find Carter magnetic? How does Seth’s personality change as a result of their friendship? Does Carter’s relative ease in navigating the world embolden Seth to become more confident?
3. On this page, Seth states, “We really did feel that our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness, but by the time we got to New York, we’d learned not to talk about it.” What do you think this “right to blackness” means? How does it mirror Chester Bly’s attitude? Do you think anyone can claim a “right” to a heritage that is not his own?
4. On this page, Seth states, “There is a place I sometimes go to where no value attaches to anything. The world is flat. One sensation is exactly equal to the next.” At what points in the novel do we see Seth retreat into this attitude? What are the consequences of his doing so?
5. Carter describes himself as “disinherited” from his family, but Seth and his trip to the Wallace summer home reveal the situation is not that simple. How would you describe Carter’s relationship with Cornelius? Leonie?
6. Discuss Seth’s first impression of Leonie. How does his understanding of her change over time? Do you think that Leonie ever possesses any romantic feelings towards Seth? Is theirs a love story, or not?
7. The character introduced as “JumpJim” acts as a narrative bridge between the present and the past. How does Kunzru use JumpJim to provide context for the record’s history?
8. White Tears weaves together the past and the present in a manner that resists narrative convention. How does this movement create a heightened sense of danger in the novel? How does the vacillation between narrative perspectives contribute to the frenzied, nightmare-like tone of the second half of the novel?
9. How is systemic racism addressed over the course of the novel? What does Kunzru’s use of temporal shifts assert about the
existence of racism in this country today?
10. Discuss the dual plotlines of the road trips taken by Chester Bly/JumpJim and Seth/Leonie. How do both groups navigate their time in the South? When is their privilege most apparent? How does each trip explore the fraught history of race relations in the American South?
11. The scene in which Chester meets Charlie Shaw’s sister is a pivotal moment in White Tears. How does the idea of “ownership” of black music come into play? How does he use his status as a man to assert power over her? How does he use his status as a white American?
12. Discuss the scene in which Chester and JumpJim are pulled over by the police outside Clarksdale. How does Chester’s ease in disparaging African Americans affect his road trip partner? How does this relate to the larger cultural conversation currently happening in the United States about race, privilege, and police relations?
13. What did you make of Charlie Shaw appearing in the flesh to Seth? What is the purpose of him revealing himself now? Do you attribute this to Seth’s instability? Why or why not?
14. Leonie’s murder—and the police interrogation that comes along with it—is a shocking turn of events. Discuss the scene in which the questioning of the suspect occurs. How does Kunzru play with reality and narrative structure in this scene?
15. White Tears is a deeply complex examination of race, identity, and history in America that is as technically intricate as it is topical. What was the most challenging aspect of this reading experience for you? The most thought-provoking scene? What do you think of classifying White Tears as a “ghost story”?
16. Robert Johnson is considered to be the king of the Delta blues and has become a mythic figure—most notably for the story that he sold his soul to the devil for musical prowess. In recent years, interest in Johnson has soared. How would you account for that? How does Johnson’s story and mythic status illustrate the ideas presented in White Tears?
Suggested Reading
Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru