Obama, America, and the Legacy of James Alan McPherson

The title story of James Alan McPherson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Elbow Room opens with an italicized passage:

Narrator is unmanageable. Demonstrates a disregard for form bordering on the paranoid . . . When pressed for reasons, narrator became shrill in insistence that “borders,” “structures,” “frames,” “order,” and even “form” itself are regarded by him with the highest suspicion. Insists on unevenness as a virtue.

I thought of this last week when I heard that McPherson had died. I was also listening to President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. “My grandparents knew these values weren’t reserved for one race,” Obama said. “They could be passed down to a half-Kenyan grandson, or a half-Asian granddaughter. In fact, they were the same values Michelle’s parents, the descendants of slaves, taught their own kids, living in a bungalow on the South Side of Chicago.”

It sounded like an innocuous statement: “These values weren’t reserved for one race.” But Obama was talking about his mother’s family. Scotch Irish whites in Kansas. I live a few blocks from Kansas. It’s not the most hospitable place for, say, half-Kenyans. Or Mexican-Americans. Or Democrats generally.

Then he asserted that the values of these white Kansans were the same as the values of the descendants of slaves.

A turn like that engages what McPherson referred to as the “function at the junction.” It’s an unexpected operation that causes fixed categories and settled identities to change. Borders and frames disappear.

Obama’s move was ok. But McPherson’s were better.

I didn’t know that when I first wandered into his classroom at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early 1990s. I had no idea how serious McPherson was. How deep and considered his philosophy would be.

“I am here, among so many white people,” he said, “because they couldn’t get anyone else to volunteer.” (The Iowa program was almost entirely white in those days.) “And because race is the great subject of American literature. And you have a responsibility to understand it, as much as anybody.”

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Then he told us to go buy Ralph Ellison’s essay collection Going to the Territory and read the essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station.”

On it’s simplest level, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” is a defense of diversity as an American ideal. Few of us knew that. Even fewer knew that Ellison had already been criticized for believing in such a thing. He’d been called naïve for underestimating the hostility of white America. Where would a teacher begin?

Early in the essay, Ellison asks how The Great Gatsby might be read by an African-American who finds himself unrepresented in the story.

It may have been somewhere around our discussion of this passage that McPherson looked up at me with a mischievous sparkle in his eyes.

“You went to Princeton, didn’t you?”

I ducked my head. I was trying to fit in and being connected to an Ivy League school did not seem, in a competitive place like Iowa, to be a good idea. “Yes,” I said, reluctantly.

“You ever seen him?” McPherson asked.

“Who?” I asked, confused. Did he mean Fitzgerald?

“The prototype,” McPherson said, as if I and everyone else in the class should understand what he meant. “The original WASP. I imagine that they keep him stored in a crypt somewhere in Princeton and bring him out every so often, when people start to forget how they’re supposed to act.”

I laughed at this because it was funny—an outrageous image that was, nevertheless, entirely plausible. He was also flipping me shit, which I appreciated. That was what my friends had done with me back in Kansas City. It was how I knew I had friends. But it was also a challenge. If you tease somebody about their past, it means that you also believe that past is something they can transcend.

And transcendence was a big thing for McPherson. Not just the transcendence of racial division—though that was important to him—but transcendence of the human condition. He looked hard for it, valued it, and didn’t care who achieved it.

Consider Fitzgerald, another Midwesterner, like Ellison—or for that matter, like Langston Hughes—who’d gone on to write a great American book.

McPherson never let Fitzgerald or any other white American writer off the hook for being unpardonably blind on the subject of race. He once told me to read Toni Morrison’s essay “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” which goes through the history of this blindness critically.

But he also had a fascinating riff on the Scopes trial and the humiliation of William Jennings Bryan at the hands of Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken. He pointed to that trial as the moment when religion ceased to be an acceptable avenue for transcendence in modern, intellectual life. And he credited artists who tried to find secular forms of transcendence to replace it. For example, Gatsby’s failed attempt to transcend his past. Or the functional, self-invented codes of behavior that could be found in the films of John Ford and Akira Kurosawa. Or the civil rights briefs of Albion W. Tourgée. Or the music of Duke Ellington and Nina Simone.

As for McPherson’s own code, it was impeccably generous, thoughtful, and reciprocal. Like all good teachers, he was less interested in who you had been and more interested in who you might become. More than anything else, he was hopeful that you, as a student and citizen of America, would keep asking questions and that, in the process of asking questions, you’d keep developing.

In this sense, there was a vulnerability to him, a lack of interest in the usual competitive side of writing, or in his public “persona.” He didn’t care much how he sold. I didn’t care either. I did care that he would meet and speak with me for hours about my fiction. I cared that, one day, after workshop, he asked me if, given my hometown’s “supposedly” excellent bar-b-que, I might want to have lunch with him at a bar-b-que restaurant in town and render my opinion on the ribs.

In that way, he became the first professor ever to ask me out to eat. He was also the first professor to invite me to his house.

He also taught me something about vanity. When he published Crabcakes in 1998—his first book in many years—I drove up to Iowa City and sat down excitedly in an auditorium for his reading.

As he stood up at the podium, a professor’s cellphone rang. She took the call and walked up the central aisle of the auditorium, talking loudly.

A second white professor, once McPherson started reading, spoke up and said, “No, Jim, you shouldn’t read that part. Read the stuff about the function at the junction. That’s what’s great.”

I never saw anyone else at Iowa treat McPherson this way. The faculty and staff whom I was close to were his champions and friends and they spent far more time with him than I have over the years. He considered them family. All the more reason for my bitter anger, seeing these two people interrupt this calm and decent man.

McPherson noticed, I’m sure. But he didn’t show it. He went on. He read. He outclassed them. He had anger. But he used it to fight for others, generally.

“They didn’t like show-offs,” Obama said of his Kansas grandparents. “They didn’t admire braggarts or bullies . . . Instead what they valued were traits like honesty and hard work, kindness, courtesy, humility, responsibility.”

Fair enough. McPherson had these values too. He referred to show offs as “moral dandies.” But equally important was his sarcasm, his joy, his exceptionally concise feel for the well-placed curse. His irreverence. His love of mischief. That was what fired the excitement we used to feel when going to his classroom. The questions that we discussed in his class are, if anything, more alive today than they were in the 1990s. Was cultural pluralism really just “a con game contrived by the powerful”? Or was there something foundational in Ellison’s concept of “unity-in-diversity”?

McPherson taught the argument as an entryway into black intellectual history—Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. Stokely Carmichael, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Clarence Thomas, Al Sharpton, Albert Murray, Thurgood Marshall, Howard Thurman: where did they stand on this question? How did they respond, contradict, and agree?

There were good arguments on both sides and no easy answers, especially when it came to uncompromising persistence of racism and the pain, poverty, and violence that it engendered. (Those were, after all, the days of Rodney King.)

McPherson gave each position its due. But in the end, we all could tell he took a side. He was an Ellisonian. He was also fundamentally an iconoclast and an optimist—more so than many people. More so me.

The story “Elbow Room” isn’t frequently anthologized. It’s about a white man from Kansas, Paul Frost. And a black woman from Tennessee, Virginia Valentine. They meet, fall in love, marry, and have a child. Its narrator, the one who’s so concerned and mistrustful of borders, worries that such a union is doomed to fail. The parents oppose the marriage. There’s a deep history of racial antagonism on both sides.

“People do grow,” Paul Frost tells the narrator. “You may not think much of me, but my children will be great!”

The narrator responds skeptically: “They will be black and blind or passing for white and self-blinded. Those are the only choices.”

This was not James McPherson’s view. Or rather, it was and it wasn’t. Being trapped in a society that allowed only those binary options was, I think, his greatest fear. He recognized it as a real danger. But he was never blind or self-blinded. And, on good days, he liked to call himself an Omni-American, to borrow Albert Murray’s phrase. It wasn’t the flag, or the wars, or American power that interested him. It certainly wasn’t the country’s economic might. (Once, in later years, McPherson got into some serious trouble for not paying his taxes. When I asked him about it, he shrugged and said, “I just got tired of pretending to be middle class.”) Or idiotic commitments to unfettered free market capitalism. These were things he distrusted.

It was the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights: those were documents that he, the Harvard law graduate, liked to celebrate.

And people. Members of his community.

By the end of the “Elbow Room,” the narrator is slightly less skeptical that the mixed marriage has a chance. “The mother is a bold woman,” he admits. “The father has a sense of how things should be.” But it’s the child that he believes in. The son of a white Kansan and an African-American from Tennessee.

“I will wager my reputation on the ambition, if not the strength, of the boy’s story,” the narrator says.

So did McPherson, in a sense. Beyond his own work and family, he wagered his reputation on the students he mentored at Iowa—an amazing and diverse family of men and women. (The Workshop itself is significantly more diverse these days.) Even so, when he wrote “Elbow Room” in the 1970s, I can’t imagine that he anticipated that a man with a background so similar to the one he described in his story would be the President of the United States.

And yet, there was Obama, the son of a white Kansan and a Kenyan, citing those founding documents as an affirmation of what America was supposed to mean: “Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that We the People, can form a more perfect union.”

In my own hometown of Kansas City, this union isn’t, and never was, perfect. My first two novels, thanks to McPherson’s teaching, describe the deep, ongoing and systematic segregation of the city I grew up in, its causes, its soul-killing effects. The more recent protests that began in Ferguson, the deaths of young black men at the hands of police, these are all evidence of a fact that people who’ve lived in cities like Kansas City or Baltimore or Chicago or St. Louis have known for a long time. People of color are not treated equally in these places, however they may be created.

McPherson called these forces of inequality “the dragons.” Given his contrarian nature, my guess is that he also flipped Obama some shit about his policies during his presidency. But, as Jerald Walker points out in his essay “Dragon Slayers,” McPherson also searched for stories in which the dragons lose. And so it seemed fitting, as I mourned his death, that a mixed-race president would be giving a speech in which some of the ideas that McPherson taught were repurposed, transformed, and aimed at an entirely unexpected dragon: Donald J. Trump.

It’s no accident that Trump’s campaign is all about borders, walls, and divisions. It’s no accident that Trump’s slogan—Make American Great Again—includes in its final word the assertion that our greatness lies only in an imagined past that does not include the contributions of people like James McPherson. That progress toward a “more perfect” union would be a bad thing.

It’s also no accident that Trump made his name by attacking Obama’s birthright. Obama’s policies aren’t the main problem for Trump.

It’s the implication of his identity. His functioning at the junction.

I would not have understood this, had I not studied with McPherson. I would not have been able to see how, by conflating the values of his white Kansan ancestors and his wife’s family, Obama was escaping the old tribal borders that Trump is trying to re-inscribe on the country. In Obama’s phrase “We don’t look to be ruled,” I also heard the phrase, “We don’t look to be bordered.” Like the narrator of McPherson’s story, we want some elbow room. We don’t want to be framed.

The concept that being American means, by definition, having an ideal that you’ve failed to live up to—that’s another crucial thing I learned from McPherson. It is not a rejection of America for Michelle Obama to note that her daughters are growing up in a house built by slaves. Or a rejection of a white writer to point out that Fitzgerald was a racist. Instead, it is American to admit those facts and to find in that admission a way forward. The status quo in America is our constant, argumentative, sometimes violent movement toward a more perfect union; it is not the protection of an imaginary perfect union that never existed in the first place.

I am less certain about McPherson’s faith in the possibility of transcendence on a personal level, at least when it comes to myself. It’s not something that you can just wake up one morning and decide to enact. It’s more something that with hard work, and patience, and study, you might aspire to achieve.

Can’t say I’ve ever gotten there. But I think McPherson did, quite frequently.

* * * *

Special thanks to: Marcus Burke, Tom Piazza, Lan Samantha Chang, Jerald Walker, Jerry Renek, Marc Nieson, Suketu Mehta, and Elizabeth McCracken.