Return to My Native Land

Great novels are not always recognized in their own time; often they lie waiting, as if in ambush, for the future to catch up to their achievements. “Nothing odd will do long,” Dr. Johnson quipped to Boswell. “Tristram Shandy did not last.” Sometimes odd things outlive the savviest critics.

When odd literary works happen to be written by black writers, it can be harder still to tell whether their neglect stems from discerning judgment or the censure of contemporary taste. William Melvin Kelley’s 1970 magnum opus, Dunfords Travels Everywheres, a creolized answer to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, was described as “exhaustingly difficult to read” by Kirkus Reviews and was out of print for half a century before its revival in 2020. We can agree or disagree—as people always have of Finnegans Wake—about whether it’s a good novel. But it seems unlikely that Joyce’s Earwicker is an easier fellow to follow.

Similarly, readers who have thought it important to read dauntingly epic novels like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) have rarely been as willing to accord their attention to Leon Forrest’s Divine Days (1992), an African American Ulysses set on the South Side of Chicago.^* The fact is, ever since its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century, the black novel has labored under a burden of expectations about what it should be and what it ought to deliver, which has ensured that any novelist who deviates, takes risks, or self-consciously experiments will find public approval or critical recognition even harder to come by.

Vincent O. Carter’s forgotten, and very nearly lost, writings from the 1950s and early 1960s are a case in point. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1924, Carter is one of the most underexplored figures in the cohort of African American writers who came of age around the end of World War II. His early life is still relatively unknown; much of it we have to glean from the pages of his only novel, Such Sweet Thunder, posthumously published in 2003 and republished this year by Pushkin Press. It is a portrait of a black childhood in Jazz Age Kansas City and the early years of the Depression, a turbulent and exuberant time when the city operated under the political boss Tom Pendergast, who helped make it known throughout the country as the “Paris of the Plains.”

Carter grew up in a subsection of the 18th and Vine district, which like so many other vibrant black neighborhoods was razed in the 1950s to make space for highways that would facilitate white flight to the suburbs. His parents, Joe and Eola Carter, are the models for Rutherford and Viola Jones, the parents of the novel’s hero, Amerigo Jones. Like their fictional counterparts, they were teenage parents and working poor. Carter’s father was a building maintenance man and later a bellhop, his mother a laundress.

Drafted into the US Army in 1941, Carter worked in a defense plant for a year before shipping out. He fought at Normandy in 1944 and marched to liberate Paris. In 1945, while waiting to be demobilized, he appears to have gone to England to try to study there but ended up after a short stay returning to the United States, where he briefly worked as a cook on the Union Pacific Railroad before enrolling at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious historically black universities. (The poets Langston Hughes and Melvin B. Tolson graduated from Lincoln in the 1920s.)

He had a reputation on campus for being eccentric and introverted, given to wearing tweeds and smoking a pipe. After graduating he moved to Detroit, where he spent eighteen months working in an automobile factory and taking graduate courses at Wayne State University. In 1953, with $3,000 from his parents, he arrived in Paris, following writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, who had both decamped for what the scholar Michel Fabre called the “rive noire.” A series of souring encounters led him to move around Europe—first to Amsterdam, then to Munich, where he had American contacts from his time in the army, and finally to Switzerland.

For details from this period of Carter’s life we have only his The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind, which got to press through the support of another American expatriate, Herbert R. Lottman, who was living in Paris on a Fulbright and trying to write a novel while working at the French offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Carter sent Lottman parts of the novel he was working on, and Lottman returned words of encouragement. By 1963 the book was nearly complete, with the working title The Primary Colors. Lottman was impressed and showed it to Ellen Wright, Richard Wright’s widow, who was still living in Paris. With her support the manuscript made its way to American publishers. None of the eleven publishers who read it over the next five years bought it, and so Lottman and Carter turned their attention to the Bern material instead.

The Bern Book was finally published in 1973. Aside from a perceptive review by Nona Balakian in The New York Times titled “Black Odyssey, White World,” The Bern Book received little critical interest. It quickly went out of print and did not resurface until the turn of the millennium, when Darryl Pinckney reintroduced Carter in a lecture series at Harvard. He had been given The Bern Book as a gift by Susan Sontag and Robert Boyers, who had come across it in a secondhand bookstore in upstate New York.

It is easy to see why the irony, melancholy, and witty erudition of The Bern Book caught their attention. Its range of reference and gentlemanly poise make it an exciting literary creation, though hardly an ideal book to have appeared during the high tide of the Black Arts Movement, when popular literary expression about race was delivered in a feverish, declamatory style. The central conceit is Carter’s insistence on remaining in a foreign capital that simply doesn’t know what to make of him. When a Bernese interlocutor cannot grasp that Carter is neither a musician nor a student, Carter slyly turns the mental gymnastics of the racist mind into a source of wry observational comedy:

He has never or seldom met or heard of, though he suspects there probably must be, Negroes who write…. I can literally see him straining his imagination to accommodate the new idea of me with which I have confronted him. I can feel him lifting me out of the frame of his previous conception of the universe and fitting me first this way and that, like a piece of a puzzle, into the picture of the writer his mind is conjuring up. He is struggling with Goethe and Rilke and Gotthelf and Harriet Beecher Stowe and me.

Carter’s arcane, cosmopolitan ruminations—qualities that would have made The Bern Book legible in what I have called the Blue Period of black writing between 1945 and 1965—were, alas, a terrible fit for the reading public’s sense of what black writing should be at the time of its release. Seeing no way forward, Carter retreated from writing. He devoted himself increasingly to spiritual practice and to life with his partner, Liselotte Haas, a Swiss dancer and yoga instructor. He died in Bern in 1983.

The manuscript of The Primary Colors was long believed to have been lost or destroyed. Fortunately Haas preserved it, and thanks to good fortune and his resolute persistence, Chip Fleischer, a native of Kansas City who cofounded the independent Steerforth Press, was able to track it down and publish it in 2003. Recognizing the importance of jazz to the novel, with its Charlie Parker–like zing of vernacular play, Fleischer gave it the now-definitive title, Such Sweet Thunder, a braided allusion to two of Carter’s artistic heroes: Shakespeare and Duke Ellington, who used Hippolyta’s famous phrase for his 1957 tribute album to the Bard.

The book begins in 1944 with Amerigo as a GI bivouacked on the front lines in northern France. Seeking kindling for a fire, he encounters a scrap of an American newspaper that the army had delivered for morale. This printed matter serves as a madeleine that opens the floodgates of memory to a lost boyhood in Kansas City. The fictional paper is called the Voice, an obvious allusion to the legendary Kansas City newspaper The Call, now one of the oldest and longest-running black newspapers in the country. Carter uses the paper not only to set up his retrospective narration but also to emphasize that his novel will turn chiefly on the perspective of a black community regarding itself. (Toni Morrison would make this something of a trademark when she started publishing her own fiction in the 1970s.) In a late scene the society pages meld with Amerigo’s visions of his hometown:

Eighteenth Street spread out before him like a huge page of the Voice. All the buildings appeared as photographs and the flickering signs as headlines…. He breathed in and out the picturesque smells of barbershop and pool hall, drugstore and tavern, the Sunday-afternoon heat, the slightly wilted after-church freshness of Sunday suits and dresses reflected upon the polished surfaces of parked and moving automobiles, agitated by nervous lights upon the marquees of theaters, the honking horns of taxis and the voluble mellifluence of friendly greetings: “Hey, Joe!” cried one tall dark man to another tall dark man on the opposite side of the street. Just then the streetcar rushed between them, casting the greeter’s reflection on its windows like a chain of photographs whisked through the air.

This dream pageant is a portrait of the beating heart of pre-war black Kansas City. But it is also a lesson Amerigo is learning about the power of owning the means of your own literary reproduction and the difference it makes when the recording systems of the world reflect your agency—and your place in that world—back to you. Using the black newspaper both allegorically, as a symbol of a historic community, and formally, as a choral voice, is to me the masterstroke of Carter’s novel.

Despite these experiments with form, the plot of Such Sweet Thunder is conventional and easy to follow. Amerigo experiences difficulties and adventures as he roams further from the alleyway house in the black ghetto where he grew up. He falls in love with Cosima Thornton, a middle-class, light-skinned girl whose father disapproves.

Carter’s prose is impressionistic and full of juxtaposition, like a Romare Bearden collage. It has a haze of innocence appropriate to boyhood, with accordion-like orthographic flourishes in its fluent black vernacular. “Zaaaaaaaawlways got a excuse!” a fed up Rutherford exclaims when Amerigo tries to get out of his homework again. “Boy! Where-in-the-w-o-r-l-d have you been?” worries Viola. When his friend notices his affections for Cosima: “Eeeeevery time I see ’er in the cafeteria or in the hall I see you, standin’ or sittin’ not too far away! Just gazin’ at ’er—like she was Lena Horne!” Amerigo struggles to make sense of the city’s outbursts of casual violence and its relentless reminders of racism. We watch him mastering the ethnic slurs for every group in the neighborhood and learning to read by making out the report of a lynching in the pages of the Voice.

The book’s cityscape is fastidiously accurate; the obsessive reconstruction of Dublin in Ulysses is clearly a model. Such Sweet Thunder is inspired by Joyce too in the stylizations of its prose, with stream-of-consciousness riffs and onomatopoeic language. Carter is interested in tracking the growth and development of consciousness through his hero’s evolving mastery of English and his widening exposure to a world of art, ideas, religion, sexuality, and independence, a trajectory that echoes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s no accident that Carter—who was effectively living in exile in Switzerland, just as Joyce was in Zurich at the end of his life—unites in Such Sweet Thunder the racial outsider’s perspective of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses with Stephen Dedalus’s discovery of artistic consciousness in Portrait. Carter understood himself to be carrying out the same kind of modernist project as Joyce, drawing out the epiphanies of everyday life and rendering them in a style that presses the questions of how and why we read.

Carter uses this Joycean approach to bring his black Kansas City to life. Famous monuments and landmarks like the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (opened in 1933) are enmeshed in Amerigo’s synesthetic imagination. A weekend visit to the enormous World War I Memorial with Rutherford combines with the excitement of crowds strolling down the Paseo, the clatter of pool halls, the swing of hot rhythm sections, and an allusion to a famous Kansas City jazz anecdote about the time the drummer Jo Jones hurled a cymbal at Charlie Parker when he messed up during a jam session with the Count Basie Orchestra at the Reno Club:

He stood before two small cannons facing the street with their nozzles aimed at the high stone wall with broad stone staircases on each end that led to the upper reaches of the park. “Commemoratin’ the first world war!” Rutherford remarked sarcastically, as a streetcar nudged its way through the traffic that swarmed around the staircases. He was swept into the thickening crowd of black folks where the song throbbed beneath the brutal clash of a cymbal, against the sobbing of an alto saxophone, quickening to the pulse of a bass fiddle, or the pertinent click of hickory sticks upon taut snares, or an Englished cue banking an eight-ball in a corner pocket for a quarter.

We sense Carter’s archival impulse, a desire to record and preserve the voices of the past, like the cry of the crawfish vendor Mr. Derby: “GIT CHO RED-HOT CRAWDADS—CRRAW PAPPY—R-E-D-HOT!” Amerigo learns, as children do, that his fascination with surface textures and appearances can tip over suddenly into unanticipated realms of adult significance:

He remembered the squirming mass of bluish greenish gray creatures clamoring in the No. 3 tub, and squirming in their own vomit after Mr. Derby had poured the salt on them. Like snow. And now with a sense of pleasant revulsion he broke off one of the sharp barb-edged pincers and sucked the juice from its hollow shell. He crunched the shell between his teeth and chewed until the good taste was gone and spat it out. People’s like that, he heard Mr. Derby say.

Amerigo and his fellow black residents of Kansas City are immensely proud of their hometown, which, despite its hardships, they imagine will go on improving into the future. But we know that in the span of a single generation the vast majority of that world would disappear, decimated by so-called urban renewal, the highways, the rise of the projects, the war on drugs.

Carter returned once to the United States, in 1972, and saw for himself the devastation of what had once been a world of interethnic vitality, violence, and creativity, between jazz on the radio and the gestures of aunties cracking wise, the timbre of men hailing one another in the street and the rumble of streetcars, the pool hall slouch and the preacher’s lean in the pulpit—the dense matrix of communal black life in neighborhoods filled with poor working people with immense belief in their own talents and scorn for the racist forces regularly lashing out to remind them of their place. In a letter to Lottman, Carter lamented this lost world that, paradoxically, had flourished under segregation:

It had all changed, Herb, it was all different now; the people were gone and the houses were gone; in their place was a super highway. Only the light was the same: sunlight at seven in the morning, at noon, at five o’clock in the evening when dad used to come home from the hotel. Perhaps it was when I boarded the plane for New York that I realized that nothing had been lost. I had written it all down—that fabulous world of childhood, the world of mom and dad young, laughing and in tears. It was all in The Primary Colors, my way, and what I couldn’t say because one can never say it all, is written in my heart.

Carter’s project is more than the nostalgic story of one young man’s personal emancipation. It is a sprawling social novel (the original manuscript ran to more than eight hundred pages) that takes us into living rooms and barrooms, hotel lobbies and packed streetcars, zones where the black ghetto borders Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish communities, with merchants from each doing business on the grand avenues. We visit the segregated world, the packed churches on Sunday resounding with the pompous, oracular charisma of black preachers, and see the savvy of their political organizing and the thundering enthusiasm of their congregations. The novel admires the idealism of the well-to-do strivers, even as it pokes fun at their snobbery and petty squabbles, the teeming frivolity of the social clubs, the “Merry-We Social, the Matinee Matrons, the Forget-Me-Not Girls, the Mysterious Few Whist Club—brave little outposts of middle-class normalcy in a hostile white world,” as Roy Wilkins (who got his start working at the The Call, and who I believe is the basis for the character of the newspaper editor Robert Jordan in the novel) once called them.

The novel’s great achievement is its sense of voice, its rolling river of sound: the seedy life of back alleys, the slick talk of gamblers, the bravado of prostitutes, the argot of jazz musicians, the gossip and guile of laundresses, the jingle of the crawdaddy criers, Satchel Paige’s games with the Monarchs called over the radio, the earthy piano of Mary Lou Williams, the distinct vocal style of the Kansas City crooner Pha Terrell and his brief turn in the limelight. It all flows together in picaresque sequences, without clear breaks, the orchestration of its collective voices swinging like a jazz ensemble, playing the changes in the key of black life.

Most Americans today, including many black Americans, cannot seem to imagine that black Kansas City was ever anything other than the crossroads of highways, banks, convention centers, and empty lots that it is now. You can visit museums that have to stand in for a living fabric that was ripped away. Carter wants us to see and feel the magnitude of this loss, specifically what that loss has meant to African Americans and, beyond that, its tragic significance in the arc of American history.

His work stands—testifying on behalf of millions who never could—for the unpardonable ruination of that nascent black working class, the squandering of the heroic efforts undertaken by the pioneering generation of black freedmen, the formerly enslaved and the sons and daughters of the formerly enslaved who took off their shackles only to get to work building up black neighborhoods across America’s cities, everywhere under duress and festering resentment, and often under the hooded watch of Klan terrorism and Jim Crow apartheid.

Other classics of African American literature know these people and tell aspects of their story: William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge, Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, to name a few. To my mind none captures so aptly as Such Sweet Thunder the note of gallant hopefulness, the vivacity, sarcasm, and cunning that generation seems to have possessed in such abundance.