** POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERTS ** (no specifics, though)
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Okay, Hilary, I apologize for this taking so long, but my review of Barbara Hambly’s A Free Man of Color is finally here! Yay!!! (Balloons and confetti)
I’m only going to touch on major themes and ideas in the book so as not to spoil the reading experience for those who might want to read this book without any unintentional reveals on my part.
1. Slurs (Reclamation and Ownership)
Honestly, the use of slurs throughout this book made me want to put it down more than once. I don’t see how the author could have avoided them, though, considering the time and place the novel takes place (New Orleans, Louisiana, during the 1830s), but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t troubled. This brings up the issue of whether or not someone from outside of a marginalized community can ever use a slur historically used to denigrate that group in a non-offensive, non-oppressive way. I know that avoiding the troubling history of American slave states in fiction specifically set in that milieu would have been the greater mistake, but it still doesn’t make reading slurs any easier or comfortable, especially for a person of color like myself. People in non-oppressed communities who attempt to use slurs and stereotypes like the oppressed themselves (who are attempting to de-fang the stereotypes and slurs) are walking a very problematic line (see Quentin Tarantino, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Chelsea Handler, etc.). I’m not saying that it can’t be done. I’m simply saying that we haven’t reached that point in society where it’s harmless.
Also, I initially thought many of the secondary characters (especially women of color) were verging on caricature and could have been fleshed out better. I reminded myself, though, that Benjamin January was operating within the limitations of his time and place and I was willing to give this a pass, since it amounted to a minor quibble. Many of those same women of color were more fully realized as the novel went on. It also helped to know that Octavia Butler gave Hambly feedback on the original manuscript (see the acknowledgements section at the end of the book).
However, I hung in there and the book paid off in very surprising and satisfying ways.
2. Freedom
I like that Hambly showed the convoluted and often contradictory nature of January’s “freedom” (how it was conditional based on his location within Creole society, whether or not he was physically on a plantation, whether or not he had documentation of his free status on his person, etc.). She adeptly noted the additional difficulty of choices for black women based on gender, economic opportunity, and race. The depth of detail around this theme makes the book title doubly, if not triply, ironic.
3. “Passing”
This was the most satisfying theme within the book. Without revealing anything, the major plot point (involving the murder that Benjamin January discovers) dances around the convoluted, complex notion of “passing” (appearing to be part of the majority culture when one is not). Towards the end of the novel, two characters are revealed to be “passing” in ways I never saw coming. I was delightedly shocked and surprised! (I know you know what I’m talking about, Hilary!)
So I do recommend the book and I thought it was a great and engaging read. I might read more of the Benjamin January series if I have the time and money to do so.
AAAtheist 
Ok, lets see if I can leave a comment.
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Yay, password successfully reset for WordPress. Thanks so much for following up on this, just taking the word from a name and icon from the internet that something would be worth your time. But then again, as much as I love what Libby has to say on LJF, really what keeps me coming back is how much I enjoy reading and interacting with the people who post there regularly. It’s changed my definition of what a friend is, to include someone only met online.
Starting with your last point, I found the politics and social games of passing to be absolutely fascinating, and it’s something she comes back to again and again in different ways. Not so much in the next book, which introduces a love interest for January, but in others it defines the plot. I love watching the friendship between Hannibal and January, they play off each other so well. One thing I’ve thought of, reading your review, is I wonder how much of this hyperfocus to racial identity and place got defused into the Christianity that came out of the Antibellum South. I know that I’m looking as an outsider since I’m white Jewish from the Northern Upper Midwest, but still … when we talk about American Evangelical Christianity, no matter where in the US it is we really are talking about something that got its roots in the Deep South. I’ve long held the theory that there are two general poles in Christianity, 1. What you do to the least of these you do to me/love your neighbor as yourself, and 2. I am the light, the truth, the way, there is no other path but me/Faith in Jesus above all. Since being a slave owner, and even more pervasively being an acceptable part of the white social class made it utterly impossible for the first general pole, (what you do to the least of these doesn’t work so well when you are buying and selling people) the Christianity shaped in that environment polarized to the second type, focused heavily on belief alone. Just a personal theory from outside observation.
Until I started following LJF, I had no idea how critical keeping up appearances was in maintaining that type of Christian social structure. I was raised live and let live liberal Jewish with Catholic grandparents, and my brother and I were too oddball as children to keep up much of a facade anyway. I don’t think it is *just* a legacy of Antebellum Christianity because it shows up in other fundamentalist patterns, in Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy and fundamentalism too. But reading about the terror that someone with 1 ancestor out of 8 who was from Africa passing as a white person, tainting them, how important keeping appearances of what is proper no matter what the cost, and then comparing it to some of the stories I’ve read from LJF about how important it is to keep pure faith without any contamination, to keep appearances at all costs of the perfect Christian family, I wonder if there is an underlying connecting pattern.
Actually, even as I’m writing this, I think there is. Not so much the specifics of Christianity, but the more general characteristics of keeping control in a strict, abusive and brutal society based on hierarchy. That pretty much describes every variation of fundamentalist society, and an economy based on slavery.
But getting back to the book, I love how some of the characters use that to their advantage. Mayerling is a great example, very cool, but there are other times when people use what others expect to see as a shield and cloak for what they are really doing. One thing this series really brought home to me was something that I say every year at my Passover seder – that when you put a chain around someone else’s neck, the other end goes around your own throat. It’s not just how deeply compromised the lives of the African people are that the books shows in depth, but how circumscribed the white characters were, both American and Creole. How much more freedom did Madeleine Trepagier really have compared to Dominique? A lot more, in that she couldn’t be directly bought and sold if she was in the wrong part of the city, but still she had to work around iron-clad social customs that would have destroyed her to take any agency in her life for her own happiness and desires.
As for your first point, about the language used to describe people, well, that’s why I wanted your opinion. I knew that as a white woman reading a book written by a white woman about a black man, there were things neither of us belonged to the culture enough to own. I’m glad the use of slurs didn’t stop you, but that is something I guess everybody has to know their own limits on. Hambly has a fantasy trilogy with a exiled wizard from another dimension that crosses over into Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that I haven’t read and will likely never read, because I just don’t read Holocaust literature. I have very strong opinions about what is wrong with centering Jewish identity in our history of anti-Semitism, and fundamentally if I am going to enjoy something for entertainment, it’s not going to be the bloody Holocaust.
But getting back on topic of Ben January, I agree that it is one hell of a careful dance over a minefield to write a story using other people’s pain as part of the plot or background. One the one hand, I don’t think it is right or good to say that no white person can ever write a story (or a song, or movie, etc.) that includes the reality of race or racsim without being offensive. On the other hand, like you said those words still hurt, and are still used to hurt. Also, there is such a history of white people taking and using non-white people’s experiences and twisting it for their own uses. When I went to a fantasy/sci-fi writing convention, one of the things that came up was taking inspiration from other human cultures vs. using them and ripping them off. I guess being accurate, and above all not turning anything into a stock stereotype or prop, any person or part of their culture, is important.
One thing that I really love about January is how educated he is, yet he can move through so many different levels of society. How he uses language, dialects, accents, to either connect with people or maintain his own image of respectability is always fun to follow. I would love to see this turned into a movie, but by the BBC not Hollywood. Someone who could take it seriously and really do right by the story and the people. Personally, I always see January as the guy in the Allstate ads for insurance. Or the actor who played Benjamin Cisco in DS9.
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Hilary:
Thank you for your feedback.
Your point about not wanting entertainment experiences representing Jewish life being centered in the Holocaust? My point exactly. This is why slavery narratives by non-black authors/directors/artists can be troubling (see Django Unchained). I’m not saying it can never be done (like I said before). It’s just that it remains troubling and is fraught with pain for the descendants of that experience.
And your comparison of fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity as it has been practiced (and in many ways still is) relating strongly to slavery in America is very insightful.
I’m glad you consider me a friend. I’ll try to live up to that high praise and be a friend in return.
Oh, the actors you’re referring to? Dennis Haysbert does the Allstate commercials and Avery Brooks was Cisco in Deep Space Nine. They would both make an excellent Benjamin January.
I’ll be getting to Dr. Levine’s book shortly (“The Price of Privilege”). Let me know if you want my opinions on that as well.
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I always value your opinions. I was reading something somewhere about how few friendships cross racial lines, that a statistically very high number of people have only one or no people of a different race in their circle of friends. I was trying to count up people in my own life – work, family, temple – and came up short. Then I wondered if you counted just from shared posting.
I’ve started picking up the local African-American newspaper in the supermarkets to take home to read. Realistically I’m not on the front lines of anybodys activism, but I can at least try to be less ignorant and better read. Although one thing I read made me smile – an article suggesting that if white people really want to confront the level of privilege they don’t see in their lives, they should place themselves where they are subordinate to a person of color. My boss, who I have shared a lab work bench with for 12 years, is from Beijing. I wonder if learning to read the body language and tone of voice of a soft spoken Chinese woman who has the power to fire me counts.
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