Author Andre Dubus
I write today about the father of Andre Dubus III, whose House of Sand and Fog I looked at last week. The elder Andre Dubus, now dead, is one of my favorite short story writers, and his novella Deaths at Sea came to my aid when I felt twisted and turned by racial tension.
I was teaching a “Literature by Minorities” class in which I had some very angry black students and some very defensive white students. I remember an individual conference with one African American woman where she spent half an hour complaining about how insensitive and racist white people were. I tried to be a sympathetic ear but felt that I was implicated in her condemnation. I don’t know how the student felt when it was all over, but I left the session drained and depressed.
A few days later I was at home sick (not as a result of this conference) and was reading The Last Worthless Evening, a collection of Dubus novellas and stories. When I read Deaths at Sea, my head started buzzing and I felt as though I were enveloped in an intense haze. When I am in a vulnerable physical state, works of art sometimes penetrate more than they usually do, and that was the case here. Dubus seemed to understand me in the deepest way possible.
The narrator is Fontenot, a young navy officer from Louisiana. The story is set in the 1960’s, he is a liberal struggling with his racist heritage, and he befriends Willie, a young black officer who is his bunkmate and one of only three black officers on board. They become confidants and both are present when a senior officer, under the guise of mentoring Wille, treats him with racist condescension. After the incident, Willie temporarily turns against Fontenot, which is to say, with the one fellow officer who is sympathetic. “I hate white people,” he says and then, after the narrator goes forward to help him, “I hate all white people.” Eventually he accepts a drink and a cigarette and they talk about the incident.
There is a second part to the story in which a racial epithet and a quick flare up lead to a scuffle where a white sailor falls off a pier and drowns. Fontenot must assure the black sailor involved that he will not be prosecuted, that the death was an accident. But he finds himself internally raging against the dead man’s parents and his social milieu, which taught him the racism that triggered the word that resulted in his death.
The second part of the story is powerful, but the first is what captivated me. I learned from it that standing in solidarity with people who have experienced racism sometimes means that they will take their frustrations out on you. After all, who else that is white will listen to them. I realized that my student was not so much criticizing me (well, maybe some) as expressing her hurt that race was an issue in her life. She didn’t want race to be a factor at St. Mary’s anymore than white students did, but there it was. She was angry at her white college for not being more tolerant and angry at herself for having wanted to come to a white college.
Her own ambivalence about the white and black worlds contributed to the energy of her feelings. She had talked in class about a gap that had grown up between her and her old high school friends in Southeast D.C. Those who weren’t attending college thought that she thought she was superior to them. And while she didn’t think this was the case, it was true that she was fleeing the neighborhood. After all, in St. Mary’s she didn’t hear gunshots outside her window at night. Unfortunately, now she felt as thought she didn’t fit in anywhere.
My sense was that I fumbled my way through that class, providing a forum but a chaotic one for people to hash out race issues in the context of the literature we were reading. I was amazed, at the end, when a number of students (both black and white) told me it was one of the best classes they had taken. The reason, I think, is that they had found an opportunity to have conversations they were hungry for. The “topic everyone avoids” is potent and menacing because everyone avoids it. Race becomes less threatening when people take it on.
The temporary estrangement between the characters in Deaths at Sea, however, wasn’t the most important part of the story for me. Early on, when he learns that his bunkmate is black, Fontenot says, “I realized that my excitement did not come only from finally having a chance to do more for negroes than pray; I felt that redemption was at hand, for I could finally show my feelings, and the history of my feelings, to a Negro at close quarters.”
Fontenot fells very guilty about what whites are doing to blacks, so much so that at one point Willie comments on it:
“He said there was guilt in the very air of the room, and he knew from my eyes that I had not earned it but had simply grown up with it. Or, as he said later, in a bar in Yokosuka, I was like a man who had seen a lynching once and tried to stop it and got beat up and didn’t’ get killed only because he was white and they already had a Negro to hang; and I blamed myself still, and could not stop blaming myself for throwing rocks at a wheatfield and not breaking one stalk.”
If I understand correctly what Dubus is saying about the longing for redemption (he is Catholic, by the way), then I have experienced it as well When one has grown up around segregation and blatant prejudice, one can feel tainted by one’s whiteness, and friendship with a person of color can seem to carry with it the possibility of cleansing. I think this desire helps explain one of the friendships I sought out at Carleton College.
His name was Dan and he was from Atlanta. When I discovered that we could talk comfortably, I determined to have him as a good friend. So did many others—Dan was immensely popular. As I look back, it can’t have been altogether comfortable for him to be designated as “official reliever of white guilt.” But I wasn’t only using him. In me, he got friendship with a white southerner who wasn’t an overt racist, which provided its own comfort.
I don’t want to idealize this friendship. As I look back, there was always something elusive about Dan, which may indicate how he himself felt the need to slip between identities and, perhaps, to be someone I felt comfortable with. Complicating it all was the fact that he was gay, although neither he nor I knew it at the time. (Long after we went our separate ways he would go on to die from A.I.D.S.) But for a time we were both sustained by our relationship.
There’s an interesting follow-up to my encounter with the Dubus story. The next time I taught my minorities literature class I included Deaths at Sea, but none of my students appreciated it. Certainly their heads didn’t start buzzing. For them, it was like watching a parent work out an issue that didn’t touch them. In their eyes, Fontenot just seemed old-fashioned, his friendship with Willie too symbolically fraught. (Why not just be friends rather than making such a big deal of it? they asked.) Which may mean Dubus is speaking more to those who bear a heavy guilt for having lived through segregation than to those who take racial mixing for granted. Or maybe there are other explanations I’m missing. At any rate, it hasn’t been the only time when a book that was a live-saver for me failed to touch my students.
