Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Deconstructing the Boundary of Right/Wrong in Urban Black America


            Judgments seem to come quick and easy to most of us, especially when we look as outsiders onto a scene without regard for context or with only our own values and perceptions in mind. Marvella, the young, single, African American mother in Edward P. Jones’ short story, “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” is painfully aware of the judgments being passed upon her by white passersby as she disciplines her children. She knows that those passing judgment are not privy to the entire situation, and that simply seeing a black woman scolding her children is deemed as wrong when taken out of context. Like those white passersby, the readers of Lost in the City, a collection of short stories by Jones, and the viewers of Do the Right Thing, the classic Spike Lee film on racial tension, may be quick to pass judgment on the characters’ actions that can hastily be assessed as wrong. If we do so, however, then we, too, are taking the actions out of context and without consideration of alternative viewpoints. Jones and Lee both strive in their works to illustrate the entire situation in which their characters find themselves. Though the actions taken may never be considered right, the context in which they occur and the alternative perspectives with which they are included are shown to be extremely significant, and the boundaries between right and wrong are so blurred that attempting to render any judgment is made into a nearly impossible and certainly unreasonable endeavor.
            In “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” one of the first stories in Lost in the City, Cassandra mercilessly berates Melanie for liking boys, or, in Cassandra’s words, for being “the leader of … girls [who] pull down their panties and give up the booty just cause some boy is cute” (48). She yells and swears at Melanie so much that Melanie eventually gets out of the car and begins to walk home in order to escape being subjected to this treatment by her friend any longer. Was Cassandra wrong to treat her friend this way? Did she go so far in her criticism of Melanie that her point can no longer be seen as right, but simply as harsh and cruel? The text seems to tell us otherwise. During the events leading up to this schism between friends, Cassandra (and the reader) see an endless parade of women whose hopes and dreams for their future lives had been broken by the realities of single parenthood. The entire car trip takes place due to a request by Gladys’ recently single mother, who Gladys holds up as cruelly wronged by her father. On their way to Anacostia, the girls meet with Pearl and Joyce, two pregnant teenagers who recently dropped out of high school and who are visibly distressed by their situation. Cassandra, who grew up in a broken home of her own, reacts strongly to these women’s predicaments. When her actions are seen with this context in mind, Cassandra seems merely to be reacting as per her usual principles to Melanie’s habitual flirtatiousness. Her admonishments are a form of tough love, meant to protect Melanie from a future that Cassandra sees as terrifying and hopeless. This may not make her methods right, but it certainly casts doubt on their being judged as wrong.
            In the next story, “Young Lions,” we meet a criminal named Caesar. Caesar turned to his life of crime as a teen and seems to feel little, if any, regret about his immoral and illegal actions. However, even this supposedly hardened criminal is shown in a light that many of us would generally never take the time to consider. Caesar is capable of showing a surprisingly sensitive side at times: he doesn’t like the sound of Manny’s voice because Manny always sounds “inappropriate” and “obscene” (56); when he breaks into his father’s house to retrieve his things, he lovingly touches and looks at family heirlooms and trinkets; he pays close attention to a tourist family’s interactions while visiting DC; he is conscious of the innocence and child-like wonder of the retarded people he watches; and he often thinks of his dead mother and is even moved by his cousin Angelo’s gesture of stealing flowers for her grave. None of this is enough to redeem Caesar’s shortcomings, but it does create a rounded portrait of a whole man rather than a flat stereotype of a tough criminal. Caesar is revealed to be lonely, scared, and unsure of himself—as when he is frightened by being shut out of the house by his father. This is a particularly important scene, as it portrays a transitional moment in his life both from childhood to adulthood and from innocence to crime: Caesar was kicked out by his father and taken in by a criminal, who then acted as a role model for him during an impressionable age and a transitional time in his life. Caesar is indeed a malicious and corrupt young man, but can we really step in and judge him instantly as being entirely bad? Is there ever a circumstance that could justify such behavior as his? Jones does not attempt to answer these questions, but he seems determined to raise enough complications to suspend any snap judgments on the reader’s part.
            Another young man whose course in life was forever altered by his father’s actions appears in “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day.” Sam Williams leaves his sister and aunt—the only family he knows—and begins acting violently (getting into bar fights) and using women as objects (hiring prostitutes). His choices could be considered questionable at best, depraved at worst. However, as with the other situations we have examined, we cannot judge Sam’s actions solely on their own grounds, without a bigger perspective. Sam was a young and impressionable ten-year-old boy when his father brutally murdered his mother and subsequently left the family (for prison). Even though he views his father as reprehensible, Sam has no other male figure from whom to learn. Therefore, his later actions in life can be seen as shaped at least in part by both a traumatic experience as a child and the lack of a suitable father figure as he grew up. Either of these alone would certainly be enough to make Sam’s choices understandable; put together, they make Sam a sympathetic character—and attempting to draw negative conclusions about him becomes an absurd pursuit.
            Sometimes the reasons for a character’s actions are not so clear at first glance. In the title story of Jones’ collection, Lydia—a wealthy lawyer—habitually lies about who she is to the men with whom she sleeps. When she is woken in the night, she actually resorts to leafing through her day planner in order to remember who is in her bed, and she does not know the name she used with the man until he calls her “Cynthia,” at which point she recalls the lines she had given him the night before: “My name is Cynthia and I come from Washington” (143). Is Lydia a bad person for treating men this way? Is lying to them wrong? Certainly some may come to Lydia’s defense simply because she is a woman, though the same people would think that a man acting that way toward women is undoubtedly blameworthy. However, even if we place Lydia on a level playing field with men, there are still signals within the rest of the text that point to a reasonable explanation for her behavior. Lydia is rich and lives in a nice gated community in the Southwest area of DC. Her mother had once told her that she “knew folks who lived in Southwest before they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy” (147). This comment highlights the fact that Lydia is out of place where she lives. As the cab driver follows Lydia’s request to get her “lost in the city” (148), he drives deeper and deeper into the black neighborhoods with which Lydia is intimately familiar. Yet she is not at home here, either, and her wealth would make her out of place in the poor community in which she grew up. She realizes that she has no links to her past, that “in the world there was now no one from whom she could get that full medical history” or “write down her mother’s recipe for that wondrous beef stew” (148-149). In short, Lydia has no sense of personal identity, making it impossible for her to supply that identity to the men she picks up. Lydia cannot be judged for her failure to provide others with her true identity when she is not capable of supplying it even to herself.
            Two other women in Jones’ stories act out of feelings of frustrated expectations and lost hopes. In “Gospel,” Vivian proclaims herself a good Christian woman, yet she shows spiteful envy toward her best friend, Diane, for having a desirable lover. It would be easy to say that Vivian is wrong to be envious, but through her memories the reader learns that she has always held an ideal figure of a gentleman in her heart, and that her yearning for such a man has remained unfulfilled through five unsuccessful marriages. Seeing Diane achieve Vivian’s own lifelong dream is too much for her to bear, and her reaction to the situation becomes tolerable, if not particularly right. In a story about another, similarly disappointed woman, Marie finds herself battling the Social Security Administration for her SSI checks. At the end of her patience one day, she slaps the receptionist, Vernelle—obviously not a particularly good action to take. But it is only after this takes place that the reader slowly begins to learn Marie’s history. Marie had come to the city as a very young woman, with dreams handed down from her mother “that everything could be done in Washington, that a human bein could take all they troubles to Washington and things would be right” (241). When Marie moved there, her mother thought she “had managed to make it to heaven” (241). However, after a lifetime in the city, Marie is haunted by a “sense of loss” (240), and the city has turned out to be not heaven, but an endless supply of difficulties and frustrations. Slapping Vernelle was not so much a malicious act toward the woman, but a reaction to the dashing of a lifetime of hopes…and who are we to judge that?
            In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the entire film seems determined to set the viewer up for a conflict of sympathies. Each ethnic group portrayed in the film is shown in an unbiased light, and each of their concerns is played out as understandable—even the most heinous actions are ultimately seen as almost inevitable and hard to judge as either right or wrong, given the circumstances. For example, Buggin Out would have us believe that it is racist and wrong of Sal to not hang any pictures of African Americans on the wall of his restaurant. However, throughout the film we are reminded that Sal, an Italian American and private business owner, has as much right to be proud of his own heritage (and to show that pride within his own restaurant) as any African American has a right to be proud of his or her heritage. Should Sal be punished or condemned for showing pride in his ethnicity, when that is exactly what Buggin Out wants to do? Perhaps he is not entirely in the right by not showing appreciation for his customers, but he certainly cannot be considered wrong for showing appreciation for his culture.
            At the same time, it could be argued that Buggin Out is wrong for boycotting Sal’s because of the lack of black representation on the walls. Given the argument above, Buggin Out may be seen as a troublemaker for disturbing the peace and hindering a man’s business for what could be considered no good reason. Again, we see through other signs in the film that the answer is no quite so unambiguous. Buggin Out feels that the predominantly African American clientele of Sal’s is underappreciated, so he uses Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protest techniques, which are generally viewed as commendable, to show his displeasure with the situation. He, like Sal, displays his feelings through his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. It would seem, in this case, that both men are in the right.
            Of course, the argument escalates and does not end in the relatively diplomatic and law-abiding way in which it began. Eventually, Radio confronts Sal in a more aggressive manner and Sal reacts by destroying Radio’s boom box. Surely Sal is wrong for reacting with such violent behavior in a situation that was, at the time, still nonviolent (if not exactly peaceful). Nevertheless, this action, too, is portrayed in moral shades of grey rather than clear black and white. It must be remembered that Sal is running a place of business and has every right to refuse service to a customer who is disrupting the peace and acting as belligerently as Radio was; in this case, Sal did try persuasion and threats before resorting to destruction of the boom box. Still, was destruction necessary? Obviously, Sal felt personally threatened by the powerful African American man before him (as demonstrated by camera angles that show Radio from below, making him look larger, and Sal from above, making him look small and vulnerable) and by the community that was rising up behind Radio and his cause (again, seen in the camera angles and rapid cuts between shots of Sal and the crowd). If we are to believe Malcolm X’s statement that violence as self-defense is acceptable, perhaps Sal’s actions at this point can be seen as acceptable as well.
            Even so, those actions do lead to more violence, and Radio ends up being killed by the police. The African American community takes this as an outrage, and they believe that the officers are completely and reprehensibly wrong. It would be very easy to agree with that sentiment, but Lee refrains from doing so. He is careful to show that the police officers were outnumbered by an angry mob on the brink of rioting, and that it took three of them just to subdue the extremely large and strong Radio. With racial tension high, the white officers undoubtedly felt threatened by the angry black crowd around them and were concentrating on keeping Radio from fighting and starting an actual riot. Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves: If Radio had been white, would they have held him so tightly or for so long? Perhaps not, and if this is the case, Radio’s death was due to his skin color—but it still occurred in an impossible situation and was obviously accidental. This does not excuse the officers or make Radio’s death right by any means, but it does confuse the issue enough to say that we cannot judge it as simply and clearly wrong, either.
            Finally, we reach the climax of the film and an action that poses possibly the most difficult question of right and wrong with which the viewer has to struggle: Mookie throwing the trash can through Sal’s restaurant window. Although the action is certainly not as serious as killing a man, the reasons and arguments for and against Mookie taking this action are so ambiguous that it is nearly impossible to decide whether it was the right thing to do—which is exactly the response Lee was aiming for. Throughout most of the film, Mookie tries following Dr. King’s admonition to maintain nonviolence; but at this point, after Radio was killed and Sal’s restaurant seemed to be the cause of his friend’s death, Mookie turns to Malcolm X’s claim that resorting to violence in self-defense is necessary and even vital. Mookie, like the police officers and so many others in Lee’s film and Jones’ stories, found himself in an impossible situation, torn between doing what he thought was the “right thing” by holding down a job for Sal despite his friends’ protests over Sal’s perceived racial discrimination, and doing what those friends thought was the “right thing” by showing Sal that he cannot expect to get away with racial discrimination in an ethnic neighborhood. When both of these tensions came to a head after Radio’s death, Mookie did what he felt was an act of self-defense on behalf of Radio and the black community by retaliating against the cause of Radio’s death. Whether his act was right or wrong is, once again, impossible to judge.
            Edward P. Jones and Spike Lee show us through their works that even ideals such as right and wrong, that may at first seem clearly black and white, are not so unambiguous after all. There is no right/wrong binary, but only various points on an infinite continuum of morality. Like the white onlookers in the train station, judging Marvella on her parenting techniques without any knowledge of the whole situation, many of us often find ourselves coming to conclusions for which we have no basis. We are encouraged by Jones and Lee to open our minds to other perspectives, to consider that there is always more to a situation than we can easily gauge, and to remember that right and wrong are as subjective as light and dark, warm and cool, or simple and complex.
 




Works Cited
Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Giancarlo Esposito, John
Turturro. 2001. DVD. 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, 1989.
Jones, Edward P. Lost in the City. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

1 comment:

  1. Your esay makes me look at myself and reconsider how I judge people all the time. Standing in a long line today I was asked to sign a petition that I would never consider. I unfairly judged him a d-bag but after some time in line with the guy I deeply regret that I was so quick to judge.

    Thank you Lori for helping us to open our minds

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