Erasure Read online

  Praise for Erasure

  “Erasure demonstrates the folly of racial assumptions in America. It also shows how our culture alters its past—how we repudiate our own histories. We’re too quick to assume and we’re too quick to forget. Everett is a novelist we should definitely keep an eye on.”

  —Playboy

  “Oases in what too often feels a dreary desert of literary mediocrity, Everett’s books … are unfailingly intelligent and funny, formally bold and intellectually ambitious…. [The novel-within-the-novel] is a truly vile and very, very funny piece of writing, mocking the clichés of ghetto genre-writing with all possible viciousness.”

  —L.A. Weekly

  “A tour de force for Everett, who cheerily blasts apart our notions of political/racial correctness in a story that is sharp-edged yet lyrically tender-hearted. It’s a brilliant book that can only benefit from word of mouth and is virtually guaranteed to be even better than you’ve heard it is.”

  —The State (Columbia, SC)

  “Short, tight, and nasty, [the novel-within-the-novel is] as fast and funny as a modern-day Candide.?”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The sharp satire on American publishers and American readers that Everett puts forward is delicious, though it won’t win him many friends among the sentimental educated class who want to read something serious about black inner-city life without disturbing any of their stereotypes.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Erasure deserves the attention of anyone—black or white—interested in sophisticated fiction that subtly questions the phrase ‘black and white.’”

  —Tom LeClair, Book Magazine

  “Erasure is probably Everett’s most wryly humorous and disturbingly semiautobiographical and metafictional novel.”

  —African American Review

  “An over-the-top masterpiece…. Percival’s talent is multifaceted, sparked by a satiric brilliance that could place him alongside Wright and Ellison as he skewers the conventions of racial and political correctness.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A scathingly funny look at racism and the book business: editors, publishers, readers, and writers alike.”

  —Vanessa Bush, Booklist

  “More genuine and tender than much of Everett’s previous work, but no less impressive intellectually: a high point in an already substantial literary career.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Everett makes good use of his literary antecedents, most notably Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, reworking their themes in intriguing ways. This is an important novel from a well-established American author.”

  —Library Journal

  “Erasure is just that—a revelation, the heart and mind of a writer laid bare. Percival Everett has accomplished that rare thing, a novel at once emotionally moving and outrageously satirical. Shocking, tender, brainy, honest.”

  —Josephine Humphreys

  “The prospect of reading anything from Percival Everett’s pen is thrilling. He is a total original, someone whose work one reads with that marvelous sense of familiar discovery which we get from reading only the best writers. Erasure is no exception. What a great pleasurable ride, what a read!”

  —Richard Bausch

  “Why do I love Percival Everett’s new novel, Erasure? Because, like all of his fiction, it is audacious. Its audaciousness consists not only of a wildly engaging story, but of describing the most indispensable worst and best of people. In plot, dialogue, sheer inventiveness, Everett is stupendously one of our least compromised writers. The construction of this novel is genius; Erasure refracts the American experience, then powerfully re-shapes it. Thelonious Ellison—a writer—is one of the edgiest, most savvy, indelible characters I’ve encountered in decades!”

  —Howard Norman

  “The most refreshingly alive novel I’ve read in a long time. It’s funny and serious and sad and strong and courageous…. This one will last. And that is what counts.”

  —Clarence Major

  “A parody within a parody, intricately cross-hatched as a double-crostic, Erasure may be the most irreverent take on matters racial since—well, since nothing. It’s what Ellison’s Invisible Man would look like if he crawled out of his dark hole and said, ‘Yo mamma.’”

  —Lisa Zeidner

  “The anger and brilliance of Percival Everett’s Erasure puts you in mind of Invisible Man, but the satirical wit is all Everett’s own. Half the time I wanted to laugh until I cried and the other half I wanted to fly into a righteous rage and go and start … never mind.”

  —Madison Smartt Bell

  Also by Percival Everett

  Assumption

  I Am Not Sidney Poitier

  The Water Cure

  Wounded

  American Desert

  A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, As Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid

  Damned If I Do

  Erasure

  Grand Canyon, Inc.

  Glyph

  Frenzy

  Watershed

  Big Picture

  The Body of Martin Aguilera

  God’s Country

  For Her Dark Skin

  Zulus

  The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair

  Cutting Lisa

  Walk Me to the Distance

  Suder

  The One That Got Away

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2001 by Percival Everett

  This publication is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, MN 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-599-9

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-039-0

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930487

  Cover design: Kapo Ng @ A-Men Project

  I could never tell a lie that anybody would doubt,

  nor a truth that anybody would believe.

  —Mark Twain, Following the Equator

  My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pages. Since however I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when. My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So, I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker. If for no other reason, I choose this last, callous-building occupation because of the shame it caused my mother, who for years called my pickup truck a station wagon. I am Thelonious Ellison. Call me Monk.

  I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. Though I am fairly athletic, I am no
good at basketball. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, hating every minute of it. I am good at math. I cannot dance. I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south. My family owned a bungalow near Annapolis. My grandfather was a doctor. My father was a doctor. My brother and sister were doctors.

  While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads. From a reviewer:

  The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience.

  One night at a party in New York, one of the tedious affairs where people who write mingle with people who want to write and with people who can help either group begin or continue to write, a tall, thin, rather ugly book agent told me that I could sell many books if I’d forget about writing retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists and settle down to write the true, gritty real stories of black life. I told him that I was living a black life, far blacker than he could ever know, that I had lived one, that I would be living one. He left me to chat with an on-the-rise performance artist/novelist who had recently posed for seventeen straight hours in front of the governor’s mansion as a lawn jockey. He familiarly flipped one of her braided extensions and tossed a thumb back in my direction.

  The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is.

  Saws cut wood. They either rip with the grain or cut across it. A ripsaw will slice smoothly along the grain, but chew up the wood if it goes against the grain. It is all in the geometry of the teeth, the shape, size and set of them, how they lean away from the blade. Crosscut teeth are typically smaller than rip teeth. The large teeth of ripsaws shave material away quickly and there are deep gaps between them which allow shavings to fall away, keeping the saw from binding. Crosscut teeth make a wider path, are raked back and beveled to points. The points allow the crosscut saw to score and cleave the grain cleanly.

  I arrived in Washington to give a paper, for which I had only moderate affection, at a conference, a meeting of the Nouveau Roman Society. I decided to attend out of no great affinity for the organization or its members or its mission, but because my mother and sister still lived in D.C. and it had been three years since my last visit.

  My mother had wanted to meet me at the airport, but I refused to give her my flight information. For that matter, I also did not tell her at which hotel I’d be staying. My sister did not offer to pick me up. Lisa probably didn’t hate me, her younger brother, but it became fairly clear rather early in our lives, and still, that she had little use for me. I was too flighty for her, lived in a swirl of abstracts, removed from the real world. While she had struggled through medical school, I had somehow, apparently, breezed through college “without cracking a book.” A falsehood, but a belief to which she held fast. While she was risking her life daily by crossing picket lines to offer poor women health care which included abortions if they wanted, I was fishing, sawing wood, or writing dense, obscure novels or teaching a bunch of green California intellects about Russian formalism. But if she was cool to me, she was frozen to my brother, the high rolling plastic surgeon in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bill had a wife and two kids, but we all knew he was gay. Lisa didn’t dislike Bill because of his sexuality, but because he practiced medicine for no reason other than the accumulation of great wealth.

  I fancied occasionally that my brother and sister were proud of me, for my books, even if they found them unreadable, boring, mere curiosities. As my brother pointed out once while my parents were extolling my greatness to some friends, “You could rub your shit on a shingle and they’d act like that.” I knew this before he’d said it, but still it was rather deflating. He then added, “Not that they don’t have a right to be proud.” What went unsaid, but clearly implied, was that they had a right but not a reason to be proud of me. I must have cared some then, because I was angered by his words. By now however, I appreciated Bill and what he had said, though I hadn’t seen him in four years.

  The conference was at the Mayflower Hotel, but as I disliked meetings and had little interest in the participants of such affairs, I took a room at a little B&B off Dupont Circle called the Tabbard Inn. The most attractive feature of the place to me was the absence of a phone in the room. I checked in, unpacked and showered. I then called my sister at her clinic from the phone in the lobby.

  “So, you’re here,” Lisa said.

  I didn’t point out to her how much better So, you made it might have sounded, but said, “Yep.”

  “Have you called Mother yet?”

  “No. I figured she’d be taking her afternoon siesta about now.”

  Lisa grunted what sounded like an agreement. “So, shall I pick you up and we can swing by and get the old lady for dinner?”

  “Okay. I’m at the Tabbard Inn.”

  “I know it. Be there in an hour.” She hung up before I could say Goodbye or I’ll be ready or Don’t bother, just go to hell. But I wouldn’t have said that to Lisa. I admired her far too much and in many ways I wished I were more like her. She’d dedicated her life to helping people, but it was never clear to me that she liked them all that much. That idea of service, she got from my father, who, however wealthy his practice made him, never collected fees from half his patients.

  My father’s funeral had been a simple, yet huge, somewhat organic event in Northwest Washington. The street outside the Episcopal church my parents never attended was filled with people, nearly all of them teary-eyed and claiming to have been delivered into this world by the great Dr. Ellison, this in spite of most of them being clearly too young to have been born while he was still practicing. I as yet have been unable to come to an understanding or create some meaning for the spectacle.

  Lisa arrived exactly one hour later. We hugged stiffly, as was our wont, and walked to the street. I got into her luxury coupe, sank into the leather and said, “Nice car.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “Comfortable car,” I said. “Plush, well appointed, not shitty, nicer than my car. What do you think it means?”

  She turned the key. “I hope you’re ready.”

  I looked at her, watched as she slipped the automatic transmission into drive.

  “Mother’s a little weird these days,” she said.

  “She sounds okay on the phone,” I said, knowing full well it was a stupid thing to say, but still my bit in all this was to allow segue from minor complaint to reports of coming doom.

  “You think you’d be able to tell anything during those five minute check-ins you call conversations?”

  I had in fact called them just that, but I would no longer.

  “She forgets things, forgets that you’ve told her things just minutes later.”

  “She an old woman.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.” Lisa slammed the heel of her palm against the horn, then lowered her window. She yelled at the driver in front of us who had stopped in a manner to her disliking, “Eat shit and die, you colon polyp!”

  “You should be careful,” I said. “That guy could be a nut or s
omething.”

  “Fuck him,” she said. “Four months ago Mother paid all her bills twice. All of them. Guess who writes the checks now.” She turned her head to look at me, awaiting a response.

  “You do.”

  “Damn right, I do. You’re out in California and Pretty Boy Floyd is butchering people in Fartsdale and I’m the only one here.” “What about Lorraine?”

  “Lorraine is still around. Where else is she going to be? She’s still stealing little things here and there. Do you think she complained when she got paid twice? I’m being run ragged.”

  “I’m sorry, Lisa. It really isn’t a fair setup.” I didn’t know what to say short of offering to move back to D.C. and in with my mother.

  “She can’t even remember that I’m divorced. She can recall every nauseating detail about Barry, but she can’t remember that he ran off with his secretary. You’ll see. First thing out of her mouth will be, ‘Are you and Barry pregnant yet?’ Christ.”

  “Is there anything you want me to take care of in the house?” I asked.

  “Yeah, right. You come home, fix a radiator and she’ll remember that for six years. ‘Monksie fixed that squeaky door. Why can’t you fix anything? You’d think with all that education you could fix something.’ Don’t touch anything in that house.” Lisa didn’t reach for a pack of cigarettes, didn’t make motions like she was reaching for one or lighting one, but that’s exactly what she was doing. In her mind, she was holding a Bic lighter to a Marlboro and blowing out a cloud of smoke. She looked at me again. “So, how are you doing, little brother?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “What are you doing in town?”

  “I’m giving a paper at the Nouveau Roman Society meeting.” Her silence seemed to request elaboration. “I’m working on a novel, I guess you’d call it a novel, which treats this critical text by Roland Barthes, S/Z, exactly as it treats its so-called subject text which is Balzac’s Sarrasine.”

  Lisa grunted something friendly enough sounding. “You know, I just can’t read that stuff you write.”