Review: The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas by Reginald McKnight

Reginald McKnight (born on a US military base in Germany 1956), who is currently the Hamilton Holmes Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is a writer of considerable talent and inventiveness. Much of his fiction deals, in his own words, with deracinated African-Americans who came of age after the civil rights struggle. These are people who are at the front lines of the struggle for human rights. They're part of the struggle whether they want to be or not, for they are in the thick of the white world, daily being judged by their employers, peers, et cetera as to the depths of their intellects and souls." Definitely not postracial, though post-segregation.

My favorite stories in McKnight's first collection of short stories, Moustapha's Eclipse (and, I gather, his first novel, I Get on the Bus, which I have not read), involve a clueless African American anthropology student floundering in western Africa (Senegal). There are none of these in his second collection, The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas. The title story, which won both the Kenyon Review New Fiction Prize and an O. Henry Award, is told in very short sentences and sentence fragments from the point of view of a black primary school boy in (yet another) new school. What I mean by post-segregation -and short sentences! - is clear in the narrator's account of his situation:

"Three black kids. in our school there were fourteen classrooms of thirty-odd white kids (in '66 they considered Chicanos provisionally white) and three or four black kids. Primary school in primary colors. Neat divisions. Alphabetized. They didn't stick us in the back, or arrange us by degrees of hue, apartheidlike. This was real integration, a ten-to-one ratio as tidy as upper-class landscaping. If it all worked, you could have ten white kids all to ourself."

The scrutiny of the ten-plus was irritating, one lumpish black male student named Marvin was embarrassing, but the narrator's main problem is Oakley, the class bully, who focuses on him. There is plenty of shame to go around. The racial dynamic is prominent (hence, not "postracial").

There is a racial dynamic (more than an undercurrent) in my favorite of the stories, "Quitting Smoking," which was also originally published in the Kenyon Review and is the longest one in the book. It takes the form of a very long and rambling letter from Scott (who is black and a cabinetmaker) to B__ (who is white), one of his buddies in high school. Memories of the old days occur, but primarily Scott is explaining to B__ what has gone wrong in Scott's relationship with a white woman. The lure of nicotine is central, along with rapes (No, Scott does not recall being a rapist, but the buddies witnessed a woman being dragged off and did nothing about it once upon a time.)

My other favorite, "Into Night" (one of three that had not been previously published) is written from the perspective of a (black) grandmother, uncomfortable with her daughter's treatment of her grandson. A major problem is that the five-year-old boy keeps going into his older sister's room while she is in school and trying to fly the model airplanes she adores (spurning the dolls her paternal grandmother is always sending her). The grandmother regrets the continuing family history of violence. Her situation of living with her daughter and son-in-law as well as guilt of punishing her daughter when her daughter was small keep her from any effectual action.

The Chicanos are not provisionally white in southern California in "Peacetime," a comic account by a black Marine of his buddies' rowdiness along the way to arranging for the narrator to end his virginity (ca. 1973). There is a sexualized motorcycle, police not harassing the marines, but ordering them out of town, erratic driving, heavy alcohol consumption, and more. The narrator realizes that his buddies need a war to have something to do and that partying with them is more likely to end his life than his virginity.

The other three stories don't engage me. "Roscoe in Hell" is somewhat amusing a fantasy about a young black man who has ODed on drugs (crack) and finds exhausting excess in hell, where he is required to be the life of a party that never ends. I'd like it better if it were half the length it is.

The sci-fi "The Homunculus: A Novel in One Chapter" involves a would-be Dante visiting not Hell, but an Atlantis-like continent, writing his masterpiece... and forgetting the name of his Beatrice.

"Soul Food" is a stream of consciousness (also in short sentences and sentence fragments) of a homeless pickpocket and a sort of "Blade Runner" America in which cannibalism is common. The voice is convincing but IMHO the story is pointless. I may have missed it, and others might value the fantasy in the other two stories more than I do. And there are points - all-too-didactic ones - about art feeding on and substituting for life in "Homunculus," an unfortunate choice for the lead-off position the volume. (I'd have started with "Into Night," the one family-centered story with the oldest and youngest major characters anywhere in the volume.)