PEARL K. BELL
289
What the young hero of
High Cotton
struggles to convey is the con–
fusion and uncertainty about his race and status that someone born into
the black elite in the early fifties had to try and sort out. When the
family moves to the suburbs, the nameless narrator describes himself as
one of the Also Chosen - the small number of black students in a
predominantly white school. His immediate tactic is to deny there's
anything special about his situation, with a wry proviso: "There was
nothing to be afraid of as long as we were polite and made good grades.
. . . You were just as good as anyone else out there, but they - whoever
'they' were - had rigged things so that you had to be close to perfect
just to break even."
The tension between his nonchalant affectation of indifference and
the intractable reality of race is put to the test when, in adolescence, he
visits relatives in the South, which he calls "The Old Country." There
the lines demarcating black and white are not as conveniently blurred as
they seemed to be in Indiana:
The Old South became a sort of generalized stuffy room... . It
wasn't safe to explore the South. The old-timers themselves
discouraged too much curiosity about what lay beyond the gate. It
was a place of secrets, of what black people knew and what white
people didn't.... Meanwhile, television passed on its pictures, the
connecting tissue. The representations survived the subject and
eventually overtook my own images, which were less durable than
waxwork figures in an exhibition of Black Life at the Smithsonian.
Since
High Cotton
is constructed, in the manner of autobiography, of
self-enclosed episodes that represent the stages of a developing life, it is
sometimes hard to discern the thread - other than the wry tone of the
narrator - that connects these events. Whatever tenuous unity exists
comes from the fascinating figure of the young man's Grandfather Eu–
stace. He, not the mercurial and nameless narrator, is the most fully
realized character in the book, the one who represents a view of his
race and identity that the narrator thinks he can neither share nor entirely
reject with impunity. "I spent much of my life running from him,
centripetal fashion, because he was, to me, just a poor old darky" who
came from the Old Country - Georgia. What "old darky" means in this
context is not some shuffling stereotype from
Gone With the Wind
but a
man whose view of blackness his grandson thinks obsolete, intransigently
resistant to the changing times. A graduate of Harvard and Brown,
Grandfather Eustace became a Congregationalist minister, always
eloquently spoken and elegantly dressed, an awful snob who rarely visited
