Story night

Thursday night was our Swarthmore Class on Zoom - two new short stories: Nafissa Thompson-Spires, "Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apologies, and Kiley Reid, "George Washington's Teeth." Both of these stories were written by African-American authors. Nafissa Thompson-Spires was born in San Diego, California, in 1983. She earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Illinois and Vanderbilt University. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, won the Los Angeles Times Art Sidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Award for fiction, among other prizes. Heads of the Colored People has been translated into Italian, Turkish, and Portuguese. She also won a 2019 Whiting Award. She was long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in New York Magazine's “The Cut,” “The Root,” “The Paris Review. “The White Review,” “Ploughshares,” and many other places. She currently teaches at Cornell University as the Richards Family Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, where she teaches fiction and television studies.

Nafissa Thompson-Spires***************************************** Kiley Reid was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1987 and raised in Tucson, Arizona, from the age of seven to 20. She graduated from Salpointe Catholic High School and studied theater at the University of Arizona for two years before transferring to Marymount Manhattan College. She later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her recent novel, Such a Fun Age was longlisted for the Booker Prize in July 2020 and won the International Book of the Year at the 2021 Australian Book Industry Awards. The novel, which explores the relationship between a young black babysitter and her well-intentioned white employer, was ranked No. 3 on the New York Times hardcover fiction list within two weeks of its U.S. release. It received generally positive reviews in numerous media outlets, including The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR and The Atlantic magazine. It was the first selection of 2020 for Reese Witherspoon's book club. The Washington Post's review said that "Reid constructs a plot so beautifully intricate and real and fascinating that readers will forget it’s also full of tough questions about race, class and identity." The Atlantic described the book as "a funny, fast-paced, empathetic examination of privilege in America." A review in The New York Times noted the book's "resonant insights into the casual racism in everyday life, especially in the America of the liberal elite."

Kiley Reid*************************************************** Heads of the Colored People brought home to us the fact that we are pretty much out of touch with black culture. There were numerous references to people, songs and writings that were unknown to us. Our teacher, Peter Schmidt, anticipated this and provided us with the supplementary material but also encouraged us to use "Google" to look things up, which we did, to some extent. We are now a bit more "with it." But who knows how long it will last! George Washington's Teeth raised a lot of interesting and provocative questions. It was about a young African-American fifth-grade teacher, Claire, who has been nominated for Teacher of the Year in a nation-wide competition. As she waits to find out if she wins that honor, she gives her class a creative assignment - she has prepared s series of "mis-conceptions of American History" and put them on slips of paper and put them in a hat - the students draw out a slip and are asked to research the issue and make a presentation to the class. But this proves to raise a dilemma for Claire. Heather, the mother of a student, Anna, comes in to ask Claire to change Anna's assignment because the one she drew is causing Anna a lot of distress. The slip Anna drew - her "misconception" - is "George Washington's teeth were made out of wood." Behind this statement lies the reality that George Washington did actually buy and wear teeth that had been extracted from the mouths of slaves. Anna has imagined the teeth being taken from live slaves and is so disturbed by that image that she is crying at night. She wants Claire to give her a less vivid "misconception," like, "Albert Einstein failed math." The problem for Claire is that there is a back story here. Twenty years earlier, Claire and Heather were at an almost all-white girls camp in Vermont, and an incident occured there in which Claire was falsely accused of stealing a cake from the kitchen, an accusation which clearly has a racial dimension. Heather knows Claire is innocent, but remains silent when she could have spoken up and cleared her from suspicion. Claire learns that Anna is the daughter of Heather when she sees her name and does a little research, but when Heather comes in, this fact is not acknowledged. They have not seen each or been in touch since it happened. Claire is actually waiting for Heather to say something about it - maybe even apologize all these years later. But that doesn't happen, and Claire is not disposed to grant the request - she feels that assignment is actually having its desired effect! This dilemma gets resolved in a very interesting and provocative way, and it made for good discussion. *********************************** The Heads of Black People is much darker. It features a black man named Riley who is a fan of what is called "cosplay" - elaborately dressing up and impersonating a character famous in pop culture. Riley's character is based on Tamaki Suoh, a main character in a Japanese manga (comic strip) and anime (hand-drawn computer animation) called Ouran High School Host Club. These are all names and terms Ellen and I were totally unfamiliar with but most 20-somethings would recognize immediately. I did not realize that many black young people are big fans of Japanese manga.

Tamaki Suoh**************************************** Impersonating Tamaki Suoh requires Riley to bleach his hair and use blue contact lenses to make his eyes blue, as well as dressing appropriately. This might appear to white people to be a kind of self-hatred and denial of his blackness, but that is not the case at all. It is a highly sophisticated form of play. There is another character, Bruh Man (Brother Man) who is also an unusual character and without going too deeply into details, the two have a confrontation which is innocent but which the police (white, of course, and totally oblivious) interpret as dangerous, and they shoot both men dead. So the story becomes a kind of parable of our current society.