It’s a little surprising, given how George Floyd’s dying words “I can’t breathe” have been heard around the world and ignited such widespread protests against institutional racism and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, that no one has noted their echo in the title of Ronald Fair’s novel We Can’t Breathe. A largely autobiographical novel of growing up as a black child in Chicago during the Second World War and after, Fair called it “the work of my lifetime, the book I’ve been trying to write for 10 years.”
Its central theme is that of finding a way to achieve some success as a black man in a white man’s world while maintaining some remnant of self-respect. All the ingredients of ghetto life are here: poverty, prejudice, drugs, numbers runners, petty crimes, gospel churches and corner gangs, rotten landlords and decent hard-working people being ground down by the daily friction of life. Fair’s fictional self, Ernie, narrates the story retrospectively, speaking as one who has managed to escape the worst effects of this childhood.
Ernie and four of his friends form a band after they are tormented and mocked by a group of older boys. “The five of us were brothers now, and we had to fight the others for fear that they would rob us of what little manhood we had. We had to fight the others, otherwise we would have lived in such fear of them that we would not have been able to breathe.” As they grow, they confront the threats of their world: gangs and dope dealers; the ferocious, relentless rats that infest their basements and alleys; and the prejudice of most of the white people they come in contact with. At times, they find themselves in situations where the only options are fight or flight, others where it’s a choice between surrendering — or bullshitting one’s way out.
One of the boys, Willie, takes the latter approach when caught shoplifting in a white store. “Catch the nigger before he gets away!” one of the clerks screams. he coolly walks up to her, sticks a finger in her face, and asks, “Bitch, just who the hell you think you callin a nigger?” When the manager responds by slamming him against a counter shouting, “But you were stealing, boy, and you know that’s wrong,” Willie shifts gears and adopts the stereotype of the chasten, contrite Uncle Tom:
I sho do, suh, but I had to do it to get some money for my baby sister,” he lied. “We ain’t got no food at home. Honest. We ain’t even got no bread. You know what it’s like, mister, you know, to be hungry — I mean to be real hungry? My mama left home las week and ain’t nobody there to take care of the baby cep me and I had to do somethin cause we so hungry. I didn’t know what to do, mister, I swear I didn’t. I thought if I stole somethin I could maybe, you know, sell it and get some money for food. Know what I mean? Ain’t gonna call no police, are you? Please don’t, mister, please. Please. I’m sorry.
Willie proceeds to lay out a woeful tale designed to induce maximum sympathy and swears to come work sweeping out the store’s basement — knowing full well that the white manager wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the store the very next day.
Ernie is a little luckier than his friends. Though he’s exposed to the same environmental and institutional obstacles, his mother and father stay together, they eat together each night, and no matter how dismal their apartment, he has his own bed to sleep in each night. His father encounters humiliating discrimination in trying to work in a defense plant and becomes for a time an angry and abusive drunk, but he finds a way out and Ernie has more of a sense of home and family than Willie and the others.
He also has the luck to encounter a friendly, and for the time, exceptionally enlightened English teacher in junior high school. She sees some promise in his awkward attempts at writing and gives him a book to take home and read. “I thought reading was a drag,” he recalls.
I had spent years reading about white children on farms, white men at their work, white mothers at their household chores, white animals with black spots, white families going on picnics, white grandparents coming from the country to visit their children and grandchildren, white soldiers, white generals, white sailors, white naval captains, white admirals, white explorers, white heroes, white traitors, white pilots—white-white-white-white-white everybodies with white everything they did being about as interesting to me as all of the white teachers I had had who really did not give a damn if I ever learned to read or spell or write or think.
The book Mrs. Taylor gives Ernie is a biography of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the black general who led the Haitian revolution against the Spanish and the French. After resisting it for weeks, Ernie picks it up while staying home sick and is thunderstruck. “A Negro general,” he tells his mother. “Wow, Mom, I never knew there was a Negro general did anything anywhere. A Negro! Wow, Mom, I gotta read this whole book.”
With Mrs. Taylor’s encouragement, Ernie begins to write stories set in the world he’s grown up in. When she returns his first piece, however, he is surprised at her corrections. “I was shocked to see how many times she had drawn a line through the word ‘mothafucka.'” Thinking back on the experience, he reflects,
I realize that it was a story about a mothafuckin bunch of fuckin drunks in a rotten fuckin mothafuckin town with a mess of mothafuckin other mothafuckas, fuckin around and fuckin up their lives and every other mothafuckin person in the mothafuckin neighborhood who was unfortunate enough to live in the mothafuckin city with all the fucked-up mothafuckin white people fuckin over the black mothafuckas all the fuckin time. The story ended with the only way to get out of the mothafuckin trouble in the mothafuckin world was to end up as a mothafuckin dead man, six mothafuckin feet under the mothafuckin ground.
“Is this really the way they talk?” she asks him. When he replies, “Yes, ma’am,” she responds — and here I suspect we are dealing with fiction rather than autobiography — “If that’s the way some of the people you know really talk, then I suppose I had no right to change their language.”
Perhaps this did occur. Perhaps Fair did have such an open-minded, sympathetic teacher at some point. But this anecdote illustrates why We Can’t Breathe, although undoubtedly a highly accurate picture of black life in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, fails to satisfy as a work of fiction. Ernie emerges as a young man largely unscathed. He is the survivor, but his survival seems to owe much to — well, either luck or predestination. “I had been granted immunity by the gods or by God or by the natural order of things,” he writes, “because I had been given a vision of survival without dehumanization. I would survive in spite of what happened to everyone around me.” It is hard to empathize with a character who comes off as a bit of a Teflon man. And to be honest, throughout the book, Fair’s anger is often muted by a certain amount of nostalgia for his good old days, no matter how unlikely he’d really want to turn back the clock.
George Davis, reviewing We Can’t Breathe in the New York Times, saw it as weaker overall than Fair’s first novel, Many Thousand Gone, which had been published seven years earlier and which Davis called “One of the most beautifully written books of the last decade.” Readers who turn to Many Thousand Gone for beautiful writing, however, are in for a shock. Fair subtitled the book A American Fable, but it bears little resemblance to anything Aesop ever wrote — unless there’s a version of “The Tortoise and the Hare” floating around somewhere that ends with the tortoise eating the hare.
The premise of Many Thousand Gone is simple and gut-wrenching: in a little quadrant in the middle of Mississippi called Jacobs County, wholly owned and run by the Jacobs family, slavery has never ended. Tiny, unimportant, in the midst of a state resentful of its status after the war, and surrounded by sympathetic counties, Jacobs County has managed to keep history from moving past 1864. Few outsiders — and definitely no black ones — are allowed in. The only way out for the slaves is escape. Letters in and out are censored. Black men who show any sign of resistance are beaten to death and buried. All black women are considered fair game for any white man to take in the bushes and rape.
Although Samuel Jacobs, the founder of Jacobs County, had originally strived to keep his slaves of pure black blood, over the decades the policy of his descendants towards rape has meant that there are fewer and fewer pure black babies. When the last of these is born, Granny Jacobs — like most of the black residents, she carries the name of the county’s founder — dubs him “the Black Prince” and vows to arrange his escape. When he is still a teenager, she carries out an elaborate plan by which she smuggles him to a friendly black family in a nearby county while convincing the sheriff of Jacobs County that the young man has died. The family takes him to Chicago, where he becomes a writer. The episode cannot help but bring to mind the story of King Herod and the infant Jesus.
The catalyst that sets off the chain reaction that destroys the century-long status quo in Jacobs County is when the Black Prince publishes a book about the town. He sends his grandmother a copy of Ebony with an article about it. The censor in the Jacobsville post office passes it to the sheriff, who recognizes immediately the danger in allowing the slaves in his county — all but one, the preacher, kept illiterate — see photos of black people living better than most of the whites they knew. “I can tell you one thing,” he says. “You ain’t gonna see none of them pictures as long as I’m alive.”
But word gets out and soon the slaves are curious. “They wanted to know more about the magazine, about the bright cars and fine clothes, the beautiful black women and the big houses, and especially about the schools, where colored boys and girls and young men and women learned about things the Jacobs County Negroes didn’t understand, but knew must be worth learning if the colored folks up north bothered about them.” The young black men in the county begin to talk of organizing against the whites and to placate them, the preacher writes a letter to the President of the United States:
I is writin to tell you about us because if you dont come down here or send that army down to do something to free my people they is going to kill every white man and every white woman and every white child in Jacobs County. We slaves down here Mr. President. We been slaves ever since I can remember and I been here sixty years and Granny Jacobs been here more than eighty years and she still a slave. The sheriff and Mr. Jacobs and the sheriffs deputies make us work in the fields and in the house and in the warehouse and on folks farms and in the post office and in the stores and in the jails and everywhere and aint never paid us no money cep when we ask for food or for some clothes or things like that and they dont let us leave Jacobs County. Ifen one of us tries to leave we gets kilt just as quick as swattin a fly we gets kilt. We just found out that colored folks aint slaves nowheres else cep here and we want you to free us.
The letter is smuggled out of the county. There is no reply. But months later, a carful of Federal men arrive in Jacobsville and start asking questions. The sheriff is cagey enough to keep them from discovering too much and concocts a reason to lock the agents up. Unfortunately for him and the rest of the white population of Jacobs County, however, any combustible mixture held too long and under too much pressure is bound to explode. The ending is swift, violent, and ruthless.
Many Thousand Gone is not the black equivalent of The Turner Diaries, however. This is a less a fable than a parable, a story to be told and read not literally but for its lesson. When Lillian Smith reviewed the book for St. Louis Post-Dispatch shortly before her death, she wrote, “It would be a wonderful thing if we had on our streets … storytellers telling long tales to the people. What a story this is to tell! What a soft mercy might creep into dry, hating hearts if only they could feel the poetry of this little book.” Many Thousand Gone is brief — barely more than a hundred pages — crisp, powerful as a gut-punch but told in a cool, matter-of-fact tone. There may be no actual Jacobs County, but in creating it, Ronald Fair illustrated with the precision of a haiku the damage that any inequality too long sustained can wreak upon both the oppressed and their oppressors. It’s not a book whose time has come, sadly. It’s a book whose time has never left.
We Can’t Breathe, by Ronald L. Fair
New York: Harper & Row, 1972
Many Thousand Gone, by Ronald L. Fair
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965