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  PRAISE FOR TRAGIC MAGIC

  “A prescient ancestor to today’s insurgent, boundary-breaching African American fiction… deserves rediscovery by a new generation of readers curious about where an earlier generation of Black protest came from and how they came through its challenges.”

  —Kirkus

  “Personal courage, the nature of manhood (and womanhood), the ties of the past and the freedom held out by the future, all emerge as moving motifs… This jaunty prose version of the urban blues deserves an attentive audience.”

  —The New York Times

  “Tragic Magic is a signifyin dazzler in which Black vernacular does what it does: be dance, battle, and thesis. This sentence-level prestidigitation mirrors the narrative’s tricky syncopation of tension and release, radical past and post-Civil Rights present, acid humor and the woe behind a wolf ticket’s bluster. First published in 1978, Wesley Brown’s remarkable and cinematic satire is still on-time, which is perhaps nearly as tragic as it’s surely magical.”

  —Douglas Kearney, author of Starts Spinning

  “Tragic Magic is a tremendous affirmation… One hell of a writer.”

  —James Baldwin

  “Wonderfully wry.”

  —Donald Barthelme

  “A clearly talented new writer.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An important discovery.”

  —Ishmael Reed

  “A literary gem.”

  —Mat Johnson

  TRAGIC MAGIC

  Copyright © 2021 Wesley Brown

  All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

  We’re grateful to Kevin Moffett who first brought this book to our attention, and to Concord Free Press and its co-founder and editor-in-chief Stona Fitch, whose yearslong support of Mr. Brown’s work helped bring this edition to fruition.

  McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of

  McSweeney’s, an independent publisher based in San Francisco.

  Cover illustration by Sunra Thompson

  ISBN 978-1-944211-98-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.mcsweeneys.net

  Printed in Canada

  TRAGIC

  MAGIC

  A NOVEL

  WESLEY BROWN

  PART OF THE OF THE DIASPORA SERIES

  edited by ERICA VITAL-LAZARE

  CONTENTS

  _____

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  A FEW WORDS BEFORE THE GET GO

  ONE LAST RIFF BEFORE WE HIT IT AND QUIT…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For my mother and father

  and

  Ted Solotaroff

  FOREWORD

  _____

  “…A THING NEVER MEANT a thing until it moved.” Melvin Ellington, the protagonist of Wesley Brown’s 1978 novel Tragic Magic arrives at this realization, ironically, during one of the few moments in the novel when he’s at rest, finally lying at his belle Alice’s side. It’s a posture we aren’t used to seeing him in. Magic covers a single day in Melvin’s life as he makes his way to New York City from Pennsylvania, where he served time for refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War. Thrown off his path as a college student and finding himself marooned in a kind of emotional dead zone—the result of steeling his heart against the depravities of prison life—he walks his old neighborhood haunts like a latter-day Leopold Bloom, if Bloom’s step and thought were infused with the spirit of jazz.

  When the novel opens, Melvin’s in transit. Riding a New York City subway with a past date named Tonya, he sees a man come onto her. The moment makes him insecure; should he have stood up to the man on Tonya’s behalf? Fought him? “I guess I should have done something,” he wonders aloud, like he’s playing for forgiveness. It’s not forthcoming, because Tonya isn’t offended by his inaction in the least. “What could you have done?” she retorts. She rejects the notion that Melvin’s gender makes it his duty to defend her honor—she’s perfectly well off defending it herself, as she reminds him. “You know, I almost kicked that dude in his family jewels. I caught myself just in time. I guess that wouldn’t have made you look too good if I had.” Melvin finds himself anxious over Tonya’s implication: that she doesn’t need him around at all. At least, not in the tired, predictable ways he wants her to need him.

  Tragic Magic is about tragedy, alright—the kinds of tragedies men bring upon themselves by allowing their inner lives to be ensnared in the trap we’ve come to call toxic masculinity; and the death of mind, spirit, and body that ensues when men willingly lower themselves into the coffin of gender expectations, how that death pervades everything from friendships to political activism. The scene is the first of many haunted by the specter of this death. When Melvin finds himself in a Pennsylvania prison preparing to serve a three-year bid for dodging the Vietnam War draft, he meets Chilly, an old hand of incarcerated life who warns him that not appearing like a certain kind of man can mean death. Or, worse, the ultimate violation of normative masculinity—sex between men. To that end, Chilly gives Melvin a set of directives: “Watch yourself when you take a shower. Don’t walk around half nude. And for your own protection, make sure you stay on a top bunk. The main thing is to be a man.”

  But, as Brown suggests, being a man is dangerous business. When Melvin finds himself staring at another man’s body in the prison shower, he indulges in gorgeous description, some of the novel’s most beautiful writing. “The slouch in his shoulders is an indication that very little has impressed him enough to make him straighten up. His face interests me most of all,” he rhapsodizes. “His hair, sideburns, and mustache have been trimmed as evenly as a well-kept lawn. And he is the color of a skillet broken in by cooking.” He catches himself, though, remembering where he is. “I’ve got to be more careful… At any moment someone may decide you will make a good piece of merchandise.”

  Wesley Brown’s genius in this novel is to set us down in the midst of men whose interior lives, whose senses of what it is possible for them to be in this world, have been so constrained by masculinity that they cannot even begin to think of other possibilities. He holds us so close to this world that it can seem as if there is no escaping it. Melvin, whose peers nickname him Mouth because of his overenthusiastic method of smooching women, is in many ways the perfect vehicle for this portrayal: his voice brings us into a too-intimate, almost claustrophobic relationship with the anxious world of masculinity, a community of men who feel a constant need to prove their male bona fides. It is a world of rampant homophobia, misogyny, body shaming, and generalized fear of what it would mean to let one’s guard down and participate in an actually intimate relationship—not just with women, but with anybody at all. Melvin, who seems most motivated by an adolescent lust, is not exempt from this fraternity. As a result, neither is the reader. We must be careful to read this novel not as an endorsement of heteronormativity, but an attempt to honestly reckon with the toll it takes on the novel’s male characters, the way it leaves them emotionally deformed.

  Among these men, Melvin’s childhood friend Otis is perhaps the most deformed. A veteran of the Vietnam War who, unlike Melvin, was driven to fight by his obsession with that paragon of American machismo, John Wayne, Otis is a young buck whose chief concerns are bedding women and demonstrating his physical prowess against other men. Quick to anger and possessed of a pride that goes only about half an inch deep, he is the Kurtz to Melvin’s Marlow. Racked by loneliness and more than a little guilt, Melvin seeks his friend out upon hearing that he’s lost a hand as a result of the war. What he finds is less a person than an open wound, a man whose notion of his identity has been fundamentally challenged by his
participation in a failed war, and a more personal failure to live up to an impossible standard. Once certain that fighting would make him every bit as heroic as Wayne, Otis—now a radio engineer rather than a warrior—is straining at society’s leash, leaping at every chance he gets to prove his belonging to the lethal fraternity of American cowboys.

  If Melvin is different from men like Otis, it is by virtue of his fundamentally curious nature. A skeptic whose posture towards life is characterized by a fundamental uncertainty, and an outsider who cannot quite fit himself into the cohort of horny alpha males who dominate his world, Melvin is attuned to a certain dissonance in the given world, the possibility that the world can be otherwise than it is. He is not a critic of this world but a questioner, a rebel without commitment to anything in particular, save what seems to be a pathological inability to accept things as they’ve been given to him—or to tell a story that doesn’t zig and zag in an ecstatic directionless-ness. Listening to Melvin think is like listening to Charlie Parker improvise a solo by following an idea or concept wherever it will take him, without any concern for whether or not it lines up with what came before, or what people will think of it.

  And, just like “Bird’s playing started everyone in the joint to jumping giddy and yapping in a strange tongue that emphasized the buzzing sound of the letter Z,” Melvin’s improvisatory, itinerant thought process is an intimation of a new and different language of gender and masculinity. He sees and hears what his brethren cannot—or are unwilling to—see and hear. Back in the prison shower, for example, he perceives that the prison doesn’t really mandate one strict definition of masculinity. Far from it: it’s a space where men routinely break their own rules about what it means to “be a man.” Melvin realizes that even as his fellow prisoners enforce certain gender norms, they themselves are “indulging in a favorite shower-room pastime: comparing the size of each other’s Swanson Johnson.” There’s some kind of improvisation happening here, a possible riff on staid, boring heteronormativity, maybe a new language. The inmates engage in a comparison of virility, a test of manhood that will be “determined by the one who can get his rizz-od as hizz-ard as a rizz-ock at a mizz-oments nizz-otice.”

  The spirit of Bird lingers over the proceedings, shepherding us towards something other than a dangerous and tragic notion of the masculine. This is the gift that Wesley Brown has given us: a new way to speak, a language that we have to excavate and rescue from the murky depths of gender expectation. This novel is an unruly and difficult story of how gender works in the world, and how we might find our ways to new modes of being. This is a novel that denounces reification and casts off stasis in favor of itinerant movement, in the hopes that we might come to find the meaning of our lives by playing our own solos, by riffing on the given world in search of other possibilities.

  —ISMAIL MUHAMMAD

  INTRODUCTION

  _____

  THE CONSUMMATE SHORT-STORY WRITER Grace Paley once said that, more often than not, the only thing coming with publication is silence. She, no doubt, meant that even glowing reviews from mainstream arbiters of culture, such as the New York Times, did not guarantee a substantial number of readers who would buy the book. This was my experience when my first novel, Tragic Magic, was published by Random House in the fall of 1978 and received enthusiastic reviews, particularly in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, but did not translate into sales. However, I felt enormously fortunate to have been one of the numerous African American writers that Toni Morrison guided to publication in the 1970s, during her many years as a senior editor at Random House.

  I’ve thought a great deal about Paley’s comment regarding the deafening “silence” that often greets publication since McSweeney’s contacted me regarding their desire to republish my first novel. But what I’d like to revisit is not the silence in the aftermath of publication, but the presence of sounds, spoken and instrumental, that informed and continue to animate my experience of writing fiction.

  The sounds of my mother and father’s voices, the conversations overheard among aunts and uncles, the gossip between my sister and her girlfriends, and the lively barbershop talk are imprinted on nearly every page of Tragic Magic. There was also rhythm and blues and jazz that was baked into my nervous system.

  I was reminded of this when rereading the opening of Tragic Magic: “A Few Words Before the Get Go.” The narrator identifies with the improvisational approach of jazz musicians and decides to tell his story by “…play(ing) against the melody, behind and ahead of the beat, to bend, diminish, and flatten notes, and slip in and out of any exact notation of what and how I should play.” The narrator mentions Ella Fitzgerald as an influence, who was “…one of the foremost practitioners of the form of talking shit known as scatting. With the air as her scratch pad she has scribbled much syllabic salad into song.” The protagonist also makes reference to his aunt (based on one of my own) who, when arguing with her husband, used a difficult-to-decipher slang called “Tut” and inserted it into her opposition to him. And in keeping with the transgressive lingo of “Tut,” the narrator, at the end of the introduction, says, “Like all of the rest before me I seem doomed to dissonance and thoughts like highwater pants that are too far from where they’re supposed to be.”

  Ironically, I wrote all this after the novel was completed, which could not have been written while I was discovering what I was writing and how it would sound. I was then persuaded to move it to the beginning, since the narrator could only have acquired this greater clarity about his journey once he’d finished telling his story.

  The relationship between the inventiveness of Black idiomatic speech and the improvisational impetus of American jazz are the voices in Tragic Magic that recount the story of a young Black man coming to terms with definitions of masculinity that have shaped him and persist even after two years in prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces during the war in Vietnam. Although the experiences of the protagonist, Melvin Ellington, mirrored many of my own, I had (to paraphrase artist Ben Shahn) to find a form that would shape my subject matter. And while I possessed some fragments of the story I thought I wanted to tell, I found myself following the approach of jazz great Miles Davis (on his legendary 1959 record Kind of Blue) and groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor, who took a not fully worked out composition or stand-up performance, and riffed on some of their ideas to see where they would lead them.

  During the writing of Tragic Magic and anything I’ve written subsequently, I am never without the rejuvenating sounds embodied in the human voice and their equivalent in music. Like any serious writer, I want to be read. But the silence in response to the publication of my novel was, for the most part, out of my control. What I could control, and ultimately of more value to me, are the voices telling me stories that, like Toni Morrison, I want to read. And like her, I continue to try to write them.

  —WESLEY BROWN

  A FEW WORDS

  BEFORE THE GET GO

  AS AN INTERN IN the reed section of sound I have been bucking to win the critic’s poll as a talent deserving wider recognition. I know all the standards and am particularly adept at playing the immortal “To Get Along, You Go Along.” But there are times when in spite of myself I undermine the popular rendition by not playing it as it was written, and flirt with the tragic magic in If, Maybe, Suppose, and Perhaps. When this happens I flash on my namesake, Duke Ellington, and recall what one of his mentors, Dad Cook, once told him: Learn the rules, then forget them and do it your own way. More than once this advice has subverted my best intentions to go along with the program. So at auditions to enter the fold I get the urge to play against the melody, behind and ahead of the beat, to bend, diminish, and flatten notes, and slip in and out of any exact notation of what and how I should play.

  I studied up on my problem and discovered it was quite a common affliction. The legendary New Orleans cornet player Charles “Buddy” Bolden exhibited the same symptoms and was committed to a state hospital in 1
907. After a routine examination, a doctor, S. B. Hays, gave his assessment of Bolden’s condition.

  Accessible and answers fairly well. Paranoid delusions, also grandiosed. Auditory hallucinations and visual. Talks to self. Much reaction. Picks things off the wall. Tears his clothes…. Looks deteriorated but memory is good…. Has a string of talk that is incoherent. Hears voices of people that bothered him before he came here.… Diagnosis: Dementia praecox, paranoid type.

  I went to a chili house in Harlem where it is said that ideas going through boot camp in Charlie Parker’s head resulted in his finding a metaphor inside old chord changes that no one had heard before.

  I remember one night before Monroe’s I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December, 1939. Now, I’d been getting bored with stereotyped changes that were being used all the time… and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night, I was working over “Cherokee,” and, as I did, I found that by using higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.

  —CHARLIE PARKER

  According to those present, Bird’s playing started everyone in the joint to jumping giddy and yapping in a strange tongue that emphasized the buzzing sound of the letter Z. It started when someone said—

  “Kiss my ass!” And the comeback was—

  “That don’t make me no nevermind cause eee-it-tiz neee-iz-zot the beee-iz-uuuteee, eee-it-tiz the bee-iz-zoooteee!”

  Bird wailed on at the top of the chords, and the Z string rap spread its healing and hurting potential all over Seventh Avenue. Over the years so-called “buzz talk” became the most popular street lingo and the most difficult for outsiders to decipher.