The Portable Promised Land Page 22

  And I think, I can control my life, or at least the way I look at it. If I decide that my jukebox makes me crazy then I am crazy, but if I choose to love my song then I’m not crazy at all. It’s the Eclipse Theory. I can choose to see things in ways that are good for me. I don’t have to accept Cricket’s vision of the world or Mr. Sage’s or Charisma’s. She sees the world in a way that makes her the queen of everything and everyone just goes along with it. But not me. I am the queen of my world! And in my world Charisma is a speck of dust to be flicked away. I am Superjane!

  And I just sit there for a long time listening to my song play, real loud, over and over, and thinking how things are gonna be so great this year. I don’t hate anyone, but anyone who doesn’t love me is crazy. You know what? I might be a little crazy, but I’m crazy in a way that’s good for me. And that’s good because going crazy is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

  YESTERDAY IS SO LONG AGO

  Clark Kent was crying. Just a few hot tears welling up under his lids, seeping slowly from his eyes. He was on his couch, in his robe, staring at CNN, paralyzed by grief. He’d been awake precisely four minutes, awakened by the phone, in shock as one plane-pierced tower crumbled, then the other. His cell phone rang. Someone said something. Clark said, “There’s nothing I can do.” He had some magic powers, but he couldn’t remember what they were. The willingness to die is a formidable power, he thought, perhaps greater than some of my own.

  SHOUT-OUTS

  Mom, who first taught me how to read and write

  Dad, who showed me how to work hard

  Chief Resident Dr. Meika, so proud of you

  Rita, my bliss dealer

  All of Fort Greene, Brooklyn

  Joe, Bob, Jann, and the rest of Rolling Stone, for incredible loyalty

  Sarah Lazin, for years of support

  Columbia U & Stephen Koch, for showing me the line between fiction and nonfiction is very thin Patricia Hampl, for teaching me about emotional truth Minna, a genius

  Adrienne Brodeur, who told me I could write fiction before I believed it

  Michael Pietsch, who gave me a shot at my dream Ryan, who put up with me

  Nelson George, a true friend

  Sakeem, my nigga

  Santi, The Black Widow rhyme-writer

  Mark Ronson, the best DJ in NY

  Bifal Moussa of Goree Island, Senegal

  Joan Didion (I love you!)

  Ralph Ellison, Ralph Ellison, Ralph Ellison

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

  Albert Murray

  James Alan MacPherson

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Zora Neale Hurston

  Salman Rushdie

  Toni Morrison

  Shel Silverstein

  Zadie Smith

  Greg Tate

  Bonz Malone

  dream hampton

  David Foster Wallace, who, along with any other tennis-playing fiction writer in America, is lovingly challenged to compete for the tennis championship of the fiction world. Are you listening Moody? Franzen? You too, Plimpton!

  Rick Moody, who, along with Wallace and Eggers, has created a style that I love, and I’d love to write like that because it looks like a lot of fun to be postmodern and hypertextual and have long footnotes and be wildly discursive, but then I hear a voice in my head that sounds not unlike my mother’s, and it says, “Just because all the cool kids are doing it, do you have to, too? I mean, really, if everyone else has footnotes and postmodern hypertextuality, do you have to, too?” But I feel you guys

  Lorrie Moore

  Muhammad Ali

  Richard Pryor

  Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, George Clinton, Sly

  Stone, James Brown, Bob Marley, Prince, Rakim, Snoop, Big, Jigga, Eminem, Satchmo, Duke, Miles, Trane, Dizzy, Monk, Romare Bearden, Roy DeCarava, Jacob Lawrence, William Johnson, Basquiat, Picasso, Dr. Cornel West, Allen Iverson, Randy Moss, Roy Jones Jr., Sampras, Venus & Serena

  Hiphop: MCing, DJing, aerosol art, b-boying, sonic experimentation, guerilla entrepreneurialism, sartorial warfare, linguistic assault, shadow senators, criminality worship, rhythm fantasia

  Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rem

  Koolhaas, Le Corbusier, I. M. Pei, Mies van der Rohe, Dr. Noble Truette

  Stuart Scott and Kenny Mayne

  George Burns (sorry)

  And a special shout-out to voodou, style, game, fine (as in foin), jive, jimbrowski, negritude, Chocolate City, the Willie Bobo, hype, flow in all forms, dopeness, tain’t, hustle, funk, rhythm, soul, the blues, the wop, the prep, the smurf, the humpty hump, the doo doo brown, the bankhead bounce, the nth degree, all the people who’ve read this far, and, finally, all the rogue gurus out there with enough self-love to curb their dogma and dedicate their lives to running bootleg mojo across zone lines, spending all their moxie to bring down the karma police and break their monopoly on nirvanot so Soul City can be free for all the all-that aestheticians in the underground working hard to make up the new dances and the new slang because they are the real experimental players, the style guerillas, the truly nappy minds.

  And a special thanks to all my characters in all my stories for staying on the page.

  AVAILABLE SOON

  From Negritude University Press:

  THE BLACK UTOPIA

  A HISTORY OF SOUL CITY

  By Cadillac Jackson

  Here, for the first time, is the complete story of Soul City, America’s most miraculous metropolis, where flowers leap up through the sidewalk, and the mayor is the uber-DJ, and Black magic is everywhere. Read the full story of Soul City’s slavery-era founding as well as why Fulcrum Negro’s Certified Authentic Negrified Artifacts won’t sell any of its unique antiques (and where Fulcrum got them), why you need one of Dream Negro’s Desire Obliterating Weaves, why the Revren Lil’ Mo Love is the most chased unchaste virgin in town at only ten years old, and why the multihundred-year-old ladies at the House of Big Mamas might never, ever die.

  “Aesthetic bliss! ... 1,369 pages of essential reading for anyone interested in what makes Soul City, or Black America, tick.”

  —Dr. Noble Truette, The Soul City Quarterly Review of Books

  THE PORTABLE PROMISED LAND

  Stories by Touré

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  A NOTE ABOUT TOURÉ

  Touré is a novelist first and a tennis player second. (He keeps telling himself that.) He was born in Boston just before the release of Shaft, when Al Green first sang “I’m so tired of bein’ alone” and Muhammad Ali was knocked out by Joe Frazier. He spent years in a New England prep school (beloved Milton!) and then did time at an American university that shall remain nameless. There he fell into protest poetry (if you come across it turn your head immediately!). Determined to expand the complexity of the discussion of Black people, he moved to New York City in 1992, just before the release of the classic Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg album The Chronic, just after the Clarence Thomas hearings and the L.A. Uprising, and began to write.

  He was a lazy, chatty, unpaid intern at Rolling Stone and was fired one day, then given assignments to write record reviews the next. He is now a Contributing Editor there, the author of cover stories on Lauryn Hill, DMX, ’N Sync, and Alicia Keys. He learned to write at Rolling Stone and went on to write for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Playboy, the Village Voice, Vibe, and Tennis Magazine. In 1996 he went to Columbia University’s graduate creative writing program for a year and, thanks to a class taught by Stephen Koch, began writing fiction. His first piece was the story of Sugar Lips Shinehot, a 1940s Harlem saxophonist who loses his ability to see white people. In the years following Columbia his pieces appeared in Best American Essays of 1999 and Best American Sportswriting 2001.

  He loves Didion, Morrison, Nabokov, Ellison, Rushdie, Joyce, Franzen, Moody, Greg Tate, García Márquez, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. He also loves Sly Stone, Al Green, Jay-Z, Satchmo, D’Angelo, De La
Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, Eminem, Erykah Badu, Biggie, the Beatles, Prince, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Macy Gray, Rakim, Raekwon, Radiohead, and, of course, Stevie Wonder. He’s voted for a Clinton every chance he’s had. He loves Almost Famous (it’s frighteningly real).

  Touré is his real name, the name his mother gave him when he was born, the name his parents consciously chose for him. The last name was something that came automatically, like fries with a burger, thus it wasn’t something that really meant anything to him. And plus, Touré is a last name in Africa — they laughed at him there, Silly American. Touré ain’t no first name. It’s kinda like a Bostonian named Kennedy. But in the onenamedness there’s a reference to the dislocation implicit in the African-American family name and a reach back to the unknown last names of Africa. His next book, Soul City, a novel that tells the full story of America’s most miraculous metropolis, is nearly done. He lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

  TOURÉ ON THE ORIGINS OF

  The Portable Promised Land

  The Portable Promised Land began in a fiction writing class in the graduate creative writing program at Columbia University, a class taught by the eminent Stephen Koch. (Well, it really began when I was a child because it includes everything or at least the shadow of everything I’ve ever heard, all the conversations and experiences and news and stories and books that have passed into my ear, but in that class I learned how to form fiction from feelings).

  Professor Koch assigned us to write a story and I thought, What about a Black man for whom white people are invisible? How does he get that way? Is it a power or a condition? What happens to him because of it? The name Sugar Lips Shinehot came to me and I took my first steps into fiction. Each question opened a door into a new room of thought. Sometimes the rooms were small and required only a few words to fill the small questions they posed. But sometimes the rooms were huge and allowed lots of room to think and add to the story. And thus it grew.

  The next semester, in another fiction class, I conjured up the Right Revren Daddy Love, the great ultrasexual jackleg preacher from Brooklyn. I’d long been fascinated by the stories of Daddy Grace and Father Divine, Harlem preachers from the ’20s and ’30s with epic lives who proposed themselves as Godly. They, and all the great Black preachers throughout history, got rolled into Revren Daddy Love. That story was the last I did for about a year. Then I entered it into a Zoetrope contest and somehow won a trip to Belize. Down there Zoetrope editor Adrienne Brodeur told me she thought I was pretty good. She gave me the nudge I needed. I started telling people I was going to write a book of short stories and read a lot of stories and sooner rather than later the road was begun.

  I wrote most of the book sitting on the couch. (I have a Herman Miller chair but hardly ever sit on it.) I watch a lot of TV. Too much. Sometimes while writing. (But never during Sports-Center because those guys will change the tone of your sentences.) I generally begin with an idea about the main character, the sort of magic power that distinguishes them, and then work outward from there to figure out who the character is, what his or her name is, and what shape and tone I want the story to have. I always approach the fictive world of my characters as if I’m the God in their world. If I’m going to create a world, then I’ll create the physics of that world and they won’t be the physics of this world. Thus, my stories are worlds where people can fly, where some children can disappear into paintings and other children wake up having somehow morphed into Little Black Sambo.

  “The Black Widow (part 1)” was the third piece I wrote, definitely a response to years of watching hiphop up close at Rolling Stone. (I’ve been on trial with Tupac, at Christmas Eve with Lauryn Hill, blunting in the hallway with Biggie, balling with Prince, chowing at Roscoe’s House of Chicken N Waffles with DMX, playing high-stakes poker with Jay-Z, and many, many other adventures through the looking-glass that is hiphop.) I wanted to create an MC who was beyond the extreme self-mythologizing and caricaturishly wild living that we see in our favorite MCs. I was also impressed by what George Plimpton did years ago in Sports Illustrated, writing about an incredible and mysterious new baseball pitcher named Sid Fynch. It was a total hoax, the story came out on April 1st, but for a week people believed it. I wrote “The Black Widow (part 1)” for The Source and had them publish it as though it was real. The challenge was to exploit all the personal and professional excess we know and love about hiphop, while not pushing so far that people would know right away that she was fake.

  The most realistic story of the bunch is “How Babe Ruth Saved My Life.” I really was that kid. “The Breakup Ceremony” is very emotionally honest, the direct result of a very difficult situation, of wanting to end a relationship and being unable to find a way to do so. And “Blackmanwalkin” is all about my Dad, barely fictional.

  I tried, with some of the pieces, to find new ways of constructing a narrative, with things that appear like basic lists but have a structure and shape to them. I see the books of David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, and Greg Tate as rich in experiments as to what English and fiction and narrative structure can be, much like the experiments of abstract expressionist painters of the past thirty or forty years. I wanted to give you a little of what I came up with in my word lab.

  My magic realism attempts to shine a light on the glorious or dubious aspects of Blackness by exaggerating them to the point of caricature, but not beyond the point where the truth of it is lost. I need the outsizing instrument of magic realism to discuss the complex beauty of Black people with any real accuracy.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND

  TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. “The Steviewondermobile” is a paean to Stevie Wonder, but could the story be centered around another artist? How would the story be different if it were a Ninasimonemobile? A Louisarmstrongmobile? A Franksinatramobile? A Beatles-mobile? A Jayzmobile?

  2. Could he be both? What real-life person do you think most resembles him?

  3. Is the author fair to both genders in “The Breakup Ceremony” or does one end up looking more foolish than the other?

  4. Do all of the characters’ names have special meaning? What is your favorite of all the characters’ names in The Portable Promised Land, and what do you think it says about the character? How would you rename that character if you could? What would your name be if you lived in the world of these stories?

  5. Afrolexicology Today’s Biannual List doesn’t define all the words given. How would you define those words? What words would you add to the list?

  6. “My History” reimagines the past. Try it yourself: What historical events do you wish had happened differently or hadn’t happened at all? What do you think this story is saying about the events described? Do you think it’s useful to reimagine history?

  7. Is “We Words” a short story? An essay? A poem? Why does it belong in a collection of more conventionally told stories? Are there any words in the story you don’t recognize? Are there any words in the story you think don’t belong, or words that should be added? Would “We Words” be very different if it were written five years from now? Five years ago?

  8. Do you think the Black Widow’s album would be successful on today’s charts? Would you buy the album?

  9. What would you do if you woke up to discover your five-year-old had somehow transformed into a Little Black Sambo? Why does the author make Sambo’s parents Black Panthers? What does their frustration with their son’s new form say about black pride? Do you think their reactions are appropriate?

  10. Flying is one of the most important themes in the collection. Why? Where does flying play an important role? What does flying symbolize?

  NEW IN PAPERBACK • GREAT FOR READING GROUPS

  The Wooden Nickel

  A novel by William Carpenter

  “Funny and profane.... Melville would have approved of this novel’s oily, splintered texture and boisterous dialogue, the best of which is too salty to quote here.”

  — Sally Eckhoff
, New York Times Book Review

  “A funny, funny book.... Lucky leaps to life and you buy his story — hook, line, and sinker.... Carpenter’s writing is vivid and lively, filled with earthy dialogue and hilarious descriptions.”

  — Helen Parramore, Tampa Tribune

  Brownsville

  Stories by Oscar Casares

  “Oscar Casares does for Brownsville, Texas, what Eudora Welty did for Jackson, Mississippi; he remakes a territory into his own fictional universe and does it by writing from the insides of a people he knows like the palm of his hand.”

  — Tim Gautreaux, author of Welding with Children

  “These stories are clear-eyed and fresh, full of sweet gravity and pensive humor. Oscar Casares is an exceptional writer.”

  — Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping

  Available wherever books are sold

  NEW IN PAPERBACK • GREAT FOR READING GROUPS

  Super Flat Times

  Stories by Matthew Derby

  “Imagine The Matrix, but funny, or a neurotic Metropolis, and you might get some sense of what this weird, beautifully written book, made by someone who has watched far too much television, does to your brain.”

  — Neal Pollack, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature