cammy brothers “There Is No White Culture in This Country”: An Interview with James Alan McPherson was a freshman in college in 1987, when I did the interview that follows as an assignment. The class was “The Literature of Social I Reflection,” taught by Robert Coles. We read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and other similar books. Less intent on the analysis of lit- erature than on the nurturing of moral sensibilities, Coles left his final assignment open-ended. It was not meant to be a conventional research paper or literary analysis; some students slept on the streets to experi- ence what it was like to be homeless. I interviewed Jim. It was a long, digressive conversation. I had done some research, reread his essays, and came prepared with a list of questions. But Jim lead the conversa- tion. He’d known me since I was twelve, and both my youth and my naive questions may have allowed him to lower his guard. The tone is different from the banter of his published interview with Bob Shacochis in the Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, from 1983. Here, Jim was educating me, telling me how it was. I’d grown up around the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (my mother has worked there since 1974), going to readings and dinners, and I knew plenty of interesting people and good talkers. Jim was like an inverse mirror of the gregarious writers I knew. He was never capable of small talk, and everything he said cut to the heart of the matter. He could be cryptic, wise, subversively funny, or say nothing at all. At Workshop par- ties, he often sat in a corner, and I would come talk to him. A few things strike me about the interview, rereading it decades later. Iowa seems to have been almost the first place where Jim felt he could trust his neighbors and friends. His political and moral percep- tions pervaded everything he said, from his vision of his own history to his view of the present world. His constant preoccupations, which run through both his fiction and essays, were the intersections of race, class, history, politics, and what it is to be an American. Our conversa- tion took place during Reagan’s second term, and Jim’s preoccupations were rooted in that political moment; a number of these have new resonances today. Some of his concerns, which at the time seemed Photo courtesy of Rachel McPherson the iowa review 177 eccentric—following the activities of white supremacists, for example, subscribing to their newsletters—now seem prescient. Jim’s friends will remember that his answering machine and one of his business cards said, “Mr. Jefferson is not at home, he’s down at the cabins making contradictions.” Jim’s humor was often like this, quietly outrageous. The editor of TIR and I discussed whether, in publishing the interview years after it was conducted, we should update his language (words like “mulatto”) to reflect the current terms in use. We decided not to, because Jim’s language, like his humor, deliberately skirted the niceties of polite society. Our conversation preceded Jim’s publication of his two volumes of personal essays, Crabcakes (1998) and A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile (2000), and anticipates some of the themes he would take up there. It builds on aspects of his biography. James Alan McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1943. His father was the only qualified black master electrician in the state and was continually being denied a license. The family often had to move from apartment to apartment. When he was eighteen, he got a scholarship to Morris Brown College in Atlanta. He then went to Harvard Law School and got his degree in 1968. He put himself through law school by working as a janitor for an apartment building on Massachusetts Avenue. He began writing while in law school, publishing articles and stories in The Atlantic Monthly. After graduating, he attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. He started teaching at the University of California at Santa Cruz, then at the University of Virginia, before joining the faculty of the Workshop in 1981. He worked as a grocery store boy, a janitor, a railroad waiter, a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly, and a professor. Along the way, he wrote important essays for The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine, including an interview with Ralph Ellison (who would become his mentor), a profile of Richard Pryor, essays on housing descrimination and gangs in Chicago, two books of short stories, Hue and Cry (1969) and Elbow Room (1977), and three nonfiction books, earning him a Guggenheim Award (1972), the Pulitzer Prize (1978), and the MacArthur Award (1981). Cammy Brothers: I’d like to start out talking about your childhood and what it was like growing up in Savannah. Could you describe the racial climate? Was it acceptable to be overtly racist? James Alan McPherson: It was acceptable to be overtly racist, but it’s more complex than that. I think that if you study the first generation of slaves out of slavery, you find that they were artisans, they were brick 178 cammy brothers masons, they built all the plantation houses in the South. They weren’t just field hands, they were architects. That threatened the power struc- ture, and so from 1896 until the early ’50s, there was an attempt to sup- press any evidence of black intelligence. It was aimed at making sure black laborers never competed with white laborers. That accounted for the mass wave of migration out of the South. In Ellison’s Invisible Man, there’s a segment called “Golden Day.” Those guys are old professionals. The whites feel threatened by them and the black people feel threatened by the whites. CB: In “Going Up to Atlanta” (published in 1987 in A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood) you wrote that your father gambled and drank with other older blacks who were all disillusioned with society and were frustrated. Was that an accurate picture of the scene your father was a part of? JM: Yeah. My neighbor next door tells me that you see the same groups of men gathered around the open fire in South Africa. Castrated black men who commiserate together around an open fire. I was surprised to hear that it’s the same system. It’s just that it’s a bit more naked in South Africa than it is now in this country. CB: But when you were growing up? JM: It was brutal. I remember I used to work bagging potatoes for a man named Norton. There was a restaurant across the street where, of course, black people couldn’t go to eat, but you couldn’t even go beyond the counter. Norton used to spend time at the restaurant talking business deals. His mother used to say, “James, go over there, and tell Norton this and that.” So I’d go over there and Norton was highly ironic, he knew what he was doing. He’d sit way back beyond the counter, and I’d stand where I was supposed to stand, and he’d say, “Come on, James, come on James.” So he was eroding the thing in his own way, and he’d look at me. CB: Would you come back? JM: Yeah, but I had to have his permission. The other man that worked for Norton was Mr. Sikes. He was an Anglo-Saxon redneck. He hated Norton. the iowa review 179 CB: Because he was able to observe that kind of subversive behavior, and it grated on him? JM: No, it wasn’t that. It was just that Norton was Jewish, and he hated to have to work for a Jew. He would be cleaning up the frozen food racks, and if he was frustrated with Norton, he’d pass by me and hit me on the head. As a matter, of course, he could do that, because I was trapped. I couldn’t quit the job, because it was all that I could get, and my sister had a baby, and I had to take care of that. But I’m saying that it’s such a naked thing; Sikes knew that I was trapped. CB: He just hit you? JM: Sure, yes. CB: And you couldn’t respond at all? Would you do anything, or would you just take it? JM: Well, I took it. The idea is that I was wise enough to see that Sikes was in no better position than I was. In a way, he was worse off, because he was a white man. The only option that he had was to beat up on the black help. CB: How do you view the difference between the climate when you were growing up and today? Have the attitudes really progressed or have they just gone underground? JM: The black American’s position has been so well institutionalized that even if the people want to change, the institutions still follow their own logic. They’re not geared toward the exclusion of Asians or Spanish speaking people. CB: I can see how that’s very much so in the South, and how, if it does change at all, it’ll take generations. But do you think that in the North there is hope for change? JM: You’re too young to remember this, but the Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s, for a brief period, did transform certain attitudes in the South.