is a memoir of the author's younger days, until in his 20's he was hired by The New York Times as an intern. Except it is much more than that and connects with his life after that summer internship.
It begins not at the beginning, but with a Prologue, of when in a rage Blow was driving to go kill a relative who had abused him as a boy, a topic revisited at the end as well.
It is a tale of growing up, of a discovery of self that Blow makes clear is still in his 40s. as a nationally known and respected columnist and more, is still ongoing, and now includes his role as a single father.
Blow is well-known, and those who regularly read his column are well aware of his incisive and intelligent writing, his ability to make sense of data and put it into context. Thus perhaps we might not be surprised that this volume is superbly crafted. That by itself is enough to recommend it to many. But it is far from a sufficient explanation of a book that when I began I could not put down until I was 100 pages in, and then only put down because I had to get some sleep to prepare for teaching the next day.
Knowing what I had experienced in those 100 pages, I was unwilling to pick it up again until I had a chunk of time to read the rest in one sitting, which I did one evening a few weeks ago while volunteering in a free dental clinic in Southwest Virginia. Since then the book has continued in my mind as I have reflected upon its incredible power.
This is a memoir, but it is much more. It is an insight into the life known by far too many Blacks in small towns and rural areas of the Deep South, in Blow's case in Louisiana, where he was not only raised, but where he attended college at Grambling, where he was elected President of his freshman class, a role that put him in position of being responsible for the abuse of others - there is no other way of saying it, and Blow does not shy from it.
As one raised in an upper middle class Jewish family in a comfortable suburb of New York, one might think much of what I encountered in Blow's memoir would be the equivalent of an anthropological or sociological exploration. Certainly I encountered an experience very different than that I had known in my own childhood through when I dropped out of college at 19 to go into the Marines.
And yet, the power of this book is that the reader cannot help but be drawn into both Blow's experience of his own life and the deeper insights he provides, certainly of self-understanding, but also of the conditions he encountered, of how people reacted to him in his younger days, of issues of bi-sexuality, power and powerlessness at a deeply personal level, and more.
Which I why I have pondered for several weeks before returning to this magnificent volume to write about it, in the hope I can persuade others of the value of reading it.
I told you about the Prologue. The very beginning of the main part of the book is also powerful. The chapter is titled "The House with No Steps" and begins like this:
The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears. That i how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one.
The family had gathered because his great-grandmother was dying. The end of this brief section, used to introduce us to the wider family in which Blow was rooted, reads as follows:
She peacefully drew her last breath as her head titled, and then fell still.
No dramatic death rattle, no fear-tinged soliloquy, no last-minute confession. Like a raft pushed gently from the shore, she drifted quietly from now into forever - a beautiful life, beautifully surrendered.
But I recorded it differently. I thought she turned to see a gift that wasn't there, and that something went tragically wrong in the turning.
There is nothing wasted in this book. Those words, about recording it differently, are a first example of our learning how Blow in some ways was an outsider in his own life, different, acutely aware but not quite in synch with the world around, observing closely and able to describe in detail, yet in some ways remaining outside.
Early on some adults in schools thought Blow was slow intellectually. His mother, who had to fight for him and for herself in a life framed by poverty, had to advocate and more for this child who would graduate as valedictorian of his high school class. She would continue to educate herself well into her adult years, providing Blow with a model that our learning does not end with formal schooling or when others think it should.
Except he already knew that - he was learning constantly, although not always the issues we think of.
The book began with his rage at a relative who had abused him. The question of different views of sexuality run through the book. That includes the men in his family who were far from faithful, including his father. It includes relatives and acquaintances who did not fit the expected models of male sexuality. It includes his own wrestling with the results of his abuse, and his own realization developed over time and as a result of experimentation of his own less than traditional sexuality.
Blow writes graphically of a cousin, Lawrence, who was clearly different.
It wasn't the fact as much as the flaunting that raised folks' hackles. There had always been dandies, men folks sncikered abut men whose wives they pitied. But at least those men put forth an effort to bring their behavior in line with their anatomy, no matter the damage repression did to their soul.
But not Lawrence. He wouldn't pretend. He wouldn't hide. And that is what people found repulsive. It was what they saw as his surrender to a lurid impulse, his embrace of an ignoble identity. The scent of a demon on his breath. Dangerous.
Lawrence would later be murdered, found tied to a bed, his murdered never solved. At the end of this section Blow writes
Five years after Lawrence was tied to the bed and killed, Matthew Shepard, a young, white, openly gay man, was tied to a fence and killed in a small Wyoming city. While Lawrence's death hardly made the local papers, Matthew's provoked an international outcry. That discrepancy would haunt me.
I will not go through all of the book. That would make this essay far too long. It would not take away from the powerful effect it will have on you when you read it. It is too well written to be undercut by my poor attempt to give you a sense.
The world in which Blow was raised, from rural Louisiana to his college days at Grambling, is a very different world than that most of those reading these words will have known, or even had observed. Blow is 44, almost a quarter century younger than am I. Despite the Civil Rights movement that so dominated my younger days, life for many African Americans had not changed that much. You will learn of the legitimate fear Blacks had for the power wielded by white law enforcement against them - there is one incredibly powerful story, shocking despite what we continue to see in events like Ferguson and elsewhere.
Often those who are powerless in the larger society will insofar as they have their own institutions wield what power they do have in a brutal fashion. So was it in the fraternity system at Grambling, and Blow gives us a piercing examination of that, and of how it has its attractiveness to those who, becoming a part of the elite, pass on a tradition of abuse, justifying it as something that since they endured others should, considering it a rite of passage. It is not, however, merely an action of those powerless in larger society - those subject to the abusive hazing are in those moments stripped of dignity and are themselves powerless. And as Blow reminds us, this is true of all such abusive hazing - think of hazing in the military, for example. The press may focus on the abuses in elite bands in traditional Black colleges and universities, but we should not forget the likes of Tailhook. I saw elements of it at Parris Island, in boot camp. It continues to exist in places like SEAL training in the Navy for example. Blow uses his own experience and his insight to offer us the opportunity to consider the price paid not merely by the individuals who are caught up in such a self-perpetuating system - one he acknowledges continuing outside legal restrictions, at least for a while - but by the larger society into which the individuals caught up in such practices go.
In other words, this is much more than a book about one black man in a particular set of circumstances. Part of the genius of this book is that Blow is providing not only a window on the forces that helped shape him and on his own internal development, he uses that to provide us the opportunity to reflect on a broader basis. Abuse is abuse. The rationalizations used for "traditional" patterns of behavior may vary depending upon circumstances, but they have in common an unwillingness to confront damage and harm done to individuals and to the larger groups, be they families, communities, or even our nation at large.
There is a searing honesty in this volume. The conclusion brings it back to the intensely personal. Consider a few passages:
I had spent my whole life trying to fit in, but it would take the rest of my life to realize that some men are just meant to stand out.
Those are words that are personal to Blow, of course. But they also spoke very strongly to me, and I suspect will to men and women who know they are different, but seek to have some sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. In Blow's case that is directly connected to his own sexuality, an issue that is tied back to the history of abuse. He does not necessarily blame the relative he was seeking to kill for his explorations of bi-sexuality, but ponders instead whether people like Chester did not simply have an ability to recognize pre-existing tendencies, both of sexuality and of vulnerability, and prey upon them.
This fits into a broader picture as well. As we read near the end of the book
Furthermore, I'd come to understand that I sometimes confused the need for attention with a desire for sex. For much of myh life I would crave attention with a carnal intensity. That feeling of being chosen. I would flirt with anyone who was congenial and amenable - a ravenous, indiscriminate flirtation, or a feather-light, barely-there one - or allow myself to be flirted with, by women and men alike, to cover the emptiness I felt or to fill in the hole, the desired culmination being not so much physical intimacy as emotional affirmation. The boy who had once felt invisible would forever ache simply to be seen.
When I read those words I recognize aspects of myself, and I suspect I am not alone. I can look back on my twenties when I was single and the pattern of behavior I had. I never experienced the kinds of poverty nor family physical violence that Blow recounts, but I did experience a sense of being invisible, of being out of sorts, of not belonging, and when I found out on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in Greenwich Village that I could make a physical/sexual connection, the boy who had not dated in high school went crazy, even as many encounters left me lonelier and emptier than I had been before them. I offer this to illustrate how Blow's words can speak to those of us of very different life experiences - so we think.
The book is titled as a memoir. But that is insufficient. A memoir is a reflection looking backward, and Blow, in his 40s, is still processing and reflecting upon not merely his early experiences but how they influence his life since, and his expected many years to come.
Perhaps it is unfair, but I will share the final words of the book at the conclusion of this piece. Like much else that I read in this volume, they spoke powerfully to me, I think not merely because I am a person who also has struggled with issues of self-identification, of how my sexuality shapes me, of where if at all I belong, and these fuel my passion for what I do, in my teaching, my activism, my writing, my relationship with my wife. No - the power of Blow's words are that even as your own life may be very different from his experiences, he speaks and writes of TRUTH - that is, the truth of ourselves, of our need to be honest about our pasts and our presents, to accept our wounds sometimes even as gifts that empower us, to see how we are connected to others in ways we might never have imagined. Consider that as you read these final words, on p. 228 of this magnificent, must-read volume:
I would harness the truths that had been trapped in me like a fire shut up in my bones. I would give my life over to my passions, my writing, and my children, and they would breathe life back into me.
Peace.