http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/04/AR2009090403504.html
By James A. Miller
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, September 5, 2009
PUSH COMES TO SHOVE
By Wesley Brown
Concord Free Press. 246 pp.
Paperback, $0
America now seems light years away from a time when the term
"terrorist" was more likely to be applied to American radicals than
to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Wesley Brown's latest novel, "Push
Comes to Shove," considerably narrows the imaginative gap between
those two historical eras.
Muriel Pointer, one of several narrators in this challenging story,
is a battle-weary veteran of civil rights campaigns in the South
during the mid-1960s. She returns to New York City shorn of the
beliefs that had propelled her into the movement: "I was horny with
idealism," she admits, "and foolishly believed that throwing my body
in the path of injustice was enough to stop it." In 1969, armed with
only memories of "our vision of a beloved community before it was
beaten out of us," she joins a black activist group called Push Comes
to Shove, led by Theodore Sutherland, a charismatic figure "whose
normal behavior resembled James Brown in concert." The group's
tactics become increasingly provocative, more confrontational with
the racial status quo and the police. One night -- in a scene that
evokes the 1969 assassination of Black Panther Party leader Fred
Hampton -- the police raid Muriel's house and kill her lover, Walter
Armstead, with a shotgun blast to the head. From this moment onward,
"Push Comes to Shove" propels its readers into the politically and
culturally turbulent world of the American 1960s and '70s.
Brown has assembled an eclectic cast of characters representative of
the times, including a Jewish lawyer dedicated to representing
political activists; her husband, an African American artist; a white
Vietnam War veteran and his companion, both of them active in New
York's East Village counterculture; and an African American professor
of history named Raymond Bonner, who becomes Muriel's husband.
Through Muriel's political activities, all these characters are drawn
into the shadowy radical underground in the United States.
Spanning the years 1969 to 1975, these intersecting stories and
voices unfold against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Nixon's
invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. The novel also
winds across the United States, from New York to New Mexico and
California, with a particularly cataclysmic episode in the Black
Hills of South Dakota. Throughout, the characters talk endlessly,
drink and smoke dope, make love, quarrel, fight, separate and
re-form, testing the boundaries of their racial, sexual and political
identities.
The mood of "Push Comes to Shove" is often downbeat, with frequent
references to the failed hopes of a generation, such as Raymond's
observation: "I'd sensed a change in recent years. The buoyancy
capable of lifting possibility beyond skyscraper heights had fallen
to earth. Now people moved as though stun-gunned by dreams that had
turned into boomerangs, hitting them right between the eyes."
In her post-Push Comes to Shove existence, Muriel begins writing for
a left-wing journal, setting herself the task of "putting a human
face on individuals whose bombings, kidnappings and plane hijackings
seemed without rhyme or reason to most Americans." Brown admirably
succeeds in doing the same thing. He is exceptionally well-qualified
for it: He went south to work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party in 1965, joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 and served 18
months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in the early 1970s for
refusing induction into the armed services, before becoming a
professor of literature and creative writing at Rutgers University,
where he taught for more than two decades. He writes about this
milieu with compassion and deep insight.
And there is another way in which his novel evokes the spirit of its
times: It is the second book from the Concord Free Press, which
publishes novels and gives them away free, with the following
injunction: "By taking a copy, you agree to give away money to a
local charity, someone who needs it, or a stranger on the street.
Where the money goes and how much you give -- that's your call." It's
an innovative publishing effort that one-ups Abbie Hoffman's yippie
manifesto "Steal This Book."
--
Miller, professor of English and American Studies and chair of the
American Studies Department at George Washington University, is the
author of "Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial."
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment