(Rubin). In addition to being our nation’s “blackest state,” Mississippi has the nation’s highest rates of poverty, obesity, illiteracy, teen pregnancy, failure to graduate high school, and sexually transmitted disease (Grant 3, 95). According to Mississippi-based travel writer Richard Grant, “no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness” (Grant 2).
It is in this state that Lewis Nordan sets all of his writing. Nordan, considered “an author’s author” by his publishers at Algonquin Books, and critically acclaimed for his 1993 novel Wolf Whistle, spent his entire career exploring the world of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi (Ravenel et al.). Just as Faulkner returns to Yoknapatawpha County over and over again, nearly all of Nordan’s stories take place in his fictional town, and star many of the same characters. Arrow Catcher, the Mississippi of fiction, shares many similarities with Itta Bena, Mississippi, where Nordan was raised. Itta Bena is located in Leflore County. The county’s residents are sixty-nine percent black or African American, forty percent of them live below the poverty level, and its public school system is F-rated (Grant 177, “Community Facts”). Like the rest of the county, Itta Bena faces the seemingly insurmountable challenge of “poverty, and the culture that poverty builds around itself” (Grant 177). More than anyone, this affects the children in Leflore, as “the poorest Americans have the highest rates of alcohol and drug abuse, violence against children, sexual abuse of children, neglect of children, illiteracy, mental illness, teenage
him as both brilliant and deeply “haunted” by his past (Ravenel et al.).
The way Nordan’s experiences growing up in Itta Bena shaped his career is obvious. His work is personal, and anyone who visits Itta Bena will recognize Arrow Catcher in its many run down and boarded-up storefronts. But despite Mississippi’s socioeconomic disadvantages, Nordan, and anyone who has in traveled Mississippi, will tell you that the state is not only its statistics. The landscape of the Delta is surreal, its flat planes and Cypress-filled swamps hold a type of magic. Nordan’s “limitless and lonesome” Delta is a “part of his heart’s geography” (Ingram et al., The Sharpshooter Blues). When he writes about the Delta it is with tenderness and compassion for both its landscapes and its inhabitants.
Yet, though writers like Nordan may have a nuanced understanding of places like Itta Bena, the poverty and magic of the Delta create a world that is difficult for those born outside of the region to understand. Journalist and author Rick Bragg says that people who visit the Delta may feel, “they have tumbled back in time, but I do not think that is true. They have merely slipped sideways into a place they do not recognize, and may never understand” (Bragg). This lack of understanding is exactly what Nordan attempts to rectify in his work.
as “racist, ignorant, and culturally backward” otherwise (Grant 1). This paper will explore the way Nordan accomplishes this by examining the way humans use humor as a tool to create distinct social groups, analyzing Nordan’s short stories featuring disabled characters, and considering several of Nordan’s southern white male characters.
Of course, it would be a missed opportunity to write a paper about humor without including a few jokes. Here’s something thematic to start us off:
What’s the difference between a good joke and a bad joke timing (One-Liners). I. Cognitive Humor Theory – A Brief Overview
Humans’ environmental and social knowledge is organized in schemas, frames and scripts, which people use to dictate how they expect a situation to play out and how they are expected to act and react in a situation. For instance, in a restaurant, a typical script dictates that a server takes an order and a patron to responds with what they want to eat. Most humor,
including Nordan’s, plays off of these expected schemas, frames and scripts using a tactic called “script opposition” (“The Cognitive”).
A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The driver says: 'Ugh, that's the ugliest baby I've ever seen!" The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to the man next to her: "The driver just insulted me!" The man says: "You go up there and
tell him off. Go on, I'll hold your monkey for you (“Best Jokes Ever”).
This joke is simple and, scientifically speaking, very well constructed. The woman and the driver
each have two different perspectives on her baby. The woman believes, obviously, that it is adorable. The driver that it’s “the ugliest baby he’s ever seen.” The perspectives are “self-consistent but incompatible.” The perfect set-up for a joke.
The punch line works because it is incongruous. It makes sense to listeners that a mother would be upset about her child being called ugly. That’s a rude thing to say. The driver went off
the accepted social script when he insulted the baby. So, when the fellow passenger, trying to follow the polite social script and support the offended woman, inadvertently mistakes her child for a monkey, it surprises listeners — The baby really was the ugliest after all! The bus driver
was right, not just rude! The woman is so silly for not realizing how ugly her baby is! The incongruity between the driver and passenger’s perception and the woman’s
perception is surprising and funny, and doesn’t fit with the generally accepted framework most listeners would have — that babies are cute. So, the joke is, at least by science’s standards, funny.
Now, let’s examine how incongruity theory works in Nordan’s writing. Take this scene from “Sugar Among the Freaks,” during which the protagonist, Sugar, orders several times from a waitress at a truck stop restaurant.
exaggerated British accent…I used words like bloody good and old chap and
amusing…She looked at me like I wasn’t there at all…Right now I had this waitress problem. I made some squawking and hooting noises at her, like jungle birds and monkeys. I stretched out the features of my face with my fingers. It didn’t faze her a bit. She didn’t bat an eye (“Among the Freaks” 100, 104).
Once again, we have a character not properly following a social script. Sugar, intimidated by the waitress, who “has a mean look,” uses increasingly bizarre antics to try and win her favor (“Among the Freaks” 100). The waitress, unsure how to respond to Sugar’s strange behavior, just ignores him. Once again, the humor arises from their incompatible perspectives. In this story, Sugar believes the people he is eating with are “freaks,” and is using the accents and animal noises to make himself appear more normal (“Among the Freaks” 104). Obviously, he is not successful in this endeavor, and instead makes himself look like a “freak.” The incongruity between his perspective and the perspective of the waitress allows Nordan to illustrate that readers should be laughing at Sugar.
The second theory, reversal theory, builds off incongruity theory. Reversal theory suggests that when a situation is perceived incompatibly, the second interpretation an audience discovers must involve a diminishment of the first interpretation (“Theories and Early Research II). So, in our joke about the baby on the bus, the situation is funny because the mother’s
perspective — that her baby is cute, is diminished when the passenger confirms that it looks like a monkey. And Sugar’s perception—that he seems normal, is diminished by the waitress’s clear confirmation that he is making a fool of himself. Like his characters, Nordan’s situations
with the general expectation that a fireball is destructive (Lightning Song).
Nordan clearly values the contradictions humor forces readers to consider, since the majority of his texts work to build empathy for characters it almost seems a contradiction to empathize with. He plays the contradictory nature of humor up to an even greater degree by juxtaposing the comic with the tragic and the grotesque. For instance, in “Mr. Nodine, Pentecost, and the Oral Tradition,” Nordan describes a coroner at work:
Concentrating on closing Mr. Nodine’s mouth, he passed the curved needle and thread in small perfect stitches through the inside of the lower lip and gums and up through the right nostril. The needle popped neatly through the nasal septum as he drew the thread back down to the upper lip and tied it off, closing the mouth as perfectly as he had ever done. He loved closing mouths. They would be shut forever (“Mr. Nodine” 1).
The scene is grotesquely detailed, but ends with a funny quip about shutting people up. This inclusion of both humor and horror is a classic feature of the grotesque genre that is often used to force readers into “uneasy thoughtfulness” (Pollack 176). Harriet Pollack discusses this in her essay on Nordan’s work in the genre, “Grotesque Laughter, Unburied Bodies, and History: Shape-shifting in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle,” explaining how Nordan’s “tone fibrillates between comic and tragic” (174). Nordan’s tone changes, and the thoughtfulness they produce, work in conjunction with his humor, which forces his readers to think about the social scripts his characters meet or defy. This sort of thoughtfulness is essential to understanding Nordan’s work, as much of his focus is on the way society is prone to rejecting or accepting people in terms that are too unequivocal for his liking.
***
But I laugh more (Readers Digest).
II. Acceptance, Alienation, and Social Humor Theory
The concept of acceptance and rejection plays a key role in Nordan’s use of humor as well. Especially when it comes to the characters that break social scripts. An important factor to consider when studying the white men Nordan writes about is the alienation and loneliness they constantly feel. Nordan’s men come to represent “the very essence of loneliness and alienation,” and in turn illustrate how “unrelieved isolation can lead to despair, alcoholism, madness, suicide, or even to the creation of an individual as thoroughly depraved as Wolf Whistle’s Solon Gregg” (Guagliardo 65). This alienation is a focus in most of Nordan’s work, and oftentimes serves as his explanation of what has shaped them into such difficult people to feel compassion for.
Nordan uses humor to aide readers on the road to the compassion he hopes they will find by creating a “triple alliance” between the reader, the alienated character, and the author
(himself). This alliance connects the three parties in a way that, for a moment, “defeats feelings of isolation” (Guagliardo 75). Walker Percy explores this triple alliance in The Message in the Bottle, and it is best explained using his example. He asks us to imagine “an alienated commuter riding a train.” Next, imagine “the same commuter reading a book about an alienated commuter riding the train.” Suddenly, the alienated commuter is not alone — he can relate to the
commuter in the book, and the author who wrote about him (Guagliardo 77). Similarly, Nordan’s readers, who, like everyone, will have experienced at least a momentary feeling of alienation, are connected to Nordan and his characters as he explains this feeling of alienation.
uncomfortable, it can become “a testimony to membership in the clan of whiteness,” forcing readers to note that they are, momentarily, feeling kinship with a character who has killed a child or beat his wife (Pollack 5). This kinship is uncomfortable, but it forces readers to pause and think. Learning that a man like Solon Gregg, who kills a fourteen-year-old boy in a recreation of the Emmett Till murder in Wolf Whistle, is lonely, miserable, and shares your sense of humor is like learning that Hitler loved his niece. It’s hard to wrap your head around. Nordan assists readers in this transition by using humor to make the sudden and shifting triple alliances in his literature barely noticeable.
This works because of humor’s social function in society. Humans use humor as a tool to explore environments and determine others’ attitudes about themselves and the people different from them, as well as to establish group identities that exclude outsiders (“The Social”).
Laughing at someone else’s joke marks entry into an in-group with the joke-teller and everyone else who laughed. In this way humor becomes a tool “used to enforce social norms and indirectly exert control over others’ behavior,” especially within group hierarchies (“The Social”).
Laughing with the group ensures continued inclusion. Let’s look at our joke again to see how this works.
A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The driver says: “Ugh, that's the ugliest baby I've ever seen!” The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to
the man next to her: “The driver just insulted me!” The man says: "You go up there and tell him off. Go on, I'll hold your monkey for you (“Best Jokes Ever”).
joke has established a group-identity of people who think the baby is ugly. The mother, who is excluded from this group, and whose anger is no longer justified, is placed in the out-group.
Similarly, in Nordan’s work, laughing at a joke with one of his characters places the reader in an in-group with that character. For instance, in Wolf Whistle, Roy Dale teases his classmate Wesley for looking like a monkey:
Roy Dale said, “Let’s see your tail.”
Wesley said, “My tail? — well shoot, where’s my tail, I must of done left my tail over to your house when I was fucking your mama, bring it to school with you tomorrow, will you, Roy Dale, leave it in my locker.”
Roy Dale and Wesley were giggling their heads off and going shh, shh, shh (Wolf Whistle 198).
Wesley and Roy Dale “giggling their heads off” at the insults keeps the scene congenial. The boys are in an in-group together because of the shared laughter. Their good humor extends to the reader, who is connected to Roy Dale, since the chapter is in third person limited from his
perspective. So, when the teacher scolds the two of them so meanly “nobody even giggled” for making noise she is placed in the out-group, while the reader, Roy Dale, and Wesley remain in the giggling in-group (Wolf Whistle 198).
So, shared laughter can place one person in an in-group with another. Nordan often takes advantage of this by placing his readers in in-groups with his antagonists, who are often
In addition to acting as a marker of social relation, laughter can be used to build an “idioculture.” An idioculture is the “system of knowledge, beliefs, and customs by which a small group of people defines itself and enables its members to share a sense of belonging and
cohesion” (“The Social”). An idioculture is enforced by shared humor (“The Social”). In Nordan’s texts, the residents of Arrow Catcher create an idioculture full of racial and gender stereotypes that they constantly find themselves desperate to escape from. In other words, the source of the alienation they feel, and the triple alliances Nordan creates, is this idioculture.
Nordan’s humor, which often places readers in in-groups with members of this
idioculture, invites readers to enter and explore it, to understand how it was formed and how it profoundly affects the characters inside if it. In doing this, Nordan seems to hope his humor will help readers understand the Delta town he imagines. Nordan says he has “been blessed and cursed to write” about characters “always their certain doom” in the realities of the world they inhabit, and his humor is away for readers to understand these realities (“The Invention of Sugar” 5).
understood by outsiders, so unfairly maligned, so surreal and peculiar,” as Mississippi (Grant 2). Nordan’s own peculiar humor aims to build a bridge into the idioculture of the state, and create an understanding of the people there.
So, Nordan plays off social scripts to create humor that forces readers to think about his characters’ perceptions of reality, as well as their own perceptions of reality. And, he uses this humor to place his readers in social groups with his characters, hoping to communicate an understanding of the idioculture that they are products of.
In addition to this, Nordan creates a link between being raised within the idioculture of Arrow Catcher and disability. All of his characters suffer from a terrible feeling of loneliness that he identifies as the source of all of their flaws and absurdities. The link between the alienation that comes with southerness and disability is particularly apparent upon reading Nordan’s multiple texts featuring disabled protagonists. His protagonists begin their stories identified to others largely by their physical disabilities, and Nordan gradually humanizes them using humor’s function as a social grouping tool. And, like Nordan’s able-bodied white southern men, these characters suffer from feelings of alienation and hopelessness. However, their loneliness is easier to grasp upon a first reading, making it worthwhile to look at how Nordan writes about his disabled characters in order to more easily understand both how they are connected to his able-bodied characters and how Nordan uses humor to manipulate social groupings.
*** How do you make a tissue dance?
Put a little boogie in it (“Dancing Jokes”). III. The Winston Krepps Stories
elderly paraplegic. Readers’ first introduction to Winston occurs in Nordan’s short story, “The Attendant,” which was copyrighted in 1967, seven years prior to the 1973 date of other stories featuring Winston, though the collections were both published by Vintage Contemporaries in 1989. This gap in years between authorship most likely accounts for the fact that “The
Attendant” is one of Nordan’s least humor focused works. Instead, Nordan leans heavily on the grotesque, mitigating a more serious tone with only brief one-liners that seem more indicative of his own sense of humor than his command of humor as a literary device, which perhaps came later in his career. However, the way Nordan moves Winston between readers’ in and out groups is valuable to understand, especially as he uses Winston in his later work (which even his first readers would have been able to access at the same time as his first Winston Krepps story).
“The Attendant” details the life of Winston Krepp’s attendant Harris, who Nordan suggests could be a reimagining of his reappearing protagonist Sugar Mecklin in his later short story collection “The Arrow-Catcher Fair.” The story details Harris’s day-to-day life as
Winston’s attendant. He helps Winston into his chair, gives him his pills, and decompacts his bowels until his time as an attendant ends and Robert takes his place as Winston’s caretaker. Using Harris, rather than Winston, as his protagonist allows Nordan to place Winston immediately in the out-group for readers. This is important for our understanding of Winston, as he becomes synonymous with the abject as the story continues. When Nordan writes Winston into his later stories, the relationship to the abject established in this introduction remains intact, though it is never as obvious as it appears to be in “The Attendant.”
him. Harris was sixteen, and this was his first day on the job” (“The Attendant” 98). The image of a young boy shadowing his boss, anxious on the first day of work, is easily accessible. First-day anxiety is a common and relatable experience, and describing it allows Nordan to make Harris understandable and relatable quickly. This allows Nordan to establish Harris as a trustworthy protagonist. Harris is in the in-group. Winston, the brand new boss, already a bit unfamiliar as he silently pulls “the stick of his wheelchair and [motors] out of the living room” is in the out-group.
After briefly establishing initial social groupings, Nordan pushes Winston much farther into the out-group than a mundane boss-employee relationship would suggest. Nordan does this by describing Winston’s physical body in vivid, and often shocking, detail. In a scene detailing a “queasy” Harris placing Winston in his lift, Nordan describes Winston’s eyes “bulg[ing] and protrude[ing] from the pressure of hanging by the straps” (“The Attendant” 98). Next, he
illustrates in stomach-churning detail the process of changing out Winston’s catheter and stoma. Now the worst part. After this it would be over. With a large syringe, Harris drew irrigation fluid…into the stoma. He had looked at everything but the stoma, and now he was having to look at it. It was a strawberry-colored hole in Winston’s lower belly, where the catheter was permanently implanted, a place where the bladder had been pulled forward and turned back and surgically sewn onto the stomach. The fluid was dark yellow and thick and some of it bubbled out of the hole in Winston’s belly…(The Attendant 99-100).
depiction of the act of changing the catheter, which is undeniably nauseating thanks to bubbling fluids and surgical stitches, ensures that he wants readers to remain firmly on Harris’s side. So much so that after this passage, Winston seems less a human being and more a grotesque body that Harris has been tasked with caring for. He seems more object than person at this point. Clearly, Winston is a member of an out-group separate from Harris and readers.
Immediately following this passage Harris goes to bed lonely and homesick, realizing “for the first time how few friends he had.” Nordan details Harris calling the weather and time-of-day numbers just to listen to a friendly voice, making him appear more pitiful and worthy of sympathy (“The Attendant” 100).
Then, after detailing the process of putting suppositories into Winston’s “flattened-out rear- end” Nordan starts making jokes (“The Attendant” 101). Harris, lying in bed, holds “his suitcase to him like a lover, if he had ever had a lover” (“The Attendant” 102). This one liner at the expense of Harris’s sexual prowess marks a shift in Nordan’s tone. Winston remains in the out-group, but Nordan begins describing the smell of his bowel movement (from Harris’s point of view) in hyperbolized detail. Nordan’s descriptions of the “tomahawk of shit-smell”
Nordan’s shift becomes more obvious as he begins humanizing Winston. Winston works as a counselor and has an affinity for jazz music. His face is “big” and “handsome” when not bulging in a harness (“The Attendant” 106). Furthermore, Harris himself seems to grow fond of Winston, and is upset when Robert Armstrong replaces him so that Harris can go back to high school in the fall. In fact, during Robert’s first day, Harris hopes that he’ll fail to clean up Winston’s bowel movement, and wants to “torture” him with the smell so that he won’t replace him (“The Attendant” 109). Harris’s sudden desire to remain with Winston, as well as the
humanizing traits Nordan supplies Winston with; all begin to shift Winston closer to an in-group. However, by the time Winston is re-introduced to readers in the short story “Wheelchair,”
Nordan’s most memorable depictions of him remain the grotesque explanations of his bowel movements. Therefore, he remains synonymous with the out-group.
So, when he is reintroduced to readers in “Wheelchair,” he remains in the out-group. “Wheelchair” details Winston’s plight from his own perspective. In this particular story, Winston’s attendant, Harris (a different Harris than in the previous story), has abandoned him. Harris spends most of his time at the country-western disco, and his constant refrain in the story is “Boogie is my life” (“Wheelchair” 59). He leaves Winston because he “dreams of boogie,” and can’t be tied down with a job. Winston thinks Harris is an idiot, but he also misses him desperately. So much so that as Winston begins to hallucinate about him as his body begins to break down because Harris is not there to administer the pills he needs to survive.
In typical Nordan fashion, things get weirder from here as he invites readers to look inside Winston’s brain as it shuts down throughout the course of the story.
Nordan uses this story to build more empathy for Winston. He uses the established social groupings from the “Attendant” to rapidly switch his characters’ relations to readers throughout “Wheelchair.” He successfully creates four distinct social groups in this story—the in-group of himself and his readers, a group containing Harris, a group containing Winston’s body, and a group containing Winston’s consciousness. Nordan moves Harris, Winston’s body, and
Winston’s consciousness in and out of his in-group with readers, encouraging understanding of and empathy for Winston.
Nordan separates Winston’s mind and body into distinct groups at the start of the story. He begins to create this divide by “othering” Winston’s body. Nordan slips into free-indirect discourse when detailing Winston’s thoughts and memories, but writes about Winston’s body either in passive voice, or as something with a mind of its own. For instance, when Nordan describes Winston’s movements, he specifies particular body parts, separate from Winston’s brain, that lead the activity “Winston’s legs, both of them this time, rose up toward his
face….now they settled down…Winston’s feet did not touch the footrests…his shoulders rose up to his ears and caused him to…hold his breath against his will” (“Wheelchair” 55). Giving the body autonomy from the mind paints Winston as an observer trapped inside his skin. He can’t even breathe when he wants too. In fact, only Winston’s “single remaining shoulder muscle,” is in his own control, everything else is just dead weight (“Wheelchair” 54).
during his hospital stay because “he had not yet understood that this was the day sex ended” (“Wheelchair” 52). Winston says the accident marks not only the day sex ended, but the day his “real life ended” (“Wheelchair” 51). Winston’s relationship to his own body, which he considers separate from himself, further emphasizes the divide between body and mind in “Wheelchair.”
After making it clear that these two aspects of Winston are separate, Nordan paints Winston’s body as abject. He often does so by juxtaposing grotesque descriptions of its decay with humorous descriptions of Harris. This tactic is common for Nordan, who often shape shifts between the humorous and the grotesque to create a sense of unease in his readers (Pollack). In “wheelchair,” Nordan does so by detailing Winston’s overflowing stoma— “His leg-bag had been full for a couple of days, so urine seeped out of the stoma”—just after Harris explains that “[he] is into boogie, it’s into [him]” (“Wheelchair” 53). Nordan next devotes pages to Winston’s labored movement through his house, slipping into passive voice as he describes Winston drinking through a special straw, detailing, “the touching of the tube to his tongue” (“Wheelchair” 53).
As “Wheelchair” goes on, Nordan moves both Harris and Winston’s consciousness in and out of the in-group he shares with readers. Laughing at Harris’s ridiculous obsession with boogie with Winston makes it possible for readers to identify with Winston’s mind the same way Harris’s knowledge of Winston’s more abject features makes it possible for readers to identify with Harris. As the story continues, Nordan shifts Winston’s consciousness into the in-group by hyper-focusing on Harris’s obsession with boogie; in fact, his only lines of dialogue in the story are variations on “boogie is my life” (“Wheelchair”). Nordan’s focus on this saying makes it clear that Harris is ridiculous. Laughing at him with Winston, who also finds him ridiculous, places Winston’s mind (separate from his body), in the in-group with readers.
Therefore, when Winston, who has been having uncontrollable muscle spasms, begins to feel “bemused” by his legs, rather than disgusted by them, he has already been placed in a sympathetic position. Furthermore, the detailed anatomical descriptions that accompany
Harris continues to appear in Winston’s hallucinations from this point on, telling the EMTs that arrive to assist Winston that, “boogie is [his] life” (“Wheelchair” 59). This allows Nordan to situate Harris firmly in the out-group as absurd; he is not following appropriate social scripts at life-threatening moments.
But, once Harris is all the way in the out-group, Nordan reminds readers that until this point, Harris had been “a perverse mirror in which to view…Winston’s deformity and celibacy and loss” (“Wheelchair” 60). This forces readers to think back to the start of the story, when Winston’s mind was in the out-group as the owner of an abject body. Nordan’s ultimate goal here is to create discomfort, and perhaps inspire reflection by readers on the previous social groupings they were engaged in. It is now embarrassing to be grouped with Harris, who is clearly socially incompetent, yet Nordan reminds readers that Harris’s “physical perfection” places him in an in-group with able-bodied readers that Winston is not a part of.
After this reminder of the social groups he has now created—Nordan, readers, and Harris; Nordan, readers, and Winston’s mind; and Winston’s body—Nordan enters Winston’s mind and begins a comic inner monologue that details the way Winston both pities and relates to Harris. The monologue also describes the way Winston begins to accept his own paralysis:
The knowledge that Harris knew himself so well and, in despair of it, could prophesy his future, with all its meanness and shallowness and absence of hope, swept through
Winston like a wind of grief (“Wheelchair” 60).
After this, Harris’s “boogie” has become his form of paralysis. Just as Winston is trapped in his body, Harris is trapped by boogie. However, Winston ends this monologue insisting “the table, proved [Harris] wrong,” (referring to a table he and Harris built together at the start of the story in a moment of connection) as a way of claiming that there is hope for Harris (“Wheelchair” 60). A dramatic reflection on Boogie is, of course, humorous. Yet, this moment seems to mark both Winston forgiving Harris for abandoning him, and Winston forgiving his body for being paralyzed. Further, since Nordan has just reminded readers of the in-group they share with Harris, they receive Winston’s forgiveness by association. Nordan’s careful work setting readers into multiple in-groups means they are both forgiving Harris with Winston and being forgiven with Harris here.
majority of his work. Nordan seems to understand that identification allows for a level of
empathy difficult to achieve otherwise, and his maneuvering of social groups to inspire empathy in this story illustrates this.
Not all of Nordan’s in- and out-group maneuvering is as complex as it is in
“Wheelchair,” though the story is indicative of the almost disorienting way Nordan tends to switch reader-relations to characters. “Sugar Among the Freaks,” the last Winston Krepps story Nordan wrote, allows a clearer view of the way Nordan switches in and out-groups using humor. It is perhaps one of the simplest switches Nordan makes: there is only one that occurs slowly over the course of the story. Rather than move several characters rapidly into and out of reader in-groups, Nordan slowly moves Sugar Mecklin from the in-group to the out-group. This story is an especially important one, as Sugar is an adult white southern male who is deeply impacted by the Delta idioculture he is a product of.
Nordan begins “Sugar Among the Freaks” in first person from Sugar’s point of view. Use of first person is uncommon for Nordan, and it serves a clear purpose here, immediately placing readers in an in-group with Sugar. From here, Nordan strengthens Sugar’s relatability by
describing his mother’s awful cooking—an easy tribulation to understand.
Nordan next sets his tone with a one-liner that exemplifies the grotesque humor central to all of his work— “there’s not a nickel’s worth of taste in a fly, even if you do happen to eat one” (“Freaks” 95). The meat of the story begins after this, as Nordan describes Sugar waiting for and meeting Winston Krepps, who he used to attend to. Sugar meets Winston and his new caretaker, Floyd, to go on a trip, and his behavior and thoughts become increasingly abnormal as the story progresses, pushing him from the in-group to an out-group.
at the start of the story his odd behavior is harmless. In fact, as he is in the in-group, it seems sympathetic and at times even logical. Nordan also often allows Sugar to offer an explanation for his behavior at the beginning of the story. For instance, after Sugar is introduced he gets a glass of sweet tea, and before he can stop himself he exclaims “Instant!” upon realizing the tea is from a package (“Freaks” 96). This behavior is explainable; Nordan has just detailed how Sugar’s mother always said it was “the iced tea in a place that predicts what the food is going to look like” (Freaks” 95). Of course, after his first outburst, Sugar decides to say “‘Instant’ another couple of times real loud, and [clap his] hands together when [he] said it. They might think instant means waitress in German or some other language, you don’t know” (“Freaks” 96). This is less socially acceptable than one shocked exclamation, violating social scripts and encouraging distance from Sugar. But, Nordan explains the situation as Sugar attempting to cover up his initial embarrassment. Furthermore, Sugar admits that readers may think, “he sounds a little crazy to me.” In fact, Sugar goes as far as to say, “I am crazy, I act that way. I start acting that way whenever I’m under the influence of Winston Krepps” (“Freaks” 96). This salvages the situation. “Wheelchair,” located just two short stories away from “Sugar Among the Freaks,” in the anthology, is fresh enough in memory to remind readers of who Winston is. Sugar’s
craziness has been acknowledged, and justified, since many of Nordan’s other characters seem to go a little crazy around Winston too. So Sugar, though strange, remains socially acceptable enough to remain in an in-group, at least for the time being.
To me they’re just a bunch of freaks, not much better than a midget” (“Freaks” 96-7). Sugar goes on to explain that he and Winston “get along fine,” but he “wouldn’t go so far as to say I like him. No sense lying about that. You can’t go around having a passel of freaks as your friends. No way, Jose” (“Freaks” 97). This is not a flattering portrait of Sugar. Previously odd, but understandable, Sugar now appears prejudiced. Furthermore, Sugar details that he “runs into so many of them [freaks],” and lists some of the other “freaks” he’s met, including a girl who wears a glass eye around her neck, people selling deaf-mute cards, and a man with one leg shorter than the other. He encourages readers to “think about taking a girl’s blouse off and finding an eye staring out at you” (“Freaks 97). Nordan is now painting a very different portrait of Sugar. He’s prejudiced against people of all types, his categorization of “freak” so broad it even includes those with unique fashion sense. And Winston, who he “gets along with,” grows more relatable, especially as readers remember their identification with him at the end of “Wheelchair.”
Nordan’s bizarre characterization of Sugar creates a power dynamic that puts Winston in charge of Sugar’s action but makes Sugar the superior in his own mind. Yet, at this point in the narrative the explanations offered and the first person point of view allow readers to continue to relate to a narrator that is essentially a caricature of many people’s reaction to and prejudices against the disabled. Nordan, seemingly aware of this, ratchets up the absurdity and humor by adding another, more obvious, layer to Sugar’s prejudiced responses.
Sugar meets Winston’s attendant, Floyd, and is shocked to find out that he can’t “see him at all.” According to Sugar, Floyd “was too ugly to be seen” (“Freaks” 103). Sugar notes that Floyd is “ugly enough to qualify for a full-time freak” (“Freaks” 103). Nordan suggests that Sugar may be viewing Floyd this way because he is a black man, before having Sugar tell readers that he is not “prejudiced against black people,” though he grew up in Mississippi, because he believed he was “part Negro” growing up (“Freaks” 103). It is worthwhile to note that this section of the story allows Nordan to both comment on Sugar’s innate racism and the assumption that many Mississippians are more overtly racist than the typical American by default. This next level of absurdity from Sugar is also accompanied by guilt, but two infractions of normalcy are more difficult to accept than one. Furthermore, at this point Nordan makes it clear that Sugar’s actions are absurd to the point of humor. And once readers laugh at Sugar, he will be pushed into a social out-group, much like the woman on the bus with the ugly baby.
waitress, embarrassed and ignoring Sugar, allows Nordan to offer an outsider’s perspective on the situation, despite the fact that Sugar is narrating. The waitress’s reaction here makes it clear that Sugar is the only “freak” in the current situation. Like with Harris in “Wheelchair,” Nordan has used caricature to push Sugar into the out-group, encouraging readers to relate to Winston and Floyd instead.
Nordan cements Sugar’s status as a member of the out-group when a woman with no face enters the truck stop where the group is eating. The woman has “no nose, only a wet hole to breathe through,” “no lips, only a wild caged tongue that was roaring for freedom,” “one eye, wide open and hairless as a fish eye” (“Freaks” 107). The description is undeniably grotesque, yet customers in the truck stop politely ignore this. At least until Sugar lets out an “out-of-control scream” upon seeing her. Naturally, she’s very upset. Everyone else in the truck stop hates Sugar “for noticing her deformity” (“Freaks” 107). Nordan’s wording here makes it clear that everyone in the truck stop is equally unsettled, it is Sugar’s violation of a social script that they believe is wrong, not his obvious disgust. Nordan intends for this response to provoke thought in readers about their own reactions to abnormalities, in addition to making Sugar almost
unsalvageable. It is simply not acceptable for an adult to react that way.
At this point in the story, Sugar is prejudiced against freaks of all sorts, and, worse than that, he shows it. While he is perhaps easy to empathize with while he remains harmless,
it is “not just freaks I saw as less than human. Maybe it was everybody” (“Freaks” 111).
Suddenly, Sugar’s prejudice and bizarre behavior may not be as targeted as Nordan suggested at first.
This is an ending typical of Nordan. He uses humor in the form of caricature to push Sugar from an in to an out-group before providing his character with one moment of possible redemption at the end. This allows Nordan to encourage his readers to consider who they
naturally placed in an in-group at the start — the prejudiced Sugar. But, rather than simply leave readers unsettled by this revelation, he provides a potentially hopeful outcome. Sugar is not beyond redemption, so readers are not either, despite their previous relation to him.
This type of redemption, which Winston, Harris, and Sugar all found or had the possibility of finding, is central to Nordan’s work. Each of his characters has the ability to redeem themselves, should they acknowledge the idioculture they are a part of and attempt to make a break from it. We will see several of Nordan’s characters faced with this choice as we study men identified by their southerness later in the paper. But first, it is important to
understand the connection Nordan draws between disability and southerness, in order to
understand that the same sympathy Nordan displays for characters like Winston, whose disability is out of his control, extends to characters whose disability is a matter of geography, and perhaps appears to the outside eye as less permanent.
***
“You might be a redneck if you’ve ever stared at a can of orange juice because it said ‘concentrate’”(Foxworthy).
IV. Southerness as Disability
out-groups throughout his stories to make unrelatable characters relatable, and highlight the unsettling flaws in each of the characters that were naturally relatable at the start. Nordan uses disability as a marker of the unrelatable in these stories. In most of Nordan’s other stories, he uses southerness as a marker of the unrelatable. In fact, he equates southerness to disability throughout the majority of his work, as he seems to believe that a southern upbringing, and the inherited guilt that accompanies it, prevents him and his characters from functioning normally in society.
clear (“Freaks”).
Furthermore, we can see Sugar’s southerness as the root of his freakdom more directly in much of Nordan’s other literature, which also features the Sugar character. In Music of the Swamp, Nordan’s premiere novel, dedicated entirely to Sugar’s childhood in the Mississippi Delta, Sugar is constantly struggling with his southern heritage. This struggle, and the connection between the southern, the disabled, and the freak, is particularly prominent in the chapter “Train, Train, coming round the Bend.” The chapter focuses on Sugar’s desperation to escape his
hometown; he hops on a train and decides to ride it out.
In the first few pages of the chapter Sugar remembers a boy who “hit a submerged boat and broke his back,” jumping off the dock Sugar and his friends still jump off (Music 75). This is a reference to Winston’s backstory, as established in “Wheelchair.” The fact that Sugar and his friends continue to jump off the dock suggests that they have just as much of a chance as Winston did of ending up paralyzed, connecting them to him with ties of geography.
Furthermore, the reference establishes that Nordan is once again thinking about disability as he writes a chapter dedicated to what it means to be trapped by one’s upbringing.
Freaks,” in which he feels extreme guilt for his prejudices.
After establishing the presence of guilt and disability early in the story, Nordan begins to connect these two concepts to southerness. He describes the town Sugar is trying to escape from in an anecdote about a tour of a prison during which his schoolmates laughed at electric chair deaths saying “Woo-woo,” as the process is described. Sugar, in a fit of guilt, asks to sit in the chair, prompting his classmates to tell him that he’s “sitting where many a grinning nigger died” (Swamp 80). Immediately after this scene, Nordan details the racism of Sugar’s father and grandfather. His father bans him from watching any shows featuring “colored people,” and his grandfather insists that if Sugar knew how to listen to the radio he wouldn’t “have to watch a bunch of coons on the TV (Music 81). The racial slurs come fast on these pages, and Nordan packs them tight to make it clear that Sugar’s landscape is inundated with racism. It is as much a part of his hometown as the “endless blue sky” of the Delta (Music 71). Nordan paints a clear picture of the idioculture Sugar has been raised in. His classmates laugh at death sentences and his immediate family is deeply racist.
from his idioculture.
Sugar is clearly wracked with guilt, and he knows that the racism around him is wrong. Yet, as he rides the train he begins to feel “The pain of loss and hopelessness…inseparable from my father’s drunkenness, and as the train passes by a group of black children he “yelled at the children, ‘N*ggers!’…I laughed my damn head off when I heard myself say this. I sounded just like my mother.” (Music 83-84). Despite his best efforts, he has succumbed to his environment and upbringing.
Later, Sugar gets off the train and apologizes profusely to an old homeless man, conscious of the fact that he has “escaped nothing, proved nothing” (Music 84). This scene is indicative of the way Nordan views southerness. Nordan makes it obvious that Sugar has the best intentions; he knows the attitudes around him are wrong — he’s so guilty about them that he resorts to modern self-flagellation to atone. Yet, when driven almost insane with pain, and guilt, and hopelessness, Sugar reacts by yelling slurs. Nordan suggests that Sugar’s upbringing has handicapped him. He is unable to get out from under the way he was raised; so his reaction to his own frustration with his surroundings is to mirror the actions he hates.
Nordan strengthens the idea of southerness as a disabling feature when Sugar returns home and is told his grandfather is able to see again. Sugar is shocked, but a drunken “white-trash” man explains to him, “Your granddaddy ain’t the first white man to get cured for
spite…Spite works when nothing else won’t” (Music 86). Once again, Nordan is suggesting that the hopelessness of the landscape prompts a spiteful reaction. Sugar is not the only man in Arrow Catcher who reacts with anger to the world around him. His father and grandfather, and
Nordan considers this spite a familial inheritance. He makes this clear at the end of the chapter, when Sugar goes to talk to his grandfather, who explains to him why his family is the way it is. He tells a story about finding and keeping a dead man’s hand in a doctor’s office:
“I got the hand…I waved bye-bye to Harper with it…I picked my nose with it…. I thumbed my nose…I took it to a palm reader.” My grandfather said, “Do you see what I mean?:
I said, “That’s why you are a bad man?” He said, “Yes.”
I said, “And that’s why Daddy is an idiot?” He said, “Yes.”
I said, “And what about me?”
He said, “I don’t know.” (Music 88).
This exchange ends the chapter, though Sugar continues to wonder, though his “father and grandfather are a long time dead: What about me?” (Music 88). Nordan has illustrated Sugar’s struggle with his place in Arrow Catcher’s idioculture here. He comes from a line of bad men, and has now committed his own sins, prompted by the guilt and hopelessness they inspired in him. Nordan clearly believes that Sugar’s southerness, and his constant fear about the fate of his own soul, is a type of disability. This is illustrated by his connections between Sugar and freaks, and the freaks and the disabled. Sugar’s southerness, and the fear and guilt it inspires, is the root of his freakdom.
whether memoir, fiction, or journalistic observation, contains a heavy dose of the details of his personal life” (Baker 34). This connection becomes obvious if one compares his memoir, Boy With Loaded Gun, to Nordan’s works featuring the Sugar Mecklin character. In his memoir, Nordan tells readers that his childhood nickname was “Sugar,” and Sugar’s complicated
relationship with his father mirrors Nordan’s own complex relationship with his stepfather in his memoir. So, readers can assume that Sugar is a “fictionalized I” that closely resembles Nordan himself throughout these works (Baker 47).
If Nordan and Sugar are one in the same, we can see how deeply southerness affects them in Boy With Loaded Gun. In the memoir, Nordan connects southerness directly to disability. He describes encountering a midget in New York and believing that
his materialization before me was a judgment upon me. The lesson seemed cosmic, if only I could discover what it was. I was not free of Itta Bena, and never would be, so long as my destiny was in the hands of midgets…and in that moment I knew, believed
anyway, that I was different somehow, doomed, or cursed in a particular way…I was a child of Itta Bena, my father’s son. To me this man [the midget] was a freak, only that….tragedy and comedy locked in a single human form. He was the hidden part of myself” (Boy With 99).
At this point, Nordan spells out the exact connection he believes exists between southerness and disability. He carries his southerness with him, and it is something that has “doomed and cursed” him to be “a freak” for his entire life. To Nordan, southerness is a disability each of his
characters must live with, and can be pointed to as a motivator of (though not an excuse for) their actions, like it motivates Sugar in Music of the Swamp.
connection Nordan makes distinct to himself and characters based off of his family. In fact, the drunken lieutenant governor of Arrow Catcher also spells out this connection, and extends it to every resident in the state of Mississippi in “Welcome to the Arrow Catcher Fair.” The lieutenant governor announces on-air that Mississippi is “individually, man for man, woman for woman, child for child, the most individually obscene and corrupt populace and geography” (“Arrow Catcher” 123). Every resident of the state is a freak according to him. Despite this “inherited alluvial madness,” the governor is proud of the state and it’s residents (“Arrow Catcher” 125). He says he is “proud of our pain, we are proud of out neurotic romanticism and our feelings of inferiority…proud of the bloody stains of our guilt” (“Arrow Catcher” 124). Nordan spells everything out here. For him, madness, disability, and freakishness are all a byproduct of the guilt that comes with being a southerner. Yet, Nordan is proud of this inheritance as much as he is ashamed of and afraid of it. All of his literature reflects this as Nordan uses humor to force his readers to relate to the “obscene,” “corrupt” and “alluvialy mad” residents of Arrow Catcher, hoping to unsettle readers in a way that inspires understanding of and empathy for these characters, and perhaps, by extension, himself and the other residents of Itta Bena who suffer from the disabilities Nordan believes a southern upbringing imparts.
***
Tonight I dreamt of a beautiful walk on a sandy beach.
At least that explains the footprints I found in the cat litter box this morning (“Hilarious Jokes”).
V. Humor as an Empathy-Builder for the Southern Man
Nordan has several recurring characters throughout his texts, Sugar Mecklin, Gilbert Mecklin, and Runt Conroy being some of the most memorable. Each of these characters is disabled in some way by his geography. We’ve already seen how Sugar is trapped by the
idioculture he is a product of. But, because he is most often portrayed as a young boy, he is easy to empathize with. Gilbert and Runt, two adult men, are more difficult to forgive and understand. But, Nordan makes it clear throughout his work that these men deserve the same understanding so freely given to their sons.
Gilbert Mecklin, Sugar’s father, is perhaps the more sympathetic of the two. Gilbert is an extension of Nordan himself in the same way Sugar is. Claiming Sugar as his son gives Gilbert an easier path to an in-group, since throughout the paper we’ve seen how Nordan uses Sugar as a point of relation for readers, especially in Music of the Swamp. Sugar, like many children, is often a source of hilarity, and because he is a child his missteps are forgivable. Furthermore, because Nordan views Sugar as an extension of himself, he is sentimental when it comes to writing about his moments of growth, which, like on the train in Music of the Swamp, often arise from his mistakes.
that readers cannot reduce Gilbert to solely these adjectives. Despite this, Nordan gives readers a clear picture of Gilbert’s flaws. He is an alcoholic who wears “white painter’s overalls and a billed cap all day and then [gets] dressed up to drink,” he stares at himself in mirrors
remembering a woman he used to love as a young man while his wife tells him “if his heart had to break she wanted it to break inside her own chest,” and his son “grieves” and “celebrates” his “invisibility” in his father’s eyes (“Sugar, the Eunuchs” 32). It’s very clear throughout Nordan’s literature that Gilbert’s family is suffering because of him.
Yet, Nordan feels a profound empathy for Gilbert, perhaps more than he extends to any of his characters. In an interview with Blake Maher, Nordan discusses how readers will often ask him “Are you Sugar?” Nordan agrees that he is Sugar, but goes on to say that nobody has ever asked him, “Are you Gilbert?” Nordan says he believes he is Gilbert even more than he is Sugar, and finds that people empathize with him for having an alcoholic father even as
they forget to say it must have been hard for you to be an alcoholic and know that your children suffered the same way Sugar did…So there is a great deal of love I have for Gilbert even beyond the love I have for Sugar…I feel very deeply for him (Maher). Gilbert is the quintessential example of the white southern man “far along the line of bad choices and mistakes,” that Nordan wants to create an understanding for with his work (Maher).
Nordan’s “deep feeling” for Gilbert is obvious throughout his work both as he writes about him with a degree of tenderness often reserved for Sugar, and as he uses caricature based humor to build social understanding.
at the Freak Show.” The story is told in first person from Sugar’s point of view and details his desperation to go to the freak show with Gilbert in order to feel connected to him. Gilbert agrees to take his son but abandons him at the door.
Throughout this story, Nordan establishes that Gilbert is in the out-group. As Sugar looks around at the men waiting to enter the freak show tent, he decides his mother had been right about the audience. He is surrounded by drunks, “violent stupid men some of them, with Mama’s boy names” (“The Talker” 21). Furthermore, though Sugar tries his best, he is just not able to view these spectators the way Gilbert does, “as doomed and tragic men, romantic as explorers for their hidden pistols and whiskey-ruined, sun-ruined faces and lives” (“The Talker” 23). Throughout this scene, all Sugar can see is drunk men, so Gilbert’s fanciful imaginings of himself as a tragic hero becomes humorous to the outside observer. Especially because as the story progresses, Nordan makes it apparent that Gilbert is just another one of the many drunks in attendance. In short, the story illustrates the way Gilbert is entirely a part of the idioculture that surrounds him, one of many drunks. The story culminates with Sugar feeling so betrayed that he runs home to tell his mother that his father “ain’t worth it” (“The Talker” 27-8). Yet, despite Gilbert’s shortcomings Nordan makes it clear that Sugar and his Mama are trapped by their overwhelming love for Gilbert despite the fact that he continuously disappoints them. Though Sugar proclaims that his father “ain’t worth it” and his mother agrees, they cannot help but love him too much to leave (“The Talker”).
So, Gilbert is well established as a member of the out-group by final story in the
hunting, and Sugar begins pretending G.B. is his father. But, he returns to Gilbert in the end, once again overpowered by his deep love for him (“Sugar, the Eunuchs”).
“The All-Girl Football Team,” the collection’s titular story, focuses on Gilbert and his son’s experiences dressing in drag, and begins by reaffirming Gilbert’s position in the out-group. Gilbert is at first “all-man,” “defined” by his maleness to Sugar and inaccessible to him (“All Girl” 113). This becomes even truer when Gilbert dresses in drag. Sugar, the first person narrator and a young boy desperate for his father’s love, is in the in-group of this story because of
proximity, and because he often plays the straight man as Gilbert’s actions become more and more bizarre.
For instance, when Gilbert helps Sugar dress in drag to participate as a cheerleader in the school’s “all-girl football game” his actions do not mirror any readily accessible social script dictating father-son interaction. As Gilbert helps his very uncomfortable middle-school aged son get dressed up he says:
“I will dress you in a skirt and a sweater and nice underwear and you will feel beautiful.” I [Sugar] said, “Uh…”
He [Gilbert] said, “You have never felt beautiful,” I [Sugar} said, “Well…” (“All Girl” 118).
caricature (“All Girl” 119). Despite the humor, this is one of the only moments in the text during which Gilbert is attentive to his son’s needs. He, in a non-traditional fashion (especially for the 1960s Mississippi Delta) is the most fatherly he has ever been at this point. This sudden
softening towards his son allows readers a point of access to Gilbert. He is bizarre, but he loves his child.
Once Sugar acclimates to drag, Nordan begins to use the same type of caricature-based humor he did with Gilbert to describe Sugar’s reactions. Sugar, dressed as a cheerleader, walks down the road and suddenly believes with absolute certainty that he is a lesbian. He says: “I felt like a fool for not having noticed before” (“All Girl” 124). Eventually, overcome with emotion Sugar begins to cry. The scene is both sentimental and comical. Of course Sugar is not a lesbian. In fact, he believes he’s a lesbian because he feels attracted to Tony Pirelli, another boy in drag. It’s hilarious. But, in this moment Sugar is so caught up in the experience, that much like his father, he stops acting logically. Suddenly Gilbert’s perception of reality is no different than Sugar’s. The difference between their viewpoints (bisociation) has disappeared, and the joke disappears with it. So, this is not a moment that pushes Sugar in to the out-group with Gilbert. Rather, the moment of matching perspectives pulls Gilbert into the in-group. Sugar’s new understanding of his father translates to readers as well. It is in this moment, walking down the street in drag, that Sugar realizes and makes peace with the fact that he is his “father’s child” (“All Girl” 125). This is a moment of deep connection and the sky fills with “magic” or
“meaning” for Sugar as he understands that his father, in his own way, is trying to love him (“All Girl”). Since Sugar has been in the in-group for the entire collection, this connection extends out to readers as well.
shortcomings, is just as worthy of empathy as his son is. If Sugar, as a young boy, can succumb with “spite” to the idioculture around him, surely his father, who has been inundated in the culture for far longer, is having an even more difficult time escaping the negative pieces of his heritage (Music). Nordan’s use of caricature on Sugar during this experience in drag illustrates this. If it is possible to understand Sugar, it is possible to understand Gilbert. He is both a man who will drink in the bathroom with his son is watching and a man who will carefully make-up his son’s face so he can experience what it is to be beautiful (“Freak Show” 20, “All Girl”). Nordan insists that we cannot throw out the good with the bad when it comes to Gilbert.
him serves to illustrate both his failures and successes as a man in a way that creates an entire picture. Gilbert outgrows the stereotype of the poor alcoholic Mississippian over the course of Nordan’s work, which is exactly what Nordan intends for all his characters to do.
Nordan’s writing about Runt Conroy runs a similar course. Runt is Arrow Catcher’s town drunk. Nordan writes about him extensively in Music of the Swamp, and as he does with Gilbert, he does not shy away from detailing his failings as a father and husband. In the words of Nordan, Runt is “white trash” (Music 89). It is not desirable to relate to a “weasely” gravedigger who works only when he is “sober enough,” so Runt begins in an out-group (Music 89). Yet, Nordan moves him slowly into the in-group with caricature. Just as he caricatured Sugar to build
understanding with Gilbert, Nordan caricatures the entire Conroy family to build sympathy for Runt. Nordan uses the Conroy matriarch, Fortunata, as the butt of these jokes. Runt’s children include:
twin girls, Cloyce and Joyce, children who spoke in unison. There was a misfit child named Jeff Davis who believed his pillow was on fire. And, of course there was the boy near my age, Roy Dale, and a very young child, about four, named Douglas, whose only ambition when he grew up was to become an apple (Music 89).
The children themselves are giggle inducing, but it is Fortunata who makes the family truly laughable. Fortunata is angry…
She seemed especially angry at Douglas, the child of low ambition. She berated him for it. She encouraged him to want to be something finer than an apple. She threatened to beat him if he did not change his mind. “You will always be white trash,” she said to this four-year-old child. “You will never amount to anything…” (Music 89-90).
herself to sleep because her son decides he’d like to be a cork when he reaches adulthood (Music 90). Fortunata’s reminder to her son here, that he’ll “always be white trash,” and “never amount to anything,” is necessary to take note of. Like Douglas, many of Nordan’s characters, including Gilbert and Runt, have been told by everyone from their mothers to men at a bar that they are nothing but white trash. This sentiment seems to take root in many of these men’s minds, and eventually many of Nordan’s characters truly believe that they will never, or have never, amounted to anything. This reflects in their actions, especially in their alcoholism.
Runt, for instance, truly believes his wife when she berates him. We watch one instance of this through Sugar’s perspective when he attends a sleepover at Roy Dale’s house. Since Sugar is the narrator and Roy Dale is his peer and confidant for the chapter, he and Roy Dale can be assumed to represent the in-group. Sugar enters the Conroy house and watches Runt “the way normal children watch television” (Music 94). As Sugar watches, Runt desperately tries to please Fortunata, who believes their home stinks, by washing the basement with pine-sol. Unfortunately for Runt, “This place stinks!” is a refrain that Fortunata uses to accuse him not only for the smell in the house, but also for, “his alcoholism, his birthright, his genes, his occupation, his adulteries real or imagined, his very breath” (Music 94). In other words, the smell can’t be scrubbed away with a little pine-sol. Yet, Runt miserably crawls around his basement floor, desperately trying to clean it up. The moment is a reflection of both his belief that he, in simple terms “stinks,” and an example of one of many times he tires to fix the problem.
of it both recalls the humor of the classroom scene and emphasizes Fortunata’s position in the out-group because of her bizarre classroom antics earlier. Nordan has made a joke about
Fortunata just as he begins to paint Runt; whose son has just told him the pine-sol “stinks” worse than the cellar did, in a sympathetic light (Music 95). It is clear in this moment that the world is against Runt. He is trying to atone for his past mistakes, whether they are adopting a cat that pees all over the basement, or failing as a husband, but it is too-little, too-late.
Nordan refers to the deflated Runt as a “wounded man,” here inspiring pity and pushing the real reasons for Fortunata’s anger off of center stage (Music 95). At this point, despite the fact that, “Runt is probably drunk, has probably already betrayed [Fortunata] today with another woman, or several,” is less relevant (Music 97). Readers have laughed at Fortunata and her children and are starting to pity Runt, who really is doing his best.
Nordan then places Runt into the in-group with the help of his son. As Fortunata begins to scream at Runt for the smell, which Runt believes he is guilty for, Roy Dale says “I like the way it smells,” hoping to end the fight (Music 99). Since Roy Dale is in the in-group with Sugar, and readers have been laughing at Fortunata already, this pushes Runt into relatable territory. The world is making it impossible for him to atone for his mistakes, and that is something easy to empathize with.
These passages are harsh reminders of the character of the man Nordan just encouraged readers to feel bad for. The scene allows Nordan to ask readers consider who they choose to relate to, but it also, and perhaps more importantly, serves as a reminder of the idioculture Runt is a part of. He is descended from generations of racists, he lives in a town where seemingly everybody is cheating on their wives and drinking too much. And while he is certainly culpable for his actions, it also becomes difficult to deride him for failing to get out from under his circumstances. As Nordan reminds us, they are difficult circumstances to escape.
to change every step of the way.
In a way, Runt’s struggle to change his name seems futile. None of his alcoholic friends are ever going to remember to call him Cyrus. Nordan illustrates the enormous struggle Runt faces with the comedic confusion of Coach Heard. But, more importantly, Nordan makes it obvious that to be Cyrus, Runt has to stop hanging out at Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro., cheating on his wife, and accepting the “white trash” definition that has been given to him. Nordan leaves readers unsure of whether or not Runt will be able to achieve this change. Yet, like with Gilbert, empathy he creates for Runt with humor throughout his literature makes it clear that Nordan is rooting for him, and that readers should be as well. Runt’s experience
communicates the message at the core of most of Nordan’s literature. His characters are not good men but, like Runt, most of them are trying to be.
The social groupings Nordan creates with humor, whether he is caricaturing Runt and Gilbert or their families, helps ease readers into the deep understanding of these characters that Nordan wants them to achieve. Of course, these characters are ultimately redeemable, and their stories end with a preserved chance of salvation. In Wolf Whistle, Nordan’s most critically acclaimed work, Nordan characterizes Solon Gregg, a representation J.W. Milam, who murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 (Wolf Whistle). Solon’s story is the only one Nordan writes that ends without the promise of redemption. Rather, Solon succumbs entirely to the environment that produced him. Yet, amazingly, Nordan is able to encourage readers to understand and empathize with Solon until the moment he refuses to change.
*** Why do ducks fly upside down over trailer parks?
VI. Humor, Empathy, and Solon Gregg
Solon, Wolf Whistle’s antagonist, begins in the out-group because Nordan does not hide the fact that he is going to murder a young boy because that boy is black. Yet, Nordan takes great care to illustrate how Solon reached that point. He begins to build empathy with backstory on Solon’s past as an abused child near the start of the novel. He starts with a description of Solon’s father sexually assaulting his sister Juanita night after night, while Solon’s younger brother remained at home, doing his best to protect her. Then, Solon imagines leaving home and returning, like the prodigal son, and decides; “It’s a lucky thing the Prodigal Son didn’t have a younger brother like Solon’s, he would have got his ass blowed off. The Prodigal Son got lucky twice, if you wanted Solon Gregg’s own personal opinion” (Wolf Whistle 64). Juxtaposed with a story of abuse, the quip is funny, and Solon, credited with the joke and so clearly surrounded by horror, is placed in a more positive light. Socially, readers are closer to Solon because they have laughed at his joke.
malicious. Rather, Solon seems to be woefully ignorant of his place in a harmful idioculture. He is clearly reaching out for a connection to his family despite his flaws (Wolf Whistle 65).
Furthermore, Solon’s enthusiasm on the subject is caricatured. He gets excited about some “extra delightful tap-dancing” on the radio and it is hard to keep from laughing at him, and how excited he is about an illogical hypothetical (Wolf Whistle 66).
This is Nordan’s in-road to readers. Solon now seems like nothing but a harmless joke, but his memories of his sister also make it clear that he is, more than anything, searching for love and connection. Nordan continues to strengthen this interpretation of Solon as he returns home to his wife and children. Solon details his familial relationships — his wife hates him, his children are afraid of him, his own son tried to burn him alive. So, Solon says, he wants to “keep his homecoming expectations low. That was the main thing. He was trying to be realistic” (Wolf Whistle 67). Once again, Solon’s quip is surprisingly funny. He is funny. Throughout the passage his stream-of-consciousness thoughts are full of one-liners like the one above. And, since sharing laughter creates social groupings, Nordan is able to move readers closer to Solon. Of course, Solon is often the butt of his own joke, so he does not gain entry into an in-group. But, because humor is a social tool connects people even as it establishes social boundaries, to laugh at Solon’s jokes is to humanize him (“The Sense of Humor”).
Nordan’s humor in regard to Solon at this point seems to illustrate both “the absurdity of and the prevailing horror of [the] cultural circumstance[s]” Solon is a part of (Pollack 177). He is funny, but later, Solon will enter his home and look at his son Glenn, who was burned to near-death in a fire he set trying to kill Solon. As he does with other characters, Nordan has no qualms about indicating that Solon is guilty of driving his child to such extremes. Yet, as Glenn’s
Whistle 72-76). Solon’s guilt humanizes him the way Sugar’s guilt humanizes him in “Sugar Among the Freaks,” even as Nordan highlights his sins.
Nordan concludes the chapter with Solon and his family singing “Bo Peep” and playing the washboard. They only know one verse, and wonder if maybe that verse is “the only one there was” (Wolf Whistle 77). The song is “the music of a black man named Blue John Jackson,” and Nordan uses it as a moment of peace for the Gregg family (Wolf Whistle 76). This passage serves to highlight the way that Solon is entirely a product of his environment. His actions mirror his own abusive father’s. Despite his racism, the song he sings is taken unconsciously from a black man down the road. Despite himself, he has absorbed pieces of his surroundings. A man like Solon would obviously not want to enjoy a black man’s composition, but he can’t prevent it. And perhaps even resents that he will never fully be a part of the community surrounding the music he enjoys. In a letter to his friend Ina, Nordan describes this feeling, saying,
And yet in so many ways, in all this, I was excluded from spiritual partnership with all those who were musical. By having no talent of my own, by hating church despite the singing, by not being a girl, or a black person, or a grownup, I was forever an outsider to a world that I carried everywhere with me in my heart and dreams (“Received by Ina”). The song is yet another example of a community, like his sister and her husband, or his wife and children, that Solon wishes to be included in but cannot be. Nordan suggests that this
environmental influence, both the toxic idioculture that surrounds him and the doors that are closed on Solon because of his place in it, should be considered before readers judge him. He is culpable, but also, perhaps, understandable. Nordan insists upon this type of understanding of Solon especially when it comes to the events leading up to Bobo’s murder.
