Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
pleasure in doing so.
The narration that begins the novel verges on a kind of omniscience where Jerry molds the suburban framework to his liking, choosing to filter all that he sees prior to telling it to the audience. But if he seemingly wishes for an unchanging, static conception of suburbia, do we understand the vagaries of “cigarette butts” and “dead, gassy possum” (3) to be the sole determinant of his disdain for facing the reality of his life? In describing such unseemly suburban detritus, Jerry grants us more information that recalls other processes of erosion. First, he explains to his unnamed audience what one can expect to eventually pass over: “older, densely built townships like mine, where beneath the obscuring canopy men like me are going about the last details of their weekend business, sweeping their front walks and dragging trash cans to the street and washing their cars as they have since boyhood and youth, soaping from top to bottom and brushing the wheels of sooty brake dust, one spoke at a time” (2). At first glance and without having perused paratextual materials such as a book-jacket blurb or reviews, the phrase “men like me” is hard to parse at this point in the novel. The passage suggests that men like Jerry, who have lived in the area all their lives, go about their day completing mundane tasks and errands. Despite the pedestrian nature of the activities, this depiction of suburban bliss conveys a tradition handed down from generation to generation. This moment firmly establishes Jerry within a longer tradition of the suburbs, where maintenance of family yards and vehicles becomes ritual.
The first chapter, as I have mentioned, revolves around Jerry’s decision to buy a plane, which requires him to travel to the owner’s home. Jerry describes the residence this way: “an attractive cedar-shingled colonial, built in the 1960s like a lot of houses in this part of Long Island, including mine, when the area was still mostly potato fields and duck farms and unsullied stretches of low-slung trees and good scrubby nothingness”; this contrasts to the current activity in the area, where “now the land is filled with established developments and newer ones from the ’80s, and with the last boom having catapulted everyone over the ramparts there’s still earthmoving equipment to be seen on either side of the Expressway” (9). At this point, the deliberate character construction reveals why Jerry is so focused on buildings, homes, structures, and spaces. The more rural and smaller townships that he recalls are becoming ever more populated, to the extent that any traces of a more bucolic lifestyle are being expunged. The alterations he observes are all part and parcel of postwar hypersuburbanization. Jerry’s fetishization of his flying “aloft” and above the statically framed vista is an attempt to harness what seems to be a chaotic location, one where meaning cannot easily be pinned down.
Not surprisingly, it is not soon after this moment of suburban superconstruction that Jerry drops what I would call his first racialized thought bomb. His meeting with Hal, the owner of the Cessna, leads him to muse on racial difference in his community and his life:
He was a nice-looking fellow, with a neatly clipped salt-and-pepper mustache and beard. And I should probably not so parenthetically mention right now that Hal was black. This surprised me, first because Shari wasn’t, being instead your typical Long Island white lady in tomato-red shorts and a stenciled designer T-shirt, and then because there aren’t many minorities in this area, period, and even fewer who are hobbyist pilots, a fact since borne out in my three years of hanging out at scrubby fields. Of course, my exceedingly literate, overeducated daughter Theresa (Stanford Ph.D.) would say as she has in the past that I have to mention all this because like most people in this country I’m hopelessly obsessed with race and difference and can’t help but privilege the normative and fetishize what’s not. And while I’m never fully certain of her terminology, I’d like to think that if I am indeed guilty of such things it’s mostly because sometimes I worry for her and Jack, who, I should mention, too, aren’t wholly normative of race themselves, being “mixed” from my first and only marriage to a woman named Daisy Han. (11–12)
A number of elements can be teased out of this passage. At no point does Jerry share his observations about Hal’s racially anomalous presence in the Long Island suburban region with Hal or his wife, Shari. Instead, he admits this information only to his implied audience. Jerry possesses enough presence of mind to explain why he would be “surprised” by Hal’s racial background, including an important reference concerning the status of his children as being “mixed” and of his marriage to Daisy Han. It is here that readers are finally given the first indication of Jerry’s own racial background. At no point, of course, does he state that he is white, or even Italian American, but rather identifies race through a paradoxical absence and presence, making his own visible only through contrast with others. Like Lapcharoensap’s figuration of Mister Perry and Lahiri’s depiction of Eliot, Jerry is racialized only through deduction, as the reader meditates on what is “normative” about Shari as a “white lady,” what is nonnormative about Hal as “black,” and finally, what it means when Jerry has “mixed-race” children from a marriage to a woman with an ethnic surname. Whiteness, which does not need to be named, exerts a tremendous force on creating racialized narrative meaning.
Jerry maintains a defensive posture in his contemplation of racial difference, as he attempts to forefront his sensitivity to these minority figures. Rather than disdaining Hal for sullying the Long Island suburb as the “flotsam” that can be found in every neighborhood, Jerry notices Hal’s phenotypic difference but does not use this difference to denigrate him. Nevertheless, the divulgence of racial identity is enough to suggest that Hal’s presence, whether Jerry cares or not, is one that can incite “worry.” Difference, as Jerry implies, can make one a target for further scrutiny. What bears most significance is Jerry’s awareness that Hal could belong in this Long Island but does not.13 But Jerry’s narration does not elucidate the way in which Hal, as an individual, can be placed into a structural context of suburban racial politics and histories. While it might be a lot to expect that Jerry give the readers a sense of the larger forces that exist behind Hal’s marginalization, he invites such a critique, especially by his eventual divulgence concerning his worry over Theresa and Jack as mixed-race individuals. In other words, he begins to point to the systematic nature of exclusion, one that targets Hal, Theresa, and Jack, but he still fails to express fully how this exclusion manifests itself. Jerry’s narration encourages us to ask, why are there so few minority “hobbyist pilots” living in the area, and what are the ramifications for not being “wholly normative”?
Lee does not specifically name the city or town where the scene with Hal takes place or, for that matter, where the majority of the scenes within the novel take place; but the emphasis on whiteness is everywhere, and the Long Island that Jerry knows is predicated on racial homogeneity. While explaining his first encounter with Rita, his ex-girlfriend, he recounts how individuals seek others like themselves: “In this middle of the middle part of Long Island we’re no different, nearly all of us on that boat descended from the clamoring waves of Irish and Italians and Poles and whoever else washed ashore a hundred or so years ago, but you’re never quite conscious of such until somebody shows up and through no intention of her own throws a filter over the scene” (50). Once again, whiteness, despite the different ethnicities within that umbrella designation, functions as a racial collective. Jerry thus narrates how Irish, Italians, and Poles eventually have assimilated into one racial group. Such figures constitute the norm against which minorities are compared, as Jerry reveals their majority status in the area through the phrase “nearly all of us.” Rita’s arrival at a party held on a boat plays a disruptive role; she acts as a “filter” in the sense of a device mounted over a camera lens, which alters the shading of photographs. In this case, Rita’s presence as a Latina literally colors the party. Again, Jerry does not name the exact Long Island location where this scene takes place. Instead, he describes it vaguely as the “middle of the middle part,” a reference to a homogeneous center that glosses over the suburban segregation in the area.14
Because Jerry’s storytelling never squarely confronts the nature of white spatial supremacy as it emerges in his locality, it must be placed in conversation with the sociohistorical conditions that have engineered Long Island into one of the least racially integrated locations within the continental United States and how Lee explores such issues through Jerry’s perspective. The novel occasionally refers to areas such as Farmingville (26), MacArthur Field (20), Walt Whitman Mall