Posted: Mon 12 Feb 2007 07:38 Post subject: ACE OF SPADES, review by Bliss Broyard
Quote:
February 11, 2007
Half and Half
By BLISS BROYARD
NY Times Book Review
ACE OF SPADES
A Memoir.
By David Matthews.
303 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $24.
Twenty minutes into David Matthews’s first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he is. When Matthews doesn’t answer, they trail him down the hallway — “as though I were a reprobate head of state ambushed by reporters outside a lurid hotel” — shouting out their guesses: “Black! White! You crazy?! He(’s) too light/dark to be black/white!” One jokester suggests he’s Chinese.
One possible response is that Matthews is mixed: his father is African-American, actually a “prominent black journalist” who counted Malcolm X and James Baldwin among his friends, and his mother is Jewish, although she disappeared to Israel shortly after Matthews was born. But this scene takes place in 1977 in a Baltimore public school that sits between a “Waspy enclave of tony brownstones” and a “world of housing projects, roaming street gangs and bleating squad cars,” and the difference between black and white seems too vast to allow for any unions — or their byproducts — across the conceptual divide. (Although we learn that Matthews needn’t look any further than his own life for exceptions: his best friend, his stepbrother and his half brother are also mixed, though none of them quite so indeterminately as he is.) In the lunchroom, Matthews heads to the table of students he resembles most — in skin color, yes, but also in character. The white kids, with their “nerdy diction” and “Starsky and Hutch” lunchboxes, are similarly introverted and unthreatening, while the black kids, playing the dozens and double Dutch on the playground, are “alive and cool,” and frightening. When a white boy assigned by the homeroom teacher to be Matthews’s buddy for the day makes room for him to sit down, this small, serendipitous gesture sets the dye of his racial identity for the next 20 or so years.
In this stylish, astute, often frustrating memoir, Matthews examines the zigzags in his path between black and white identities before finally settling somewhere in between. He deftly recreates the exigencies behind each decision to reveal only the Jewish half of his ancestry: from a desire for “the benefit of the doubt” granted white kids by teachers and policemen to the unfriendly inquiries by his white girlfriend’s drunken metal-head brothers to the discrepancy in pay at the hotel where he works between the waiters, who are mostly white, and the dishwashers and busboys, who are almost exclusively black. But Matthews sometimes muddles the immediacy and empathy he’s won with a weakness, by his own admission, for reductive reasoning.
The cross burning is one example. While “passing” as white, Matthews and a like-minded white classmate decide to resurrect that Ku Klux Klan symbol of intimidation as a private protest — they light it unseen in the classmate’s backyard — against their status as prey in their mostly black neighborhood, despite being rulers in the world at large. By the dim light of the sputtering fire, we clearly recognize Matthews’s confusion and resentment as the white-looking son of a taciturn, coolly removed former civil rights activist father, whose job as the managing editor of the local black paper in a city that has a majority African-American population doesn’t afford his family a house outside the ghetto. But in a coda describing his eighth-grade self as motivated both by a hatred for the racism that drove him to deny his black ancestry and by a desire to be unequivocally black (and thus “a menacing reminder of America’s failures”), Matthews diminishes the complexity of the scene with this pat explanation.
“Ace of Spades” is much more convincing when Matthews demonstrates the provisionality of racial categories through his incisive observations. His best friend, Stefan, is also mixed, but a Norwegian mother and summers in Europe immunize him from American racial stereotyping, a point that dawns on Matthews when playing with Stefan’s foreign toys: “Their mysterious shapes and alien labels flash ... the sounds of hooves on cobblestone and the revelry of gay cafes into my ears, images of little boys bounding after les ballons rouges before my eyes.” Explaining how his white stepmother’s recreational drug use introduced her to an underground world of black revolutionaries and hustlers, he writes that the drug culture has “always been an ersatz desegregation movement, bringing whites and blacks together for the egalitarian cause of copping.”
Matthews’s depiction of his homecoming to blackness suffers especially from a connect-the-dots rationale that treats identity as an intellectual stance (leading him from Louis Farrakhan’s indictment of Jews, and whites generally, for their crimes against blacks to the psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing’s theory that white supremacy arose from an innate fear of genetic extinction to the “Fight the Power” sentiments of Public Enemy’s Chuck D). But what “Ace of Spades” demonstrates so vividly is the conditional nature of racial identity as a lived experience — that it depends on the neighborhood where you grow up, the schools you attend and the friends you hang out with; that it falls somewhere between how a person presents himself and how the world sees him; that it can be distilled as much from the thin air left by a mother’s absence as from the flesh-and-blood presence of a father who always feels beyond reach.
If Matthews’s account of his racial coming-of-age feels contradictory or disingenuous at times, the fault may lie less with his skill as a writer (which is considerable) than with the thorny nature of his inquiry. The same American racial history that made the question of what one is matter in the first place now makes it difficult to answer, since necessary efforts to redress the past, like affirmative action and set-aside programs, and the polarizing debates about them, tend to reify black and white as separate and meaningful categories. For precisely this reason, dispatches from people like Matthews, for whom racial identity has been largely elective, can be instructive. They give the assertion that race is a social construction, which has been repeated so often with so little effect as to feel like an old saw, new teeth.
Bliss Broyard is the author of the short-story collection “My Father, Dancing.” Her memoir, “One Drop,” will be published in the fall.
Posted: Wed 14 Feb 2007 01:29 Post subject: Thanks from David Matthews...
To anyone interested in these issues; we (meaning my publishers and I) were really, really pleased with the NY Times review. I thank any and all of you for your congratulatory emails and notes, very humbling. And thanks to all of those who came out in the NYC cold to hear me read. The last two were standing room only, and were a blast. The Q&A's were perhaps the most fun. There will be more, all over the country soon. We also just got the review from the San Francisco Chronicle, posted below:
Ace of Spades
A Memoir
By David Matthews
HENRY HOLT; 302 PAGES; $24
Growing up in Baltimore's low-rent neighborhoods in the 1970s and '80s, David Matthews got called white boy, n -- and Jew. The light-skinned son of a Jewish mother and an African American father, he answered to all three names. But the story -- and the identity issues -- get even more complicated. Matthews' mother, who had psychological problems, abandoned him as an infant, disappearing from his life forever. His father, a journalist in the African American press who once consorted with Miles and Malcolm, dated only white women, including an evil stepmother type who abused his son. The young Matthews usually passed for white, but that label was as mutable and recalcitrant as the others he sometimes wore. As "a living contradiction of elements that shouldn't have been," he found himself morphing back and forth, either "white by inference or black by implication," depending on who and where he was hanging around.
In his memoir, "Ace of Spades," Matthews writes with candor, anger and humor about what it means to be all mixed up. Like the best of this genre, Matthews' memoir balances introspection with cultural commentary, using vivid scenes from his life to illustrate the themes of the times. The story of race and class in all its fine, often crisscrossing, lines is in large part the story of America. Matthews, who stands at the intersections of many of these lines, offers up some important insights about black, white and those myriad gray shades in between.
An astute writer with a sharp wit and tongue, Matthews does not shy away from the touchy subjects. Take, for instance, the internalized racism that made a 12-year-old Matthews call his own father a n -- and attempt to burn a Klu Klux Klan-style cross in a neighbor's yard -- a slapstick adventure almost as comical as it is heartbreaking. Or the sexual politics of black men and white women, and how men can manipulate white guilt into physical pleasure (though the author may not be quite as self-aware on this issue as he thinks he is). Proving that there's still something to be said on the subject of cool -- which he describes as almost Victorian in its restraint, a kind of effortless control while everything around you is chaos -- Matthews adds his own incisive riffs. But he also worries about how displays of intelligence get equated with uncool, and how, in his first year at a mostly black college, he tried to appear dumber in order to seem blacker.
Then there's the volatile tangle of black-Jewish relations, an arena in which Matthews is especially shrewd. As a teenager, he realized that claiming his Jewishness could help explain his swarthy coloring and keep him in with the right crowd. Figuring that "Israeli seemed like Jew squared," he talks up the one thing he knows about his absent mother -- that she moved to Israel -- in an attempt to gain cachet. But eventually this boy with two histories of persecutions starts to wonder, "What was it about Jews and their people that superseded their general alliance with the whole of humanity? Their holocaust, to be frank, paled in comparison to the ongoing deaths -- physical, economic, and psychic -- suffered by my other people."
In examining his own convoluted story, Matthews is really exploring that one question upon which the American psyche is fixated: "What are you?" As he found out on his first day at school, when the whole student body pestered him for a response, no one can get situated and nothing can get started until that question is answered, the issue of race resolved. In a sense, Matthews didn't choose white; it chose him. But, eventually, he got past both his ability and his desire to pass, and realized the irony that "I had chosen my mother (her whiteness), though she had abandoned me, and ignored my father (his blackness), though he had not."
"Ace of Spades" makes for a good story, full of profound and painful truths, but it wouldn't necessarily be a good book if Matthews weren't such a talented writer. His likable persona -- angry young wimp -- and his willingness to reveal his own most shameful moments, allows him to deliver caustic goods. The writing flows between showing and telling, between precise details of the urban landscape and grand pronouncements on the races. And the language is a playful, poetic mix of highbrow and lowbrow that creates a Spanglish-esque blend of black-and-white vernacular. One minute he's addressing the "dear reader" with descriptions of "the susurrus of corduroy trousers," "empyrean aplomb" and "oppidian scandals and minatory apocalypses." Then, just when you're ready to call him an old-fashioned blowhard, he'll drop in a line about "the bucolic suburbs of wherever" or how "times done changed." The one clear thing about Matthews is that he is a man on whom no label will stick.
Frances Lefkowitz (FrancesLefkowitz.net) is at work on a memoir about poverty and escape.
Posted: Tue 20 Feb 2007 05:13 Post subject: USA TODAY!javascript:emoticon(':?')
By J. Ford Huffman, USA TODAY
Is David Matthews:
A. The white son of a vanished, activist mother whose Jewish heritage Matthews equates with wealth that would rescue him from poverty?
B. The black son of a poor, "darker iteration of Barney Fife" who "at one time had been a great black man" with cool friends such as James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Miles Davis?
C. Both?
The answer: C.
As a child, Matthews learned that other people insisted he be black or white, so he opted to pass — hide — as white. Admittedly, his choice was a "torturous game of racial keep-away."
A memoir with meaning, Ace of Spades is a story of self-deprecation and, ultimately, self-empowerment. Matthews was born in 1967 and was raised and educated in Baltimore during tumultuous times in the streets. Everyone else was from Cooley High, he says, and he was from Sesame Street.
As he writes: "I dream of the mother who had left and of the (white) life and ease she had taken with her. … Surely I belonged in a luminous brownstone, or a quirky condominium, and not the slums of Baltimore?"
Pop references proliferate. When he tries to learn how to shoot a pistol for a frightening and futile stint in crime, his visual mentor is Pepper of Police Woman.
TV was "the ersatz black-and-white parent" that allowed him to "retreat even further into a world in which I was fast becoming the sole inhabitant: the planet myopia." His father ominously called his galaxy "that little world of yours."
That world was not rose-colored. His father's white girlfriend ("no one wore a dashiki the way Karen did") shoved his young face into a bowl of soup and vomit. Later she "plunged a dinner fork into the bony flesh between my shoulder blades." His father lost his appetite for Karen the third time she abused his son.
Like his journalist father and grandmother (who reported for The (Baltimore) Sun for a few days in the 1920s until she found out they thought she was white), Matthews developed an affinity for language that became a mastery.
His own "two-man diaspora" — life with only a father — comes to an enriching end when he investigates, as an adult, why his mother, Robin Kahn Matthews, left him.
His lifelong search and the book come to a conclusion that is wrenching and redemptive. He decides to "tuck Robin into a thawing corner of my heart as a living loving creature," and the reader does, too.
I wonder if David has received any negativity regarding the use of "Spades" in the title of his book. That word has long been a semi-slur against "blacks" or African-Americans.
I cannot say that Matthews life experiences were not his because they were. I cannot say he did not do this or this way or had these issues because it is his life.
I will say that he had a hard fact of life and hurt is that hismother left. Be it that she was Jewish, Dannish, White American, Black, gay , straight ,whatever is not important, but that fact that she left.
next , he was raised in an area that was all this or that. No in between.
Add the abusive and crazy girlfriend of dads, well, the racial indentity of his was the least of his problems or at least at the bottom of the list.
Posted: Tue 17 Apr 2007 04:04 Post subject: "Ace of Spades"
Chasbyrd:
Quote:
I wonder if David has received any negativity regarding the use of "Spades" in the title of his book. That word has long been a semi-slur against "blacks" or African-Americans.
The book contains one use of the term "ace of spades." David's white mulatto, Negro-identified paternal grandmother uses the term to contemptuously describe the phenotypes of black criminals she sees on the evening news. "Black as the ace of spades!"
In the book, David clearly embraces the ODR, claiming that alll blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, etc. are equally despised by "whites." Of course, when "whites" treat the mixed-race better than blacks, that's supposed to be proof of their "racism," too. His mulatto elite father embraces so-called "black nationalism" and was friends with Malcolm X during his white-hating Nation of Islam days. Of course, nearly all Ralph Matthews' women are white. Two of them are the mothers of his sons. He doesn't get the contradiction.
Ralph reminds me somewhat of Tony Williams, the abusive father of Gregory Howard Williams. Ralph is nowhere near as bad as Tony, but he orders David to consider himself a "nigger" and threatens to beat him if he dares to identify as a non-black and non-nigger. Ralph also puts David in dangerous situations by deliberately moving into a crime-filled black ghetto.
I interpret David's use of the term "Ace of Spades" to mean a "superior" variety of "black" - the traditional way mulatto elites see themselves. Of course, as long as David is black-identified, he has a certain carte blanche to use derogatory names for blacks.
Posted: Tue 17 Apr 2007 15:28 Post subject: Re: "Ace of Spades"
Powell wrote:
Of course, as long as David is black-identified, he has a certain carte blanche to use derogatory names for blacks.
That’s definite, and no one within the black intelligentsia will dare move to censure him or demand that his books be removed from the shelves of Barnes&Noble. In my opinion there is no good reason for any such censure or removal, but it points out the glaring hypocrisy and double standard vis-ŕ-vis who has “license” to say what in this country.
...I had something to say, and with the risks I was taking in terms of voice—the book is in many ways a polemic—I needed to let the reader know that I was going to be as brutal on myself as on the world I was railing against.
...To me, political correctness stifles communication. Once a topic/word/sentiment is relegated to back rooms and whispers, it becomes cancerous. To my mind, the more we acknowledge that simply removing “hurtful” words does nothing to mitigate the thoughts behind those words, the faster we can consign the sentiments to the dustbin. And there’s a lack of intellectual honesty about political correctness as well, it assumes that we all have to like and respect everyone, and that certain things are off bounds. No real art or progressive thought can grow “in bounds.” My disdain is also a winking nudge—besides my heterosexuality—I’m a mix of all those sacred cows in America which signal the need for “correctness.” Black and Jewish are in the top three. (Jewish not so much anymore, but black is the new black).
If I can laugh and speak freely about some of the prime-grade bogusness I’ve endured growing up as an ultimate outsider, then maybe Survivor can separate their tribes based on race, like every other neighborhood in America does, without us losing our shit.
Imagine the "Black intelligensia" (and the world at large) having the mental capacity to discern the context in which an oft-objectionable word/phrase is employed. As Maureen Dowd's recent book entitled Are Men Necessary?, which actually not a polemic so much as a wry observation of post-feminist American culture, demonstrates, authors frequently choose eye-catching titles for their books. In addition, where is the evidence that Matthews means to cause harm, ridicule Blacks, or expressly refering to a Black person as the "ace of spades?"
Can we really not discern the difference in rhetorical intent here? Give me a break.
Posted: Sat 21 Apr 2007 16:40 Post subject: "Ace of Spades" and political correctness
Come on! Ace of Spades IS "politically correct." Do you imagine for a moment that Matthews would be lionized if he had NOT denounced "passing" and affirmed forced hypodescent for those with "black blood" (with Hispanics and Arabs conveniently disappearing from the universe). His book is the same anti-passing, not good enough for the honor of your own white ancestry propaganda that has been published since the 19th century.
Posted: Mon 23 Apr 2007 13:38 Post subject: Re: "Ace of Spades" and political correctness
Powell wrote:
Come on! Ace of Spades IS "politically correct." Do you imagine for a moment that Matthews would be lionized if he had NOT denounced "passing" and affirmed forced hypodescent for those with "black blood" (with Hispanics and Arabs conveniently disappearing from the universe). His book is the same anti-passing, not good enough for the honor of your own white ancestry propaganda that has been published since the 19th century.
Lionized by whom is the question. Matthew's book hasn't appeared on the book list in Essence magazine, for example. I don't watch BET so I don't know whether he has promoted his book there. Outside the somewhat elite literary gliterrati circle, where a NY Times thumbs up is what can make or break a career in publishing, where are the opinions of the "Black intelligensia" to whom Powell and Chasbyrd make reference? I am not being flippant, I really want to know. I wonder if either realize that the vast majority of Black Americans are blissfully unaware of the controversy, and even the "Black intelligensia" may be as well (what/whoever this term refers to). I guess Matthews himself is too White or white to be a part of the "Black intelligensia?" Interesting point-of-view, if so.
It is probably more realistic to say that "passers" who "honor" their white ancestry by becoming White don't usually publicize this choice in an autobiography until the social penalties for disclosure are minimized...if at all. There will always be a market for rhetoric the goes with the social flow. There will always be subsets of society that see "politically correct" rhetoric and rhetors as propagandists and self-promoters. At the end of the day, Matthews is telling his own story. He is entitled to see his own life, which only he has lived, through whatever lens makes sense to him. What or who else is he obligated to represent "correctly" or "incorrectly?"
Joined: 20 Oct 2006 {Posts: 283 } Location: Akron, Ohio
Posted: Mon 23 Apr 2007 15:01 Post subject:
Sagascend said:
''At the end of the day, Matthews is telling his own story. He is entitled to see his own life, which only he has lived, through whatever lens makes sense to him. What or who else is he obligated to represent "correctly" or "incorrectly?"''
And I will agree with the above. I can't imagine David pondering the yeas and nays and losing sleep over whether his view of things goes against the grain of some. So what. I hope the book makes him a million dollars.
On the Ace of Spades, I had never heard the ''ace'' part as a kid growing up in Indianapolis. Whenever it was used, by Blacks, it was derogatory, and because the color of the spade, which is black, was akin to saying the N-word with a bit less sting. The word black was highly offensive in the 50s. That said, I suppose Ace can be understood to have big Cajuna (sp?) status.
Go David Matthews!
Last edited by Andrew Waters on Mon 23 Apr 2007 15:18; edited 1 time in total
Sagascend said:
''At the end of the day, Matthews is telling his own story. He is entitled to see his own life, which only he has lived, through whatever lens makes sense to him. What or who else is he obligated to represent "correctly" or "incorrectly?"''
And I will agree with the above. I can't imagine David pondering the yeas and nays and losing sleep over whether his view of things goes against the grain of some. So what. I hope the book makes him a million dollars.
I thought that the issue was whether the title exploits the sly innuendo of a once-popular racial slur. Surely, no one can doubt that it does. Like AW, I too hope that the book is successful. But, c'mon guys, let's call a spade a spade.
Sagascend said:
''At the end of the day, Matthews is telling his own story. He is entitled to see his own life, which only he has lived, through whatever lens makes sense to him. What or who else is he obligated to represent "correctly" or "incorrectly?"''
And I will agree with the above. I can't imagine David pondering the yeas and nays and losing sleep over whether his view of things goes against the grain of some. So what. I hope the book makes him a million dollars.
I thought that the issue was whether the title exploits the sly innuendo of a once-popular racial slur. Surely, no one can doubt that it does. Like AW, I too hope that the book is successful. But, c'mon guys, let's call a spade a spade.
Sure, but I guess I don't interpret that exploitation differently then any other garden-variety marketing ploy to sell books.
The term I always heard was "Black as the ace of spades." It always seemed like a derogatory descriptor of skin color to me among Blacks (among countless others). The only other time I have heard it is when used by Italian Americans in some mob movie ("Muli" and "shine" also come to mind), where it was employed as a racial slur rather than a descriptor.
Given that, especially after reading Matthew's stated intent in the interview excerpt that I posted above, I guess I don't see that he is promoting the "better breed of Black" view by using the term.
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Sure, but I guess I don't interpret that exploitation differently then any other garden-variety marketing ploy to sell books.