2015 read #67: Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange.

Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange
207 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 29 to December 3
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Recently I read an opinion piece on "How I learned to stop writing for old white men." It was a dispiriting read, as epiphanies often are, exploring the usual imbalances, biases, and disparities of social power within our "mainstream" society, a society in which the very definition of "mainstream" is delineated and enforced by the proverbial "old white men" (or at least a particular social and economic class with disproportionate power, largely populated by said old white men). Happening to pick up this book at approximately the same time, I was struck by how very few books I've ever read that weren't, in Claire Vaye Wakins' terminology, written for me. I have always been poor -- during the late '00s, there was a stretch when I was lower middle class, but that was a personal peak -- but I don't bother to read novels of Napa Valley weddings and architects investigating the suspicious deaths of their fathers, and I have yet to run out of things to read that nonetheless conform to certain expectations of worldview. A book like Mat Johnson's Pym might be a pointed satire of "whiteness," but it is a reaction to (and a dialogue with) a minor classic of the white American literary canon. White readers were clearly as much in Johnson's mind as Black readers.

Betsey Brown is the first book I've read, really, that didn't feel like its author had a white audience in mind. Researching Shange and her other writings (usually categorized as "post-Black Arts") suggested that my perceptions are potentially way off -- Shange has been criticized (possibly as a reaction against her feminist perspective) for "capitulating" to a mainstream (white) aesthetic. Yet this is the first book I've read that, say, presents segregation and Black separatism as positives, or at least as conditions and states of mind worthy of nostalgia and reevaluation. I'm pretty much a pampered little baby when it comes to serious critical theory, much less wholly new perspectives, so I'm not qualified to do much more than make a note of that. Even going that far from my sheltered world of fantasy wizards and rocketships leaves me feeling vulnerable, my toes skittering on the bottom of the pool as the water threatens to inch over my head.

The story itself is light and sweetly told for all its heavy racial and political text and subtext, a lovingly rendered series of vignettes on early adolescence and adult regrets in a relatively prosperous Black household in 1950s St. Louis. It was fascinating and left me wanting more, as well as filling my head with a dull awareness of my own ignorance, so I'd say that, as a novel, it works on several levels.