Culturally aware educators, especially culturally aware white educators working in a minority-majority district, know the phrase "windows and mirrors". It means students need both kinds of books -- those that are windows into the way others think and live, and mirrors that show them their own culture with their own voices represented.
I've been reading a book that serves both kinds of readers. The World Doesn't Require You, by Rion Amilcar Scott, is his second that is centered on the fictional town of Cross River, Maryland, site of the nation's only successful slave revolt. Half of the book are short stories, often connected by characters or ideas, while the second half is a novella, Special Topics in Loneliness Studies. The second half brings everything together, but it's the stories I want to feature today. They are so rich and audacious. (Apologies for not having read his first work, Insurrection, also set around Cross River and not knowing if any of the characters in these stories are connected with those. It is a failing I hope to make up.)
Scott begins this collection with the story of David Sherman, the last son of a man called God. His legacy is a drive to create the music he hears in his head, music tuned to the river. The way his family treats him, especially those who are supposedly people of faith, is as incisive as any nonfiction chronicle of prosperity Christianity and the hyprocrisy of those who have and do not wish to share with those who do not have.
What happens to David Sherman and his legacy are featured later on in the book. In all instances, the writing about music that only some can hear and the urgent need to re-create that music so others hear it is vibrant and intense. The visceral understanding of the way music affects the soul is right up there with the best novel about music I know, The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor.
It's not just the music. It's the idea of community and family within the stories, the idea of belief in oneself rather than any higher power, because higher powers do not help those who are below them, and the idea that being an outsider is empowering if one knows it and is prepared to make one's own way as best one can.
The stories centered on David Sherman and the community that resulted are strong and fit together so well. They chronicle how ideas change over time, and that what once was simple and pure can become obtuse and tainted. They reveal how strong the human will can be, and how easily a heart can be broken. They are incredible.
Scott also has stories that are from the point of view of self-aware artifically intelligent creations. The stories both remind me of the sensibility of some stories by George Saunders in The Tenth of December and stand completely original in the way living things regard themselves when they know they are property, and that their own will is not what will dictate their days.
Another story is one that appeals to my research-loving heart, about a graduate student who has nearly finished writing a paper on a childhood game, the basic game of ring and rip when someone in the group knocks on a door and everyone runs before the door is opened. The story has a lot to say about childhood memories, trying to relive childhood, and academia.
I know that, even while admiring these stories, I am not seeing the complete work. I cannot. I am looking through a window and not into a mirror. There are situations that I only see superficially. There are names and words I have no business using that Scott can, and does, with aplomb. And that's OK. Because it's essential that mirrors such as his works exist. And that those of us who are reading it as a window just step back and marvel.