My Friend, Percival

There are several points I'd like to make before I get this essay started:

1. I'm hard-pressed to think of a writer I admire more than Percival Everett. His fiction is genuinely intellectual without being pompous or deliberately difficult, without losing sight of the fact that what comes first in any artful piece of writing is the need to engage your reader on the level of the sublime. Plus, he's pretty funny. I want this essay to reflect his genius. I want it to be smart, scholarly. I want him to read it and call me on the phone and invite me to go fishing sometime. But because I am not a scholar, because my own writing is mostly fiction, because I dabble in creative non-fiction, both of which tend toward personal rather than intellectual revelation, this essay will likely turn out to be more about me than Percival Everett and that will be a shame.

2. It is possible that I am the whitest human being walking the planet at this time. I tell myself that because I love Robert Johnson and Miles Davis and Percival Everett that I must have a little soul in me somewhere but, in my more self-aware moments, I will admit that this probably isn't true. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. My family had plenty of money. I went to a fancy private school. There were all of two black kids in my graduating class. I wasn't good friends with either of them, though I liked them fine. Neither were they friends with each other, if memory serves.

This is what scares me: almost twenty years later and I still don't have a single real black friend. I have black acquaintances and my wife has black friends whose company I enjoy. There's a new black guy in the English Department who I like, who has friend potential, but it's too soon to tell what'll happen there.

3. I have a student right now who is such a fine writer, who is so filled up with talent that it makes me want to cry. This is a young black student. He keeps taking my classes, despite the fact that he has other options, and I like to think that speaks well of our relationship. It makes me feel better to think so anyway. In a year, he'll be gone and I will have written him a world-class letter of recommendation. I will use every superlative I can think of. He deserves it. The only thing holding this kid back—and it makes me nervous to commit these words to paper—is that he sometimes has trouble writing beyond his blackness, writing beyond his racial politics in such a way that his people live and breathe, that his characters do more than serve as vessels for social commentary. I hasten to add that this isn't a big problem and that he's getting better all the time and that he is generally quick to make things right in later drafts and that a big part of the fire that burns in his writing has as much to do with youth as anything else. Also, a big part of what's so gorgeous about his prose is the fire itself. His sentences are conflagrations.

About a year ago, I bumped into him while waiting for an elevator and we fell into our usual topic of conversation—writing. I had just finished Erasure. I had read it in a stretch, sitting under this big hemlock tree in my backyard and two days later, I was reeling from it still. Right off the bat I was telling this student of mine that he needed to put down whatever he was reading and pick up Erasure. He remembered Percival Everett from my Introduction to Fiction Writing Class (we'd read a story called "The Fix"), though he hadn't realized Everett was black and he seemed surprised that I hadn't made this known to the class. What's great about this student is he...