Knowing Percival

I met Percival Everett in the summer of 1999, when he and I were on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. We spent very little time together, as I remember it—lunch at the A & W Drive-In one hot afternoon; encounters walking from class to a reading. But somewhere along the way, we seemed to be circling one another with that combination of welcome and somehow uneasy-making recognition of a kindred sensibility when and where one had least thought to find it. I had read a couple of Percival's short stories—aside from that, I knew very little about him. He liked fishing early in the morning. He had some horses. He had a mule. Only a few days after meeting Percival, I woke and wrote, pretty much straight out, this poem. For Percival, and not a little about him.

Corral

for Percival Everett

Fleetingly, the mule is neither
justice nor injustice, but
another muscled

abbreviation in which
right and wrong take in
each other no apparent

interest, as if—impossible, on
purpose—to remind how
not everything is

vengeance, not everything
wants reason. The mule
intends nothing of the contrast he

makes inevitably
in a field otherwise all
horses: five of them, four

standing around and nosing
the only one whose flesh, white
entirely, lacks pattern, unless

the light counts,
the only one not standing,
lying with the particular

stillness of between when
a death has occurred
already and when we

ourselves shall have
learned of it. Until then,
that which before was
patternless and not standing
stands up, white, patterned
by the countable light,

the five horses step
into then just past a shy
gallop, the mule

among them, then beside them,
the mule falling in time behind
slightly, not like defeat—don't

think it—like instead one who,
understanding (as a mule
cannot) in full the gravity

of the truth always that he carries
with him, can
afford to pity

honestly a glamour that
extends even to the legs, classical,
on which each horse for now outruns the mule.

In our brief time at Bread Loaf, and all the more so once I read—as I did immediately upon returning home—everything that Percival had ever written, I began to see that Percival was one of those rare individuals who insists on being nothing but himself as a person and as a writer; he may or may not be vulnerable to criticism, I can't say—but the model he presents on paper and off suggests that no such vulnerability will allow him to compromise his integrity. The result, in terms of the writing, is a body of work that is clearly among the most original being written right now, and it is work that is particularly defiant of the various identity-boxes that are constantly being imposed on writers of color. In style and in content, the range is astonishing: from the retelling of the tale of Jason and Medea in For Her Dark Skin, to the unflinching meditation on morality in Cutting Lisa, to Glyph's rollicking spoof on literary theory, to the assault on identity-making itself in the recent Erasure. Sometimes, as in that last book, the characters are African American, sometimes not; at one point, more than half-way into one of the novels, there's a dialogue in which one of Percival's characters mentions being black; to which his companion asks: "Are you black?" It's a disorienting moment, making us wonder why—if we did—we assumed that the character was not black: because it was never mentioned earlier? And to what degree, if at all, does our thinking get reconfigured upon learning this new piece of information? Both in sly moments like this one, and in his refusal to be predictable in terms of what he will write about and how he will write it, Percival Everett reminds us that race—and all other markers of identity—is but one of many incidentals which contribute...