Othello, Othello, Where Art Thou?

Virtue! Was I some fair-haired white maiden locked in the castle tower, braiding my hair as the barbarians approached, their penises tied around their waists in bows? No, I was the maid lying on the castle stairs, her dress bunched at her waist, her bodice torn in ribbons and her thighs smeared with semen-thickened blood.

I had to go back home, for it was in the South that I learned something of virtue from the old ones who never knew a day of ease, who accepted the indignities and atrocities inflicted upon them, but were never resigned to them. That was crucial . . .

Julius Lester, All is Well (286-87)

At least two years ago I came across Othello: A Novel written by Julius Lester. I first knew and remembered Lester as the author of Black Folktales, which had caused some stir in the publishing world. While there were some troubling aspects of female portrayal there, I loved his version of "People Who Could Fly." Since that publication I was aware that he had continued to generate materials for younger audiences, including the nonfiction work, To Be A Slave, which introduced children to some of the original narratives of black people that told of their experiences with American slavery. Though I did not follow his career closely, I knew that he had gone on to produce books of retold folk tales such as The Knee-High Man and Other Tales. When I encountered his Tales of Uncle Remus and More Tales of Uncle Remus as I browsed a bookstore shelf one day, I was somewhat surprised that Lester, who I considered to be of a radical black consciousness, would want to preserve not only the African American lore of B'rer Rabbit and his nemeses, but Joel Chandler Harris's "darkie" uncle as well. I remember dismissing a vague flutter of alarm with a rationalization. I knew that Lester had turned some kind of corner, but I did not "study on it," as my great-grandmother would have phrased it. With the 1996 publication of Sam and the Tigers, reviewed in The Village Voice (49), I returned to Othello to "study on" Julius Lester and his latest developments.

Julius Lester opens his autobiography, All Is Well, with a detailed description of his desire from early childhood, to be a girl: " . . . in my childhood fantasies [I] became a beautiful girl with long black hair, like my mother's. . . . I called myself Michele" (9). This sense of the inner girl weaves throughout All Is Well, figuring in his tormented sexual development ("I particularly hated that thing drooping from the end of my torso like a fat worm . . . "[35]), his conflicted reverence and disdain for women (" . . . I came to hate girls" [35]), his categorical rejection of black women ("I'd known since I was nine years old that I would marry a white woman" [102]) and quick hatred for traditional black bourgeois cultural values ("When I returned to Fisk . . . I was a man at war, stoning the high-heeled properly coiffed girls with profanity, wearing my jeans like Jeanne d'Arc carrying the Croix of Lorraine into Orleans, and being as different from my classmates as I could, afraid that . . . I would succumb to the virus of black 'respectability' and be entombed in some black suburbia and written about in Ebony" [41]). By the time he's worked his way to the latter pages of his narrative, Lester has declared the Civil Rights movement and "The Revolution" morally and intellectually bankrupt, and has come to view himself as the embodiment of Remnant Virtue, likening himself (in the quote that opens this essay) to a helpless white girl ravished by barbarians. He concludes this depiction with an implicit comparison between himself (virtuous, defiled, white girl) and what we are to gather were the contemporary, assaultive barbarians--young black radicals who "sit on the porch . . . blood-stained machetes in their hands" (287).

Lester's All Is...