Introduction: An Assembled Coterie

It is possible that much of what is needed in order to help understand the incomparable work of Percival Everett has been said or more likely written by Everett himself. The challenge is to get more people to read it. This special issue is a modest attempt to contribute to a broadening of Everett’s readership.

In an interview published in The Canadian Review of American Studies in 2007, Everett made the following statement to me during a discussion of the problematic nature of readerly assumptions:

That’s the way we’re trained to read. You step in water. Your shoe gets wet. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing. This is the culture in which we live. This is the way we’re trained to read. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. But it’s a thing. But it doesn’t mean it has to remain that way.

(300)

This last sentence speaks volumes about Everett’s aesthetic and what is potentially available to us if we learn to read differently. In a brilliant and characteristically brief essay, published in Callaloo in 1991, Everett makes a similar point. The essay reflects, in part, on a telling request made by Embassy Pictures (the production company that produced All in the Family) as they considered making a movie based on Everett’s first novel, Suder (1983). The request was that Craig Suder, the novel’s black protagonist, be made into a white character for the purposes of the film. In the heady pre-Will Smith days of 1980s Hollywood, one can certainly recognize this commercial impulse to pander to the most limited of the potential film-going audience. Everett, however, makes a very useful observation:

I do not believe that the works we produce need to be any different; the failing is not in what we show but in how it is seen. And it is not just white readers, but African-American readers as well who seek to fit our stories to an existent model. It is not seeing with “white” eyes, it is seeing with “American” eyes, with brainwashed, automatic, comfortable, and “safe” perceptions of reality.

(10)

Our reading habits and associations need not remain as they have always been, and Everett’s work is an enthusiastic and rewarding invitation to read differently. The habitual assumptions that many readers make—quite possibly without realizing they are doing so—about what African American writers should or should not write about need not remain as they are. But in order for these assumptions to change, they must first be drawn to our attention.

A lot of what Everett writes draws our attention to the workings of these assumptions. He is able to make art out of this important literary critical observation. One of the most characteristic passages of Everett’s thematizing of readerly assumptions occurs in Glyph (1999), when his improbable narrator, Ralph, turns his gaze on the reader directly:

Have you to this point assumed that I am white? In my reading, I discovered that if a character was black, then he at some point was required to comb his Afro hairdo, speak on the street using an obvious, ethnically identifiable idiom, live in a certain part of a town, or be called a nigger by someone. White characters, I assumed they were white (often, because of the ways they spoke of other kinds of people), did not seem to need that kind of introduction, or perhaps legitimization, to exist on the page.

(54)

You will have to read Glyph in order to appreciate the almost innumerable reasons why this passage is so extraordinary. For now, suffice it to say that this passage articulates how the problem of readerly assumption impinges specifically upon artists from minoritized groups as well as, if not better than, the point has ever been made. The question of who does and does not need to be legitimized in order to exist on the page is implicit on every page of Everett’s considerable oeuvre.

Perhaps Everett’s aesthetic may be...