A burden comes with being asked to define the contribution to American life of someone like Albert Murray. By “someone like” Murray, I mean the fact of his not being quite a household name—great though he was—which only adds to the pressure. In the face of Murray’s relative obscurity, those who know and love his work care that much more fiercely about how that work is characterized; we dream of a day when our hero’s writing is more widely known (or else we don’t, since his work would then no longer be our special province), a time when there will be room for that writing to be the subject of argument, dissent, interpretation, and counterinterpretation. But until that day comes, any appreciation had better get it right, or “right”—or some of us, count on it, will be pissed.
The safer thing, then, is to describe what Murray’s work means for oneself—nobody can argue with that, can they?—which presents its own challenge. When a body of work has become so important to you that it is effectively part of you, can it be separated long enough to get a good look? Well, let’s give this thing a try.
Some of us Black folks, struggling to make sense of our place in the grand American experiment, have verged on despair because, while the country we call home seems to think so little of us, we feel unable to embrace a continent (Africa) whose ways have been made foreign to us. For these folks, paradoxically, the work of Albert Murray provides a shot of optimism through its very lack of the sentimental. A clear-eyed look at the facts, Murray’s work suggests to me, reveals a history of heroism in the Black American story (our very survival until now attests to that), which in turn constitutes a tradition upon which we have the right, the duty, to stand—and which we are challenged to continue. That is how I interpret the term “ancestral imperative,” a phrase Murray used often: the duty we owe to the ancestors who got us this far.
How do we continue that tradition? We struggle, we fight dragons—another favorite phrase of Murray’s—in our own way.
That is the stuff of story, and story, whose refinement is literature, is the stuff of humankind: stories and art generally are the stylization of experience, as Murray was wont to put it. The conflict over which we triumph provides the “antagonistic cooperation” that enables us—or the versions of ourselves we place in our stories—to be heroes.
That is the stuff of story, and story, whose refinement is literature, is the stuff of humankind: stories and art generally are the stylization of experience, as Murray was wont to put it. The conflict over which we triumph provides the “antagonistic cooperation” that enables us—or the versions of ourselves we place in our stories—to be heroes.
Murray’s most celebrated books, including The Omni-Americans (1970), The Hero and the Blues (1973), and Stomping the Blues (1976), are celebrations of these ideas. (The blues, Murray once wrote, is “music for good times, earned in adversity.”)
One might expect, then, that triumph over adversity would be central in Murray’s own storytelling, i.e., in his quartet of novels, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1995), and The Magic Keys (2005). But what I have elsewhere termed “the great irony of Albert Murray’s career” is that for Murray’s alter-ego, the southern-raised Scooter, who over the course of the four books grows to manhood, travels with a famous jazz band, romances a famous beautiful woman before finding his true love, and embarks on a course of higher education, the path seemingly could not be easier.
There is widespread agreement on this point. “Whatever Scooter touches turns to praise,” in the words of one critic; Murray’s estranged friend and disciple Stanley Crouch referred to “the legions of the Scooter-awed” in Murray’s novels, and even Charles Johnson’s tribute to Murray in the New York Times Book Review pointed out that things simply come too easily to Scooter. Such ease would not only appear to go against everything that Murray himself holds to be vital for the success of literature, and it would seem to violate a universally agreed-upon tenet of all storytelling, which is the necessity for conflict.
On the surface, it is hard to disagree with those assessments. To give just two examples of Scooter’s Midas touch: at the end of The Spyglass Tree, he is presented with the gift of an acoustic bass, an instrument he has never before played, and by the start of The Seven League Boots, he has mastered it sufficiently to occupy a position in the world of music that other musicians might well fail to attain after a lifetime of practice; then there is that famous beautiful woman, Jewel Templeton, who speaks to Scooter—until that moment a total stranger to her—while she is stopped at a light in her Rolls-Royce and he is waiting for a taxi. Small wonder that, as some complain, Scooter does not overcome obstacles; said obstacles seem to flee at the very sight of him.
And yet, something tells me there is more to all of this luck than has been acknowledged. For a man as fiercely intelligent as Murray, who time and again pointed to the importance of triumphing over adversity in the hero’s journey, it is highly unlikely that he was blind to the need for conflict in his own novels. My question, then, is whether we have been looking for that conflict in the wrong places, whether, perhaps, it has been present all along, wearing a disguise while staring us in the face.
Consider what Murray and Scooter have in common. Both grew up in Alabama in the early years of the twentieth century. In a time and place notoriously unkind to Black folks, both were raised by loving parents who, it was eventually revealed, were not their biological mother and father. Murray and Scooter were notably intelligent, and thus, both had placed upon them the hopes, expectations, and encouragement of their communities.
Therein, I maintain, lay Murray’s—and Scooter’s—very own dragons.
In her 1992 volume Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison argued that our study of American literature would be a good deal richer if we were to pay attention to the subtle and not-so-subtle signs, in fiction narratives, of authors’ awareness of the Black presence in their midst; writers creating the literature of a nation founded on the ideal of freedom, Morrison argued, surely needed something or someone to define that freedom against, a role that Blacks filled nicely. I would propose a similar approach with regard to Murray’s novels. That is, I suggest that the experience of reading Murray’s novels might be more rewarding if we pay attention to what is, as with all literature worthy of the name, between and outside the lines—in this case, as it relates to the burden of expectation.
I suggest that the experience of reading Murray’s novels might be more rewarding if we pay attention to what is, as with all literature worthy of the name, between and outside the lines—in this case, as it relates to the burden of expectation.
First, though, let us take a look at some of the lines themselves. Train Whistle Guitar is generally held to be the novel in the quartet that is least weighed down by all the praise for the main character, and some adult characters, such as the man who marries Scooter’s aunt, even give Scooter the side-eye.
More representative, though, are the lines spoken about the very young Scooter, in his presence, by Sawmill Turner, a comparatively well-off man in the community. After giving our hero an impromptu history lesson, Sawmill announces, “This boy is worth more than one hundred shares of gilt-edged preferred, and the good part about it is we all going to be drawing down interest on him.” After Turner has given the boy a five-dollar bill and promised to keep him supplied with pens and paper as long as he stays in school, Scooter—as first-person narrator—tells us, “All I could do was say thank you, and I said I would always do my best.” That may be all the poor boy can do, but it apparently does not begin to satisfy the adults’ need to lavish compliments on him:
All Mama could do was wipe her eyes, and all Papa could do was look at the floor and shake his head and smile. But Uncle Jerome was on his feet again . . . and I knew he was going to take over where Sawmill Turner had left off and preach a whole sermon with me in it that night. And so did everybody else, and they were looking at me as if I really had become the Lamb or something.
All I could do . . . as if . . . or something: Scooter’s language suggests an awareness of both the adults’ excessiveness in heaping glory on him and his own inability to respond adequately.
The older Scooter gets, the less he can escape the chorus of approval. One of the male rites of passage he undergoes as a college student in The Spyglass Tree is a visit to a prostitute; here, a reader might think, is one situation in which Scooter can be free of all the good-boy talk, but the miracle is that he can perform sexually in the face of this woman’s auntlike, downright oppressive faith in him:
You a nice boy . . . I mean sure enough nice like you been brought up to be. Don’t take much to tell when it come to something like that. . . . you take care of yourself and hit them books . . .
Overcoming danger and any obstacles to success in life, for this young Black man coming of age in the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth century, would seem to be as nothing—and I am being only partly facetious—compared with being the object of all of this praise, faith, and expectation, which may be why Murray solves some of the external conflicts offscreen, as it were. The challenges for even the most strong-minded individual in Scooter’s position would almost certainly involve not external troubles but twin fears, having to do not with self-doubt over his color—he has been raised too well for that—but with what he will accomplish: What am I to do with all of this promise? And What if I disappoint them all? (Add to those thoughts two more: How do I bear up under all this damn praise? And why won’t these people shut the hell up until I actually do something?)
A suggestion that Scooter does indeed feel the burden, that his drama and conflict are as much internal as external, comes in The Seven League Boots, which finds him playing bass in a famous jazz band led by the fictional Bossman and romancing Jewel Templeton. One passage has Jewel, a white woman, talking about all that Scooter has exposed her to culturally and socially, and Scooter responding to us, if not to her:
So whenever she would say what she would say again and again about what she was not only learning but also coming to terms with because you were there, all you had to do was turn your head as if from well-meaning but gross exaggeration and then change the subject back to the point at which her enthusiasm had interrupted you.
Note the use of the second-person narrative, which allows the protagonist to view the situation objectively long enough to deal with it. That objectivity is the way of both the bluesman and the storybook hero that Murray lays out in The Hero and the Blues. Note, too, what happens not between the lines in this case but between the words. “[A]ll you had to do was turn your head,” Scooter tells us, and while he does not describe what “your” face—unseen by Jewel—is doing in that moment, one might imagine an expression of exasperation, a look that says, Will you just let me say what I’m trying to say? The boy from Train Whistle Guitar who knows only to say “thank you” has grown into the young man of The Seven League Boots who has developed a means of wading through the swamp of positivity long enough to make his point. His reticence and stoicism, as he does so, are in keeping with the view espoused by Murray that storybook heroes and actual people should fight dragons but not complain about their existence. In place of complaint, in this instance, comes substitution. This is a key element for how I propose reading Murray’s fiction: interpreting the stoic Murray/Scooter’s frequent use of the “you” as, well, you. What might your own inner struggles be in these situations? Likely, they are Scooter’s too.
And Scooter must, and does, struggle. “Ancestral imperative,” it turns out, is more than a nice-sounding phrase; it represents weight to be carried. Scooter’s way of signaling that weight involves—again—substitution. In The Seven League Boots, Scooter recalls his college roommate saying about the ancestral imperative (italics Murray’s), “The question is which ancestors and what priority of which imperatives.” What is important here is that Scooter does not, perhaps cannot, complain of this confusion himself; it must be done through someone else. Even as Scooter’s easy triumphs only demonstrate his abilities, and those abilities only increase the pressure on him to choose his steps carefully, his added challenge is to avoid appearing, himself, to feel that pressure—to be stoic, in accordance with his own code.
As for the pressure itself, the fears that might be expressed as What am I to do with all of this promise? and what if I disappoint them all? can be seen in the passage from The Seven League Boots in which Scooter resolves to leave the Bossman’s jazz band, to see if he can make it on his own as a musician before going to graduate school (the territory of The Magic Keys). To the ordinary stress of making one’s way in the world and choosing a career path is added the pressure of doing so on behalf of one’s elders and ancestors, for whom the Bossman, in this instance, is a stand-in.
Here we see Scooter confronting his own version of the dragon. An elder has laid out a path for him—an “ancestral imperative”—but Scooter, as the hero of his own story, must choose his own path. He feels the weight of this choice.
Here we see Scooter confronting his own version of the dragon. An elder has laid out a path for him—an “ancestral imperative”—but Scooter, as the hero of his own story, must choose his own path. He feels the weight of this choice.
Sitting in a diner, Scooter first tells one of the bandmembers, Joe States, about his decision to leave the Bossman. “Then [Joe] said, Damn, man, you sure got some heavy stuff to lay on the bossman this morning. And I said, Don’t I know it though. I said, Man, do I know it.” Two things are noteworthy here: first, that the “heavy stuff” is laid on the Bossman, which suggests but also masks the burden on Scooter; second, that it is Joe States, not Scooter—in keeping with Scooter’s stoicism—who first acknowledges this burden.
One could call this a “good problem,” and one would not be wrong, but good problems can still be problems, and Scooter’s are paradoxically amplified by his very gifts. Beneath every compliment and bit of encouragement he has ever received is the unspoken assertion that the glory of an oppressed people rests with him, and if anything in these novels matches his abilities, it is the corresponding and frightful responsibility he bears for not screwing it all up.