Everyday People

Stewart O'Nan

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781555847906
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This novel of Pittsburgh, by the author of Last Night at the Lobster, "celebrates the lives of everyday people in an extraordinary way" ( San Francisco Chronicle). Pittsburgh, 1998: Chris "Crest" Tolbert is eighteen years old, a soon-to-be father, and partially paralyzed after an accident that left his best friend dead. As he navigates the challenges of new fatherhood and life as a paraplegic, Crest must also negotiate his relationships with his born-again brother and his father, who has been cheating on Crest's mother with a younger man. In Everyday People, acclaimed novelist Stewart O'Nan offers a multifaceted portrait of Crest and of East Liberty, the African American neighborhood he calls home. The result is "a living, breathing history lesson that brings together a set of compelling voices that make real and immediate the ups and downs of a black urban community" ( Chicago Tribune ). "Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place, Everyday People weaves its tale elliptically.... O'Nan creates vivid interior worlds, evoking conflicts and joys with astonishing grace and agility." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

THE FIRST THING was the professor was white. A white woman. Very white. Like 90210 white. Vanessa didn’t have a big problem with it, but the rest of the class wasn’t happy. It was Vanessa’s first college course ever, and she didn’t know if she should join in with the grumbling, the low, class-wide groan of disappointment, the muttered curses of disbelief.

“Excuse me,” one big guy right behind her said. “Do you think this is appropriate?”

“Actually I don’t,” Professor Muller said. She was tall and blond and young, and wore a chiffon scarf around her neck like Barbie. Like the women behind the perfume counter who asked if they could help you, all the time checking out your pockets. “Professor Shelby asked me to fill in for him while he’s in the hospital, and I couldn’t turn him down. I think you’ll find I know the material.”

“That’s not the point,” the guy said.

“I understand,” Professor Muller said. “It’s only going to be for this first week, I promise.”

The guy shook his head bitterly, as if he’d been cheated.

She waited for someone else to challenge her, then started in on Professor Shelby’s syllabus. There was a lot of reading. Vanessa knew the authors but had never actually read them. W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison. It looked like a good class. The professor didn’t really matter to her.

In fact, the class didn’t matter; she was only here because her mother expected her to be. Whenever they argued about it, she reminded Vanessa that she was the first person in two generations who even had the chance to go to college, and dammit she was going to take advantage of it. Pitt was cheap, they could afford a class, maybe even two. Vanessa thought she could use the money for something else, that they should just save it. She’d never liked school, she’d always been a C student. But she had to agree. Her grandparents had sacrificed, her mother had struggled, her father had even died for the privileges she seemed to take for granted. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” her mother accused. “You ought to be grateful.” It wasn’t enough to just say, “I don’t want to.”

“Personally,” Professor Muller was saying, “I’d like to see more women on this list, and more contemporary writers. More gay and lesbian writers as well. To remedy this, I’ve created a list of my own.”

She passed out a stack. The list was three pages long. There was Terry McMillan and Alice Walker, but the rest of these people Vanessa had never heard of. Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Smith. She could tell which ones were women, but which were gay and lesbian? She thought it was important to know. She hoped someone would ask about it.

“I’d like each of you to read at least one book from this list this semester. History isn’t something that’s done with, it’s what’s happening right now. The purpose of studying history is to influence history. To make history. Every person in this room is going to make her or his own history.”

Vanessa wrote this down, even though it seemed obvious. She wrote down everything Professor Muller put on the board, which wasn’t much. Mostly the professor leaned back against the desk and went on and on in these long, perfect sentences about oral traditions in different African cultures and how it was important to take these into account before looking at decidedly American texts.

“American in what sense?” the big guy behind Vanessa said, and she turned to look at him. He was fat and kind of Sinbad-looking and had a leather jacket and a Black Power pick in his hair like Ice Cube. He glared at the professor like he was debating her.

“In that their authors resided here and were influenced by the dominant culture, whether they were of this country or merely in it.”

“In it,” he insisted.

“That’s what we’ll discuss next time.”

She assigned the Du Bois, and then it was time; everyone started putting their backpacks together. “And I want you to have arguments for both sides,” she ordered, “not just the one you agree with.”

In the hall, waiting for the elevator, Vanessa overheard Sinbad saying, “Thesis-antithesis. Completely European concept. It’s another form of brainwashing.”

It was true, Vanessa thought on the bus, but what other way was there to think? How did you even think at all, all the different factors that went into it? It seemed too huge a concept to grasp, and she shook it off and studied the plastic ads above the windows. Be All You Can Be. Learn Computers at Triangle Tech. Like her mother would ever let her. Outside it was nice, the light still lingering, pretty. And it was just her first day. It was only going to get worse.

Rashaan was in the living room, gnawing on his plastic snap-together blocks in front of the TV. She picked him up and nuzzled him—pudgy and so smooth. Those big cheeks. He giggled and then hiccupped. “Did you miss me? Did you miss your mama?” He smelled of fabric softener and curdled milk, and she set him on her hip.

Her mother had kept her supper in the oven. Vanessa thanked her, and her mother just said, “Uh-huh,” meaning she’d have to thank her again later, at length. She looked tired; she still had her nametag on and the white Nikes all the nurses wore. Vanessa sat Rashaan on her lap and picked at her chicken.

“Everything go okay?” Vanessa asked, meaning with Miss Fisk. She watched Rashaan, and they were lucky—she always did a good job, it was good for her after Bean—but the other day she’d left a cake in too long and the fire department ended up coming.

“She’s fine. How was class?”

“Good,” Vanessa said.

“I hope you had fun, because I wasn’t having any fun here, let me tell you. First thing I did when I came home was make supper. I’m still not done cleaning up and I haven’t even started the laundry.”

“I can do that.”

“You’ve got to eat, and then you’re taking care of him. He’s been a little devil since I picked him up. Oh, and his father called. Twice. He wants you to call him.”

“Thanks.” She kept eating.

“Are you going to call him?” her mother asked.

It was none of her business. All she knew was that they’d broken up a month before the accident, and Vanessa wanted to keep it that way. His father —she was the only one who called him that. Vanessa looked up from her string beans, and her mother looked away, all salty, like she’d done something to her. Why did it always have to be like this?

“Maybe,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” her mother said, and went to change.

Vanessa sat there chewing, staring at the sampler on the wall. Bless this house. What was she supposed to say to Chris? After Rashaan, he hardly came around. He still loved her, he said, but the way he said it made it clear he hadn’t planned on being a real father, that he thought it was a trap. It was a mistake, and she would have to pay for it, simply because she was a woman. How many times had her mother warned her. “You are not going to be like those Coleman girls dropping babies when they’re sixteen and living sorry lives. You’re not from that kind of people.” Vanessa never brought up her father, the fact that he left when she was just a baby, went off to Grenada and got killed, one of only three Americans. The odds were ridiculous. A stray bullet, a ricochet. The Marines called, and the Pentagon. Her mother kept his picture on her dresser, and one Veterans Day took her to plant a little flag at the cemetery. She wanted Vanessa to have what she’d lost—a man to help raise her baby, a real family, college, a chance to get ahead. It seemed she’d thrown everything away by keeping Rashaan. Like her mother said, it was too late to put him back now.

Her mother returned in a powder-blue housedress and slippers, the belt knotted floppily at the waist. “Don’t you have homework?”

“Just some reading.”

“You need me to watch him?”

“It’s all right.”

“Because I will. I’m just going to be watching TV.”

“That’s all right.”

“Okay, baby. Don’t stay up too late.”

“I won’t.”

Her mother said this every night, even though she knew Rashaan wouldn’t be down till eleven. Half the time he was up again at two, needing to be rocked. She didn’t even have to turn the light on anymore, knew the exact number of steps to his crib, already had a clean spitcloth draped over the arm of the rocker. Sometimes that was the best time, there in the dark with the streetlight in the window, his lips tugging at her little finger, and sometimes it was the worst. She’d think of Chris alone in his room, stretched on the bed where they made love those cold mornings, cutting school, and she’d picture his legs beneath the sheets, growing thinner, the muscle leaving him. “My pearl,” he used to sing after they made love, “my precious little girl,” coming on just too smooth so she’d laugh at him. It was good then, what he’d bring out in her. And then she’d think of Bean and of Miss Fisk not even crying at the funeral, how she didn’t let anyone help her back to the limo, slapping at Mr. Spinks the director’s hands when he tried to take her arm. All of that was history.

Rashaan grabbed one of her string beans and crammed it in his mouth.

“Why you little crumbsnatcher,” she said, and swooped in and kissed him on the ear so he giggled.

She finished her plate and rinsed it in the sink, the water calling her mother out of her room. “You do your homework and don’t worry about this mess,” she said, and Vanessa knew better than to argue, just thanked her again and unzipped her backpack.

She’d found the Du Bois used at the campus store, a yellow sticker on the spine accusing her of being cheap, announcing it to the world. It was a cracked softback copy from the sixties. The Souls of Black Folk: A Negro Classic, the cover said. She gave Rashaan his blocks and opened her notebook on the kitchen table, but when she turned to the introduction she saw the pages were covered with highlighter, whole paragraphs double-underlined, the margins busy with scribble. Beside one line, the previous owner had written: Bourgeois elitist garbage. It looked like a woman’s writing, curly, the e’s nearly circles. Some revolutionary sister, she thought, and wondered how long ago she’d written it.

There was a name inside the front cover—Mary Durham—but no date. It could have been this spring or 1969. Maybe there were clues.

The introduction said the book was an argument against segregation, against Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist position. Black men needed to assert their rights as citizens and demand the government honor the constitution. The very best men would form the Talented Tenth of the population and lead the rest of the people forward.

It was all underlined and highlighted, the yellow going dingy with age. No women in the struggle? Mary Durham had written. Forward into what?

Good questions, Vanessa thought.

The book itself was actually pretty boring, Du Bois going on and on in this stiff official voice, but Mary kept things interesting. White patriarchal / Black matriarchal stereotypes, she wrote. Reality a combination.

Rashaan scratched at her ankles, trying to climb her shin. Ten-thirty and she’d only read twenty pages. She wanted to watch TV. She remembered Professor Muller’s question. Was Du Bois of this country or just in it? She thought she should choose a side and start collecting evidence, but with every new idea he seemed to switch. He wanted the people to become part of the nation, to be respected and accepted as men. So were his dreams of the country even if he wasn’t? But didn’t he know that?

She quit around midnight, getting Rashaan down, then going through the apartment, shutting the lights. Her mother’s light was on, and the TV, but her mother was asleep on top of the covers, the clicker in her hand. Vanessa slid it out of her fingers and turned off David Letterman.

“Bedtime, Mama.”

“What?” her mother grunted, “I’m watching,” and sank back again. Vanessa helped her get under the covers, then went to the dresser to make sure her alarm was set. Beside it leaned the picture of her father in his dress blues, the Marine flag in the background. He looked older than twenty-three, but only because she knew he really wasn’t. She used to stare at his picture after school when her mother wasn’t around, as if by concentrating harder she might get to know him better. She tilted the frame to the light, hoping she’d find some hint of her own face in his, but she never could. High cheeks, even teeth. He’d come from Youngstown, his father a shop foreman for U.S. Steel until the Southside closed down. Good, solid people. She knew his birthday and the day he was killed. She knew her mother was ashamed they’d never married, which Vanessa thought was sad. Now she set the picture down again, the white-gloved young man smiling grimly back at her, a warrior. In five years she’d be twenty-three.

Rashaan was already asleep, and she slipped her cold pajamas on and got in, then lay there listening to him breathe. Of this country or just in it. In her cedar chest her mother had a flag neatly folded in a triangle, a box of medals lined with red crushed velvet. She turned on her side and looked out at the streetlight, starlike behind the gauzy curtains, and wondered if Chris was awake. Probably watching his little TV, smoking up some of Nene’s weed. He loved the Sci Fi Channel, and MonsterVision on TNT. Their one year together they must have seen every horror movie that came out, every trip to the theater a test of her nerves. When she jumped or sucked in her breath, he just laughed and held her closer. He and Bean knew all the directors and their movies, the history behind everything.

It would be easier if he was straight shiftless, she thought. She knew him better. He was so proud of his art—his writing, he called it. You could see it in everything he put up, in the colors and all the details, the way it jumped off a wall. He was the one who should be going to college. So what if it was his own fault, it didn’t make it any easier on him, stuck in that chair.

You’re afraid of hi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Inbound
• Good Kirk, Evil Kirk
• A Real, Live Person
• African American History
• The Hawk
• Ghostbusting
• Good Morning, Heartache
• Any Woman’s Blues
• Evading
• Cry Me a River
• Are You My Mother?
• Candyman
• The Payback
• Killing Me Softly
• Favorite Son
• O Happy Day
• Giant Steps
• Outbound