Yin-Yang, Dark and Light

Poverty, drugs, violence, stunted dreams are all here.  The characters, though, are street smart and sympathetic; the plot includes a couple of minor mysteries and is engaging; coincidences abound; old folks fall in love. 

The language is superb.  Yes, there is the blue language of the streets throughout.  But mixed with that are the poignant passages.  Sportcoat, in his 70’s, remembers, sees, his dead wife:

She stood, clasping her hands near her chest, emboldened with the enthusiasm of love and youth, a way of being he’d long forgotten…The newness of love, the absolute freshness of youth…She was so pretty.  So young.

Hettie, his wife, speaks to him:

Back home you gived life to things nobody paid the slightest attention to: flowers and trees and bushes and plants. These was things that most men stepped out on. But you…had a touch for them things.

McBride is not above a lesson or two for his readers:

The world was becoming clear to me then. Seeing how we lived under the white folks, how they treated us, how they treated each other, their cruelty and their phoniness, the lies they told each other…

The threads of the story are tied up neatly providing a satisfying ending.  But after I thought about that happy ending, I realized that it was happy only for the people who got out of the projects – the cop who retired with his lady love; the minor mobster who left to make bagels; the talented baseball player who was the one in thousands good enough.  For the rest, who stayed, the dark clouds gathered and the rain fell as big time drugs moved in.

Although the Taoist symbol yin-yang, black and white, is not about right and wrong, it is the picture that kept coming to mind.  The black darkness is the devastation of war, the destruction of home, shattered family, greed and cruelty of individuals.  The balancing light is found in the human characteristics of tenacity and courage, love, friendship, kindness.  The intertwined structure of the novel, past with present, contributes to this image. 

There are few details about the war in Syria but many about the state of refugee camps in Turkey and Greece.  To endure these, the characters draw strength from the stories they tell themselves, illusions they create, and memories both real and embellished.    Without these, this book, like their journey, would have been too depressing to finish.

One of the legends that particularly resonated with me was the quest for the City of Brass: 

After years, when the City of Brass is finally reached, it is a shiny paradise of beautiful mosques gleaming with brass and jewels, but there is nothing alive in it.  There is a table with etched words that say “At this table have eaten a thousand kings blind in their left eye, a thousand kings blind in their right eye, and a thousand kings blind in both eyes.  Every king who ever ruled this place was so blind that they left the place full of riches and devoid of life.” 

Nations may come and go but greed is apparently ubiquitous and lives forever. 

She tells us the new word “arborglyph,” that is, a communication carved into the tree.  We know about lovers’ hearts, but this was a serious method of communication among people before paper and books.  At this same time, I was reading Pocahontas by Paula Gunn Allen where she also uses the word to illustrate communication methods of native American tribes, thus proving the point that when you learn a new word it will inevitably pop up somewhere else.

There’s this meme going around now that says, “Dinosaurs didn’t … and look what happened to them.”  One I especially like is, “Dinosaurs didn’t eat chocolate and look what happened to them.”  But even better is, “Dinosaurs didn’t read and look what happened to them.”