A memoir about racism in Baton Rouge
A review by Chris Turner-Neal
It's hard not to like Baton Rouge native Tim Parrish. From our first exchange of emails, in which I asked for a review copy of his memoir, Fear and What Follows: The Violent Education of a Christian Racist, I was truly charmed by the warmth of this man. The deal was sealed when he asked if he could also send me a copy of his new novel, The Jumper, explaining that it was getting less attention than the memoir; and, as a little brother himself, he felt protective of it. This likeability and charm-an old-fashioned word, but the right one-are key to the success of Fear and What Follows.
The memoir opens with a bawdy, sassy exchange between brothers that establishes their relationship in less than a paragraph, and since the two surest ways to my heart are good prose and a dirty joke, I was hooked.
As the generally depressing 1970s grind on, young Tim faces multiple personal crises. Both parents fall ill-his mother with the lupus that would continue to weaken and eventually kill her. An older brother deploys to Vietnam during the moral and strategic roulette of the Nixon phase of the war. Bullies, fickle in their savagery, dish out arbitrary beatings and harassment. A congenital defect requires major, slow-healing chest surgery.
All this would be more than enough to keep a memoir afloat (and a therapist in a summer home), but fate wasn't done with Parrish: all these body blows take place as racial tensions in Baton Rouge reach gasket-blasting levels. Parrish, who is white, must not only deal with adolescence (which, as you may remember, is hard enough), not only with personal and familial disaster, but also with the complete reordering of society and a general facing-up to what centuries of adherence to an unjust status quo have cost.
Tim watches as the adults around him navigate a newly integrated world with varying degrees of clumsiness. His mother instructs him to only use the term “negro” when out and about, regardless of what he may hear at home. The family's Baptist congregation takes a break from blood and thunder to talk black and white; two votes under two different preachers both oppose admitting black worshippers. The tension between “He died for all” and “the coloreds just want to start trouble” is Tim's first clearly understood encounter with racial injustice, and shakes his previously firm, literal faith.
As Tim enters high school, he begins his own balancing act-befriending a couple of black students but also a major instigator of anti-black violence who gleefully participates in the huge racial brawls that break out at and around the high school. Inexorably, inevitably, the situation gets worse. The aggressions pile up, and Tim becomes more and more embroiled in the frantic segregationist's last stand developing around him.
Here's where the charm comes in. It's easy to dismiss racism as the province of bad people-or, to be very Southern about it-something trashy people do. Once you dismiss it as something beneath you, it becomes safely distant, but also harder to understand-you've defined it as something “other” and “outside,” in a neat taxonomy not unlike racism itself. Because Parrish is so sympathetic, as both the narrating adult and the child-self he describes, this compartmentalization is not so easy.
While most childhoods are less dramatic than Tim's, we've all worried about our parents, learned that the world is unfair, and made choices about the kind of person we want to be-and some of those choices were wrong. It's not as easy to dismiss racism as something “those people” do when you realize you used to be a confused teenager with a sick mom too. And maybe if you'd lived a little earlier and a little deeper in the South… some readers may join me in realizing, for the first time, how otherwise kind and pleasant people can come to have repugnant views about race. It's a distressing epiphany to have.
Unfortunately, Parrish links his past to modern politics and makes sure you know he's a liberal and therefore “better” now. (The irony of heavy Democratic support for segregation during the period preceding his memoir is not addressed). He even refers to himself, God help us, as “lefty and semi-enlightened” at one point.
Regardless of your personal politics, the flow-breaking self-reassurance of these passages is out of place and at odds with the otherwise frank, insightful introspection Parrish brings to the rest of the book. Though jarring, these interruptions are confined to the very beginning and end, and shouldn't dissuade anyone from reading this otherwise excellent and thought-provoking book. Finally, I want to throw in a quick plug for The Jumper, a book also well worth your time. On the first page, Parrish takes the reader through the inner monologue of an illiterate man struggling to read a telegram; and the plainly-expressed poignancy of the moment will knock your socks off.
All writers work to make the imagined real; Parrish displays a knack for making the unimaginable real, and well deserves a place on your 2014 reading list.
Fear and What Follows: The Violent Education of a Christian Racist, A Memoir, by Tim Parrish. (University Press of Mississippi; hardcover; 240 pages.)
The Jumper, by Tim Parrish. (Texas Review Press; paperback; 296 pages.)
