Such Sweet Thunder

Foreword
 
Great novels are not always recognized in their own time; often they lie waiting, as if in ambush, for the future to catch up to their achievements. In the case of Such Sweet Thunder, the miracle of its arrival at all inevitably continues to color its critical appreciation. We know something about the unusual circumstances that led Vincent O. Carter to effectively exile himself from his native Kansas City and take up residence in Bern, Switzerland, (where he wrote the novel over the course of several years in the late 1950s and early 1960s), because of the only book that Carter would see published in his lifetime: The Bern Book.
This deeply ironic, essayistic blend of memoir, travelogue, and poetic meditation was successfully published in the United States in 1973 but, despite some favorable reviews, it was quickly filed-away and forgotten. Appearing at a time when black militancy and popular discourses about race were just reaching a fever pitch of declamatory and affirmative style, Carter’s arcane, cosmopolitan, and inwardly focused ruminations—qualities that would have made The Bern Book legible to what I have elsewhere called the “Blue Period” of black writing that lasted between 1945 and 1965—were, alas, a terrible fit for the reading public’s sense of what black writing should be the mid-1970s.
The difficulties that this first book encountered had implications for the viability of the second. Despite the efforts of Herbert Lottman, who acted as Carter’s literary intercessor, and of Ellen Wright, the widow of Richard Wright, who read portions of the manuscript (at the time still bearing the working title The Primary Colors), no publisher would take it up and Carter eventually despaired of seeing it through to publication. He retreated from his attempts at writing and devoted himself increasingly to spiritual practice and to his shared life with his partner Liselotte Haas. He died in Bern in 1983.
The manuscript of Carter’s only novel, long believed to have been lost or destroyed, was thankfully preserved by the care of Liselotte Haas and retrieved for publication through the heroic efforts of Chip Fleischer, who recognized the importance of the manuscript and first published it under the magnificently braided Shakespearean and Ellingtonian title Such Sweet Thunder at his own Steerforth Press in 2003.
Despite its evidently eccentric stylistic flourishes and a somewhat contrived overture, Such Sweet Thunder is in many ways a fairly conventional Bildungsroman, or even more accurately a Künstlerroman that narrates the dawning of creative consciousness and of a sentimental sensibility in the boyhood and teenage years of Amerigo Jones, a character whose roving mind and synesthetic perceptions are clearly a stand-in for Carter’s vision of his own years growing up in the black working class neighborhoods of Kansas City. These were the interwar years of the Depression, but also of the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs and their star pitcher Satchel Paige; the cradle of Kansas City jazz and its musical luminaries like Count Basie, Bennie Moten, and Charlie Parker; a time when black Kansas City was, tragically in retrospect, at a social and cultural zenith.
Such Sweet Thunder is centered in the mercurial consciousness of young Amerigo, yet his parents, Viola and Rutherford Jones are every bit as much the protagonists—the beating heart of this novel—as he is. Based on Carter’s own mother and father, they are teenage parents and working poor: Viola works in a laundry and also as a maid (Carter’s mother Eola likely worked both of those jobs) and Rutherford (like Carter’s father Joe) works as a porter at a hotel. As with many of the details in the novel, the brick-and-mortar realism of the spatial and material cityscape is emphatically accurate, even as it chooses at times to withhold key details. The imposing Muehlebach Hotel is rendered with fidelity; but the humbler hotel where Rutherford works is never named, for instance. Yet because Amerigo places it at Ninth Street and Locust Avenue, we know that it must be the Densmore Hotel which indeed operated from that location from 1909 until it was demolished in the late 1990s. This feeling for the city is that of the exile, familiar to us from James Joyce whose obsessive reconstruction of Dublin in Ulysses is clearly one of the models for Carter’s depiction of Kansas City. Indeed, Such Sweet Thunder is inspired by Joyce not only in this sense, but perhaps even more so with its plentiful stream of consciousness riffs and colorful uses of onomatopoetic language that echo Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, with, in Carter’s case, the addition of a magnificent ear for the cadence of small talk among black folks.
During one of his only return visits to the United States, Carter saw for himself the staggering devastation of what had once been a world of throbbing multicultural and interethnic vitality, rife with racial tension and violence to be sure (an aspect Carter vividly captures in all its quotidian banality), but nonetheless, a community brimming with what Carter conceived of as a web of aesthetic relations: between jazz on the radio and the gestures of aunties cracking wise, the vocal timbre of men hailing each other in the street and the rumble of streetcars at Eighteenth and Vine, between the poolhall slouch and the preacher’s lean in the pulpit, the dense matrix of communal black life in an urban setting marked by the dominant presence of poor, working people with immense belief in their own talents and abilities and ever scornful of the racist forces regularly lashing out at them and reminding them of their place. In a letter to Lottman from 1973, Carter lamented this lost world that, paradoxically, flourished under segregation:
 
It had all changed, Herb, it was all different now; the people were gone and the houses were gone; in their place was a super highway. Only the light was the same: sunlight at seven in the morning, at noon, at five o’clock in the evening when dad used to come home from his hotel. Perhaps it was when I boarded the plane for New York that I realized that nothing has been lost. I had written it all down—that fabulous world of childhood, the world of mom and dad young, laughing and in tears. It was all in The Primary Colors, my way, and what I couldn’t say because one can never say it all, is written in my heart.
 
But Carter’s vision cannot be reduced to the idiosyncratic story of one young man’s personal emancipation against a screen of nostalgic reminiscence. The work of ideological mythmaking has ensured that what happened to downtown Kansas City remains in large part a mystery to most Americans (including black Americans), who cannot seem to imagine that it was ever anything other than the cross-roads of highways, banks, convention centers, and empty lots that now defines it as predictably as virtually any other important urban center in the country. What Carter wants us to see—to make us feel grievously as an immediate loss—is a tragedy that holds a much broader allegorical force within the national narrative of the United States, and with particularly fierce poignancy in the historical memory of African Americans. It stands for the unpardonable ruination of the first black working class, the massive squandering of the heroic efforts undertaken by the first generation of black freedmen and women, the formerly enslaved and the sons and daughters of the formerly enslaved who took off their shackles only to get to work building up the first free black neighborhoods across America’s cities, everywhere under duress and festering resentment, and often under the hooded overwatch of the Klan’s terrorism and the de jure apartheid of Jim Crow.  
One can think of other classics of African American literature that know these people and tell aspects of their story: William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge; Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying; Margaret Walker’s Jubilee; Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, to name a few. Yet, none arguably captures quite so aptly the note of gallant hopefulness, the tender vivacity, the sarcasm and cunning that generation seems to have possessed in such abundance as the novel you hold in your hands.
Anyone who ever knew black folk of that era, knows something of the distinctive grain of the voice that they brought into the world. Everywhere the grain of that black voice was allowed to show up it changed the world; in popular music, in sports, in the arts, in politics, in fashion, in everyday speech, and yes, in literature.
In her striking work of literary criticism Liberating Voices, Gayl Jones makes the argument that the African American novel emerged out of the struggle of black writers to incorporate their own “distinctive aural and oral forms” into the representational conventions established by the European realist novel. The opening pages of Such Sweet Thunder do seem to groan as Carter struggles to stage Amerigo’s encounter with the Proustian madeleine that will open the floodgates of memory to his lost Kansas City. It’s no coincidence that the vehicle he lands upon, however, is a copy of a newspaper called The Voice, an obvious allusion to the legendary Kansas City Call (still extant), one of the oldest and longest-running black newspapers in the United States. The black press and its once improbable reach and influence are now something of a spectral myth, acquiring that vaguely legendary sepia tint that also attaches to the Negro Leagues and other bygone relics of an era that our popular culture has seemingly no capacity or desire to meaningfully remember. Yet the idea to use the black newspaper both allegorically as a symbol of a historic community, and formally as a choric voice, is perhaps the masterstroke of genius in Carter’s novel. Without the opening vignettes, we would lose sight of this deliberate construction.
As a scholar I can appreciate Such Sweet Thunder as a miraculous recovery and a remarkable example of what was possible in black postwar fiction. But as a novelist, I appreciate even more how it does things in prose with such a wondrously open sense of freedom. It is unsparing when necessary, yet humming with grace and good humor. It is also a social novel, passionately carrying us through living rooms and street corners and social dances in virtuosic passages that linger long after we have left them. It remembers for us a world that deserved its own bard and, recognized or not, has always had one.
The novel’s gift to us is ultimately the achievement of this tremendous sense of voice, or rather the orchestration of its collective voices, newspaper-like you might say, but swinging like a jazz ensemble. This is a book I have wanted to read late into the night. It stays with me in those quiet hours, even after I put it down, its rolling thunder unfurling just above my head.
 
 
Jesse McCarthy
Rome, June 2024