From prejudice to pride

In “The Anxiety of Influence,” first published in 1973, Harold Bloom argued that all literary texts are creative, unavoidable misreadings of prior texts. The novels of Alice Randall are deliberate reinterpretations of classics refracted through a Negro-centric lens. Her first novel, “The Wind Done Gone,” was a strident rebuttal to “Gone With the Wind” told from the point of view of Tara’s former slaves, who, in contrast with Margaret Mitchell’s simple-minded “darkies,” outwit their weak white masters at every turn. It became a 1st Amendment cause celebre, not because its contents were so momentous but because the Mitchell family trust attempted to block publication.

“The Wind Done Gone” is a little ditty compared with “Pushkin and the Queen of Spades,” Randall’s operatic, far more audacious and accomplished second novel. Having warmed up her vocal cords and won our attention, she shows us the high notes she can reach when she orchestrates her background as a Harvard English major with roots in the Motown enclave of Detroit. In the guise of a mother’s rant against her son’s choice of bride, her new novel is an impassioned aria on the ferocity and consummate importance of parental love. It is also a complex manifesto on why and how race and roots matter, especially “in the face of love.”

Randall’s narrator is Windsor Armstrong, a 43-year-old, Harvard-educated, tenured professor of Afro-Russian literature at Vanderbilt University. Windsor’s area of expertise is the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, to whom she is drawn largely because of his black bloodlines: Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abraham Hannibal, was a kidnapped African sold into slavery and “given as a present to Czar Peter the Great.” Windsor claims Pushkin as the black Russian Shakespeare, who embodies “the dignity of negritude.” She proclaims, “I am a scholar of the significance of the shadow of Pushkin on his darker brothers and sisters in the United States.”

Windsor’s life has not been a cakewalk. Raped at 18, she enters Harvard as what she calls a bad validation of a stereotype, the black teenage mother. But she keeps the baby and names him Pushkin X, “for the best black brain and the fiercest black heart.” She’s disappointed when her brilliant son pursues another black stereotype: professional football player. He becomes “the Phenom,” an NFL star middle lineman for Memphis, and adopts values she scorns, including a taste for McMansions.

But that is nothing compared with his choice of fiancee, a white, Russian-born, poorly educated lap dancer named Tanya. “After everything white folks have done to my family, Pushkin wants to give one a ring. If he knew, he would not do this.... Then again, if he knew all our truths, maybe he would just be a different dark stereotype -- black man behind bars.”

Writing from her “ebony tower,” Windsor clings to an anti-melting-pot view that subscribes to “the Old South rule, the one-drop rule” that insists just a drop of African blood makes you black. To explain to her son -- and herself -- why she objects to his marriage, she delves into her past, from which she’s kept him largely segregated.

This is where Randall’s novel, somewhat repetitive and one-note in its opening salvos, climbs the scales of powerful storytelling. Windsor recalls her parents, both of whom were part white. Her fair-skinned mother, Lena, derided blacks, including her own “pickaninny” daughter, whom she snatches with her to Washington, D.C., when she leaves her husband, mainly to spite him. Windsor’s father, Leo, on the other hand, hated whites, beginning with his paternal grandfather, who deliberately handicapped his brown son by not teaching him to read or write. Leo “ran with gangsters and outlaws, the predecessors of thugz” but loved Windsor fiercely. “He wrapped that love around me like a girdle of gold.... [I]t is shot through and through with Daddy’s racist preference for everything brilliant and black and beautiful.” Windsor “resolved the conflict” between her parents “by falling in love with a kind of hyperintellectual blackness wherever it occurred.” White lap dancers do not fit into her narrow ebony tower.

In addition to resisting Pushkin’s marriage, Windsor resists telling him who his father is. We soon realize that her real worry is revealing her son’s “more complex ethnicity” -- his dominant whiteness even though he is “dark as the ace of spades.” So Windsor must resign herself not just to a white daughter-in-law but to potentially white-skinned grandchildren. And to do so, she must “transcend race” and accept that ethnicity is also about “the stories you know, the sounds you feel.”

Windsor’s odyssey from prejudice to pride encompasses numerous literary references and brief ethnocentric reappraisals of various members of the literary canon, including Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Chaucer, “Othello” and “Jane Eyre.” The poet Pushkin gets a full makeover. By Windsor’s lights, Pushkin rushed into his fatal duel over his wife’s honor because insecurity about his “kinky hair, inky skin, and broad nose” -- in other words, his racial heritage -- caused him to doubt his lovability.

Randall’s novel crescendos toward Windsor’s wedding present for her son, a heartfelt endeavor to bridge her high culture and his low culture with a rap version of Pushkin’s unfinished story, “The Negro of Peter the Great.” In Pushkin’s original, the white noblewoman chosen by Peter to marry his black favorite, Abraham, avows she’d prefer death. Randall supplies the happy, if improbable, ending the original lacked: Abraham wins over his new bride in one consummately skilled, blissful night of lovemaking.

Fortunately for Randall, the poet’s story predates copyright protection and there’s no Pushkin family trust to protest the liberties she takes. This, of course, isn’t the first time Pushkin has been bent into a new form: Vikram Seth’s delightful novel in verse set in late 20th century San Francisco, “The Golden Gate,” and Tchaikovsky’s much-loved operas, “The Queen of Spades” and “Eugene Onegin,” spring readily to mind.

Randall’s rap is a spirited tour de force enriched by her experience as a country songwriter. A taste: “Pushkin’s mama’s daddy’s daddy / Was the dark Abraham / Was the brilliant stolen man.” Randall is faithful to her source, to a point. In Thomas Keane’s Vintage Russian Library translation of the unfinished tale, Pushkin introduces the fool: “an old woman, powdered and rouged, decked out in flowers and tinsel, in a low-necked silk gown.” Randall writes: “Now this old female was dripping jewels / Was powdered and rouged / Tarted up and tinseled down / Looked like she had been around / Sagging titties in a low-cut gown.”

Purists may be less than thrilled, but Pushkin X enthusiastically pronounces it a wild “blue-eyed nigger of a poem.... It’s a bastard of two strong things.”

Which, if you ask me, pretty well sums up Randall’s stunningly gutsy, literate and original novel. *