Black Girl / White Girl

Excerpt

I have decided to begin a text without a title. It will be an exploration, I think. An inquiry into the death of my college roommate Minette Swift who died fifteen years ago this week: on the eve of her nineteenth birthday which was April 11, 1975.

Minette did not die a natural death nor did Minette die an easy death. Every day of my life since Minette's death I have thought of Minette in the anguish of her final minutes for I was the one to have saved her, yet I did not. And no one has known this.

The coroner for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, declared with no ambiguity the precise medical reasons for Minette's death and who the agent of her death was, such "facts" are not the object of my inquiry.

For "facts" can be made to distort, to lie. The most insidious of lies is through omission.

Many facts were omitted, and other facts obscured, at the time of Minette's death. I was one of those who obscured facts for there was the wish to protect my name and there was the wish to protect Minette after her death.

There was the unvoiced wish to protect Minette's family, and there was the unvoiced wish to protect Schuyler College. There was the wish—unvoiced, desperate—to protect the white faces surrounding Minette.

Fifteen years! All this time, I have been alive. 1 have been living, I have even acquired a professional reputation in my field, and Minette Swift has been dead. I have been aging, and Minette Swift has remained nineteen. I am a woman of middle age, Minette is still a girl.

I wonder at the strangeness of this! Who deserves to live, and who deserves to die. I wonder at the justice.

Some truths are lies my father Maximilian Meade has said. My father was a man who acquired fame and notoriety for such inflammatory statements, that fill some of us with rage. No truths can be lies is my preferred belief

And so I begin, my text without a title in the service of justice.

Interview

From HarperCollins

Q: What drew you to examine race relations in the post-Vietnam milieu of a women's liberal arts college?

A: Like Genna, I have long been haunted by certain memories having to do with intense relationships, particularly interracial relationships, of that turbulent era. Primarily, Black Girl/White Girl is the story of two very different, yet somehow "fated" girls; for Genna, her "friendship" with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.

Q: Why did you decide to implicate Minette Swift in some of the racist harassment she suffers?

A: Partly, I was moved to dramatize an actual sequence of events that took place in a college dormitory in the 1970s, not at any university at which I've taught but in the near vicinity. Minette has complex, largely unconscious motives for much of her behavior that might seem irrational to others.

Q: To what extent is Genna's revelation of her father's complicity in the death of a security guard a response to her own sense of culpability in Minette's death?

A: Genna is that rare individual, a "good" person; she has internalized a genuine moral code, and is appalled by her father's seeming involvement in the death of an innocent man. Yet it is only under emotional duress that she exposes him. Her sense of guilt in regard to Minette is less clear: all along, Genna has been shielding Minette from a confrontation with the truth out of her timidity and fear of provoking anger in Minette. To the very end, perhaps naively, Genna yearns for Minette's friendship.

Q: Is the "difficult" persona of Minette Swift a reaction to the isolation she feels as one of the few black students at Schuyler, or is it inherent to her character?

A: To Genna, Minette is fascinating because she is the unknowable, elusive, seemingly self-reliant Other. Genna seems to have little awareness of Minette as a lonely, insecure, deeply frustrated young woman who has grown up in a sheltered environment where she has felt entitled and superior as the daughter of a renowned Negro minister. (Though there is a side to Minette that is genuinely religious, even humble.)

Q: Others have described Black Girl/White Girl as a coming-of-age novel. To what extent do you agree?

A: Yes, Black Girl/White Girl might be described as a "coming-of-age" novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are "roommates" with one another, but how well do we know one another?

Notes

Working Title: "Blood at the Root"

Other Editions

Reviews

• Stanley Crouch, Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 15, 2006, p. 9
  
  "The grandeur of the achievement cannot be overstated. Few American writers have the necessary spunk and technique to bring a world of more than one ethnic type alive: Even fewer understand the tremulous souls hidden by meaningless class and even more meaningless color. Only those with the biggest hearts have the nerve to enter that bruising frontier of the national life, integration, where nothing is actually what it seems, and no one has a heart bigger, braver or more full of unsentimental pity than Joyce Carol Oates." More...
  
  
• Robert Braile, Boston Globe, November 6, 2006, p. E5
  
  "What ensues over their tumultuous first year in this daring and exquisite novel by Joyce Carol Oates reflects the tragedy of our purportedly progressive views on race, both then and now, views that ignore the deep complexities of this issue and thus exacerbate the dilemma they seek to resolve."
  
  
• Starr E. Smith, Library Journal, July 2006, p. 69
  
• Donna Seaman, Booklist, July, 2006, pp. 7-8
  
• Roz Kaveney, TLS, Times Literary Supplement, October 6, 2006, p. 23
  
• Lorien Kaye, The Age (Melbourne, Australia), October 14, 2006, Books p. 25
  
  
  
• Christine Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle Book Reveiw, October 15, 2006, p. 2
  
  "Oates gracefully charts how race can make normal events seem loaded, and subtly probes whether race itself alters perception of the truth..."
  
  
• Matt Thorne, Sunday Telegraph (London), October 15, 2006, p. 52
  
  "[Oates's] intellectual curiosity remains boundless and she is unwilling to reach an easy moral conclusion. If the novel ends up feeling like a literary confidence trick, it's because the author has dared the reader to underestimate her. This is an incredibly complicated book disguised as a straightforward one. It demands careful attention, and more than rewards the effort."
  
  
• Jonathan Gibbs, Evening Standard (London), October 17, 2006, Section LL 04; p. 28
  
• Kate Saunders, The Times (London), October 21, 2006, p. 13
  
• Carlene Ellwood, Hobart Mercury (Australia), October 28, 2006, p. B13
  
• Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (London), November 4, 2006, p. 31
  
  
• Karen Brady, Buffalo News, November 12, 2006, p. G5
  
  
• Nick Rennison, Sunday Times (London), November 12, 2006, p. 55
  
  
  
• Mary Flanagan, The Independent (London), November 17, 2006, Arts & Books Review, p. 22
  
  "The novel's sweltering intensity verges on the obsessive and, in another's hands, might seem grotesque. But Oates's literary passion and psychological acumen grip us, shake us, and convince."
  
  
• Cheryl L. Reed, Chicago Sun Times, November 19, 2006, p. B12
  
• Dale Singer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 19, 2006, p. F10
  
  
  
• Susan Kelly, USA Today, November 22, 2006, p. 4D
  
  "Oates' language has an understated beauty in telling a story that is heartbreaking not just because of what unfolds in the fictional landscape but also because of what is so eloquently resurrected from our very real, very compromised past."
  
  
• Samela Harris, Advertiser (Australia), December 9, 2006, p. W10
  
  
  
• Otto Penzler, New York Sun, February 14, 2007, p. 15
  
  "Black Girl/White Girl is a courageous book, offering little to warm the heart of blacks or whites who took extreme positions in the heated racial atmosphere of post-Vietnam America. The gentle yet powerful voice of Ms. Oates has underlined the point that, like so many other important philosophical and political issues, it is not a question of black or white, but of shades of gray."
  
  Adera Causey, Chattanooga Times Free Press, April 1, 2007, p. d4
  
• Variest Randle, Mobile Register, August 12, 2007, p. D5
  
• Alex Peake-Tomkinson, Daily Telegraph (London), September 22, 2007, Books p. 31
  
• Carla McKay, Daily Mail (London), September 28, 2007, p. 67
  
• Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, New Review, September 30, 2007, ARTS, p. 43
  
• Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2006, p. 597
  
• Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2006, p. 35
  
• Elissa Schappell, New York Times Book Review, October 15, 2006, p. 16
  
• Yvonne Zipp, Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 2006, Books, p. 17
  
• Darragh McManus, Irish Independent (Ireland), October 28, 2006
  
• Robin Moyle, Herald Sun (Australia), November 4, 2006, p. W26
  
• Stephen Amidon, The Guardian (London), November 18, 2006, p. 16
  
• Lisa Page, Washington Post Book World, November 19, 2006, p. T07
  
• Peter Craven, Weekend Australian, November 25, 2006, Books / Review, p. 9
  
• Jill Coley, The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), December 17, 2006, p. H14
  
• Rowland Manthorpe, The Observer, September 30, 2007, Review p. 28
  
• Christina Koning, The Times (London), September 8, 2007, Books p. 14
  
• The Baltimore Sun, November 26, 2006, p. 4F