In Maurice Berger’s classic White Lies, part memoir, part cultural analysis, he writes about “disrupting our complacent fantasy that our racial and ethnic identities will always be manifest, simple, pure. Whiteness, like blackness is not an immaculate, concrete truth but a social construction designed to mark the boundaries of race.” (206) Berger is gone now, he died of Covid in 2020. I believe he would’ve appreciated Ben Drevlow’s Honky.
In Drevlow’s Honky stories, creative nonfiction with a dollop of fiction, he tells of growing up in a small Wisconsin town on Lake Superior, a White, Lutheran boy in a dysfunctional family and a self-described loser, as a fan of Tupac and Tyra Banks, as someone who played basketball and revered Black college and professional players. Someone who dreamed of playing college ball himself but didn’t have the talent and wound up as a glorified ball boy for the team.
Drevlow is nothing if not self-deprecating, cloaking real sadness—especially about his older brother killing himself, and also about his unloving father—with self-derision, so that the reader wavers between sympathy and impatience. But while in Drevlow’s novel The Book of Rusty, where Rusty seems to be a stand-in for the author, the pathetic-ness of Rusty is a thick smoke for his limited and choking life, in Honky, there’s something more nuanced and rounded going on, something that demands an identification from the reader. And what a wonderfully messy identification it is.
In Honky, Drevlow apologetically explores his early friendships with Black people. Well, at first, only one Black person, Boykin, because Boykin’s family is the only Black family with kids in the 150-student rural school Drevlow goes to, and the two are not really friends but sometimes friendly acquaintances. The reader switches from a relief that Drevlow found a fr-acquaintance from a family that’s different—in any way—from Drevlow’s own to a familiar horror at realizing how impossibly tough Boykin’s life was. “The whole school already knows Boykin because he’s the only black kid in the school besides his two sisters and they know how much he hates most teachers because—small town or out in the boonies—in Northernass Wisconsin they’re all racist.” (32)
In college, Drevlow’s roommate is Q, a Black basketball player, and theirs is an unequal friendship where Drevlow, unskilled with women, helps Q juggle his many girlfriends. Drevlow never stops apologizing in one way or another—directly or subtly—to the reader for exploring racial stereotypes in his writing and in his life. Some of the stories are heavy handed—Q’s condoms are too big for Drevlow’s penis—some more subtle as when he’s let off the hook for drunk driving by a White policeman in a way he knows he wouldn’t be if he were Black. Drevlow is embarrassed the contrasts are such a steady drumbeat, and unfair, and the reader feels strangely grateful to him for owning and articulating them.
As I was reading, I was reminded of watching Season 1 of Mad Men when it first came out and feeling an intense relief that the show made mention, a lot of mention, of racism and antisemitism. I knew growing up these daily signs were constants, and know they still are—what we now call micro-aggressions, but somewhere along the way in mainstream culture they too often got painted over, yes, whitewashed. Drevlow unearths them, and his younger self even yearns for “different” friends (one of his early crushes was on a girl who was half-Native American and half-Jewish). He’s accused regularly of being a w-igger—white person aspiring to be Black. But none of it works, he’s still stuck with his White self and his awareness that he’s bad at surmounting cultural and racial differences.
If anything, Drevlow’s lack of the social skills needed to cross racial lines seems to get worse when he’s an adult living in a small town in Georgia with his soon-to-be-ex-wife. The second half of the book is called Southernass Georgia, and the well-crafted stories in it are a catalogue of gaffes, some of them so wince-inducing, like when Drevlow tries to give a Black man, hanging out in a park, a man he wrongly identifies as homeless, a twenty. And then later he does it again—to the same man, who again gives the twenty back. Other stories are more relatable, about white guilt, about trying for cross-racial friendship.
I read this book at a gallop, grateful for its honest, deftly written stories about the daily grain of racism, and attempts to go against that grain—and even more for its articulation, especially in the Midwestern first half, of hunger in wanting to relate, to connect through different differences, partly succeeding, partly failing.
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