The Wig
Charles Wright
(Mercury House)
$14.95
The history of the Central District’s Douglass-Truth Library goes something like this: It was built in 1914 and was first called the Yesler Branch, in honor of Seattle founding father Henry Yesler. The library initially served Jewish immigrants, but by the ’30s it began to serve Japanese immigrants, who gradually replaced the departing Jewish immigrants. The internment of Japanese Americans in the early ’40s emptied the neighborhood, and its homes and businesses were subsequently filled by flows of African Americans looking for wartime work. In the mid-’60s, a local chapter of an African American sorority (Alpha Kappa Alpha) donated 352 books to the library. In the mid-’70s, the library’s name was changed to the Douglass-Truth Library in honor of Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Today the library’s African-American Collection has over 10,000 books.
Though far from comprehensive, the collection seems to contain everything one would want to know about African Americans. The reference books cover all sorts of areas and trivia, from blacks in the military, science, cinema, politics, sports; the history of blacks in government, blacks in South Chicago, blacks in the high and low places. There seems no end or start to it. There are critical evaluations, critical analyses, critical interpretations, critical perspectives; sections on Colored Folks, Negro Life, Black Arts, African American History fill the shelves beneath impressionistic portraits of handsome Andrew Young, majestic Paul Robeson, and profound Sojourner Truth.
While studying the life of Mississippi-born author Richard Wright for a planned critical biography that, if started (and also completed), was going to establish my career as an independent researcher, I showed the collection to a friend visiting from New York City, Joe Wood, who was then (the summer of 1993) a critic for the Village Voice–but is now believed to be dead in some crevice or cave on Mount Rainier, where he disappeared while hiking in the summer of 1999. To my surprise, Joe Wood was very impressed by the size and condition of the collection. He said it was one of the best he had ever seen, and this was an important compliment, coming as it did from an intellectual based in the city with the most blacks on this side of the hemisphere.
The African-American Collection’s librarian, Samuel Jackson, who guided me through much of my research during that time, managed (and still manages) the collection with a sense of care and mission that is Old World in its almost scientific respect for the preservation of words, images, stories–knowledge without which we would be lost in a wilderness that has no past or future. That wilderness is the Pacific Northwest whose wider and deeper histories are interrupted only by the island of this small, brick, Prairie-style building whose Beaux Arts interiors contain/guard a collection that has no equal for thousands of miles around.
A collection of 10,000 books is small enough to not be daunting but large enough to get lost in. And a library is only such when one can lose one’s self in it. Once, while searching for Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain on the shelves beneath the portrait of Frederick Douglass, I got lost and found a book by an unknown Charles Wright called The Wig. I began reading the first paragraph; then the whole page, then the chapter, and by the following morning the book was completed, and I was back in the library searching for his other books. Charles Wright was a New York writer launched into fame by the praise his first novel, The Messenger, received from James Baldwin, who had never been as kind to the other Wright–despite the important role “Dick” (as Richard Wright was called by his close friends) played in launching Baldwin’s own career.
Recently reissued by the NEA Heritage & Preservation Series on the recommendation of Bay Area novelist Ishmael Reed, whose writing was influenced by Charles Wright’s fiction, The Wig, Wright’s second and penultimate novel, is a hallucinatory account of a young black man whose ordinary hair is suddenly and magically transformed into an iridescent conk by a handful of hair relaxer called Silky Smooth. “The Wig,” says Lester, the unemployed and impoverished narrator, “is going to see me through these troubled times.” There’s no easy way to describe this book; it never cools into a stable fictional form. Some parts are real, others are fantastic, others autobiographical, others draw their themes, language, and imagery from various literary canons. At its time, the book was to Richard Wright what Ornette Coleman was to Coleman Hawkins.
Page 89 of The Wig: “The sun was very bright the following morning; there was something almost nice about the polluted air. I had my glass of lukewarm tap water, said my Christian prayers, recited a personal Koran, and kissed the rat-gnawed floorboards of my room. (Nonbelievers, please take note: I was definitely insane, an ambitious lunatic.) I had spent a sleepless night plotting and thinking. Impersonation is an act of courage, as well as an act of skill, for the impersonator must be cold-hearted, aware of his limitations. I felt good. The sun was shining. Bathed in its warm rays, I became Apollo’s Saturday morning son. My new image had crystallized. An aristocratic image, I might add. The new image was based on The Wig….”
Today, if people enter the Douglass-Truth Library, which is about to be expanded, they will find not too far from Charles Wright’s first edition of The Wig a book about Richard Wright’s personal library, Books and Writers, written and researched by French literary historian Michel Fabre. In the P chapter of this book (Pushkin, Pritchett, and so on), you’ll read a short note by Richard Wright in the section allocated for one of his favorite novels, Marcel Proust’s 3,000-paged Remembrance of Things Past: “It crushed me with hopelessness, for I wanted to write of the people of my environment with an equal thoroughness….” I too am crushed (but happily so) by the sense of hopelessness that I will make but a small dent in the 10,000 volumes that make up the largest collection of African American facts and fictions for thousands of miles around.
