By Nathan McCall
ATRIA; 339 PAGES; $25
For those who reap its benefits, gentrification often means a hopeful, relaxed trajectory toward urban progress. But for the usually ethnic-minority communities eroded by it, gentrification can be a silent, insistent violation. Nathan McCall's first novel, "Them," dramatizes the troubling side of this complex race- and class- driven phenomenon in American cities.
The setting for such a story could be Harlem, Boston's Roxbury or San Francisco's Fillmore district. But McCall sets the action on one block in Atlanta's historic Old Fourth Ward, the neighborhood, not coincidentally, where Martin Luther King Jr. came of age and began his ministry. King's presence hangs over the increasing tension. We witness an Atlanta characterized by a strained reverse integration that King could hardly have imagined. Liberal whites priced out of the upscale Buckhead and Virginia Highland areas settle warily in a neighborhood where the established African American community receives them with stony resentment.
The action is told mainly through Barlowe Reed, a bitter, isolated man struggling to save enough money from his printing job for a down payment on the house he rents. At the outset of the story, Barlowe drifts uneasily through his drab days. Unhappy with his job and unable to sustain relationships with women, he finds escape by playing the lottery, drinking beer and reading travel books from the library. Whenever a police car comes into view, he rails against Caesar, his term for all government authority. He deeply distrusts the few white people he has regular contact with, especially a smarmy foreman named Spivey who pressures him to work overtime without compensation. McCall overlays this racial anxiety with a post-9/11 apprehension in which security surveillance seems to happen at random moments.
Paralleling Barlowe's story is that of Sandy Gilmore, a white liberal who buys the neighboring property with her reluctant husband, Sean. She is typical of the seemingly well-meaning newcomers to the neighborhood: personally kind but socially ignorant. She self-servingly espouses King's vision of racial harmony, and blinded by white privilege, is baffled when longtime residents snub the wide-eyed new arrivals who install sprinkler systems and presume to clean up the neighborhood. In a scene of stinging burlesque, Sandy summons her courage to enter the corner store under the stares of the locals hanging out there, mentally likening herself to the first girl at Little Rock's Central High to bravely cross the school's racial divide in 1957.
McCall can be a keen, satirical observer of off-kilter racial interaction, and he maintains a studied balance in exploring the blind spots between his black and white characters. McCall first explored these tensions in his brilliant 1994 coming-of-age memoir, "Makes Me Wanna Holler," perhaps the era's defining narrative of the black male experience. "Them" broadens the scope to uncover the pervasive myopia of these two populations.
The white characters display an obtuse ethnocentrism. Sandy regards the black community's public culture of informal gatherings on front yards and vacant lots as an affront to social respectability, thinking to herself that "if the rowdy card games were not bad enough, there were front-yard cookouts, where folks hovered around hideous steel drums, barbecuing chicken and ribs, with thick, black smoke billowing forth." Even more offensive are the real estate cherry pickers, who cruise into the neighborhood from the suburbs and knock on doors to ask about buying properties. The act has the ring of urban colonialism.
The African American community, on the other hand, comes off as blindly reactive, circling the wagons to keep whites from invading. In one incident that presages greater tumult, neighbors merely gawk after the Gilmores' mailbox is set on fire. Events escalate ominously along this one block, rippling through every relationship in a pattern that recalls Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing."
But McCall's social analysis gets hemmed in by his static characters, and he loses an opportunity to observe the greater psychological nuances of racial interaction. Instead, we get a cast of stock supporting characters: the young hustler Tyrone, skirting the edge of the law; the old corner store fixtures Ely, Amos and Willie, hanging out and sizing up passing women; the square-jawed, tobacco-spitting foreman Spivey, who longs for the days before black employees argued so much; the Al Sharptonesque preacher Pickering, orating histrionically in defense of the neighborhood and fancying himself MLK's direct successor.
McCall strives to enter more complex psychological terrain when he portrays a tentative cross-fence dialogue between Sandy and Barlowe. The fence represents an unbridgeable mental barrier, but through their persistence in facing the increasingly volatile confrontations along the block, each neighbor finds in the other an unlikely emotional ally. Only in these moments, as they move each other toward a freer, more expansive outlook, does the story advance beyond its satirical confinements and into richer territory.
The relationship between Barlowe and Sandy offers hope in a climate that seems otherwise devoid of understanding. In a world of quietly brutal displacement, the end of legal barriers seems hardly to matter to the broad social divide. But a small bridge built by two earnest people offers brief consolation.
Erik Gleibermann is a San Francisco writer and an academic mentor in private practice.
This article appeared on page M - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle
