Tragic Magic

Mendez

Paul Hardcastle’s ‘19’ was probably the first song I remember being Number One, around the time I turned three. The song’s title referred to the average age of soldiers sent to fight in Vietnam, the neoliberal war on communism that ended exactly a decade before the song’s April 1985 release. A bright and energetic dance record with the electro codes of early hip-hop, ‘19’ initially sounds fun and optimistic, with a catchy synth chorus and a jingly repetition of ‘19’. The stuttered ‘D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-destruction’ lyric pumped from the speakers like Yosemite Sam’s bullets in Warner Bros. cartoons.

But for me as an adult, with some background knowledge of the Vietnam war, ‘19’ certainly hits differently. Hardcastle sampled news media to set the grim facts and testimonies of the war to pop music. ‘I didn’t know what was going on,’ said a returned soldier – one of the lucky ones who survived. But we also know that many of the survivors lived with PTSD, a silent killer.

The American writer Wesley Brown, as a radical college student, was one of those who chose jail, and his 1978 semi-autobiographical debut novel Tragic Magic fictionalises this experience while imagining what it might have been like, as a Black man, to have accepted the invitation to stand up for ‘his’ country. Tragic Magic is the story of two brotherly young men whose paths were split apart by the political weather.

Narrated by Melvin Ellington (nicknamed Mouth, for a botched first kiss with a girl that went viral in the hood), the novel begins with a sort of manifesto on learning the rules so that you can break them – a breakdown of ingenious jazz delinquency:

I get the urge to play against the melody, behind and ahead of the beat, to bend, diminish, and flatten notes, and slip in and out of any exact notation of what and how I should play.

In an early flashback, Mouth is on a subway with a date who, despite his presence, is pursued through the carriages by another man. The young woman, Tonya, stands up for herself, but later he asks her whether he should have intervened, and her snappy response emasculates him. Now he is out on parole and making his way back to the family home a free man; and, after two years away, is looking to get laid. He owes Tonya a debt of gratitude, because if it wasn’t for what she showed him in that moment, he might’ve gone to war to protect America. But, as he puts it, ‘if one is going to put his ass on the line, he should be the one to pick the time and place.’

What unfolds is a circadian narrative structure, interrupted by flashbacks. The walk home from prison enables a re-seeing of the neighbourhood Mouth was raised in; one in which Italian immigrants, now considered to be White and thus invited to the White flight, once lived. Children, unaware of the great convulsions of racism that preceded them, and who only saw each other as equal playmates, were suddenly separated from each other by parents caught up in the higher winds of divide-and-rule. How disconcerting must it be for a child to suddenly lose a friend who did not say goodbye or leave an address? The mature voice reflects:

I often heard many of my elders, who were the first of our kind in the neighbourhood, speaking against them, who had come afterward. For some reason, they were not as good as us. And it was because of them that the whites had moved.

This abandonment trigger, combined with Mouth’s slightly risqué musings and interactions with family members, shouts back to plantation bonds and breakages.

Pop songs, as tickets to random memories, are a gift to a writer, and Brown uses The Intruders’ 1968 hit Cowboys to Girls – with the lyrics: ‘When I used to play shoot ‘em up … Chased the girls and beat em up’ – to take us back to Mouth’s adolescence. Here, we meet his good friend Otis, who teaches young Mouth, essentially, how to womanise.  That episode leads to him getting his nickname: ‘My mouth rammed hers and it was bones and teeth meeting in total disregard for lips.’

While he and Otis were once inseparable, Mouth went to college and Otis joined the Marines. Back home in the present, Mouth turns on the shower, which takes him back to the prison showers on his first day – mindlessly admiring the body of an inmate, only to panic in fear of violence. We learn that his priority was to avoid chumming up with anyone and getting raped.

By chance, Mouth meets Alice, someone he knew from school, whose smarts and beauty made her a target for bullies. Mouth is concerned that someone may have ‘crashed the party in her soul’ but is curious to know whether the party is ‘still going’. Through Alice, he learns that Otis is now working at a Black radio station in Harlem, and soon the two men are reunited. Otis lost a hand in Vietnam, deliberately maiming himself  in order to be honourably discharged,  having realised that the cause wasn’t worth losing his life for. He still boasts of being able to drive women wild – his stump merely a new appendage. Alice’s screw-faced friend Pauline cruelly tells Mouth: ‘There ain’t no difference between you goin’ to jail and Otis goin’ in the service. You both were just tryin’ to impress somebody.’

Further flashbacks depict two more young Black men Mouth has known and followed – both trying to flip the system on its head in some way, trying to get their voices heard as if no one else had before. The first of them attempts to speak on behalf of Blacks against police brutality; the other, Theo, wants to collaborate with White people against White supremacy by trying to make White people feel what it is like to feel the pain of a Black person. To that end, all Whites who wish to join the ‘No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Nigger’ Caucus must ‘read in one sitting Ralph Ginzburg’s One Hundred Years of Lynching in the presence of … one of the Blacks in our group’. It is through following Theo’s leadership that Mouth ends up in prison.

Because Mouth, horny after two years in the can, steers well clear of what we now call incel culture, Otis suspects that Mouth allowed his body to be used in prison and, as if to assert his own masculinity, picks on the wrong guy in a waffle joint. But this comes after a cathartic moment shared between the two. Led by Otis, they break into a Harlem cinema to destroy its reels of John Wayne movies – films they, like many Americans, had been raised on – perhaps so that the younger Black generations might not learn to identify with that icon of White colonialism as they had done. America, through John Wayne,  may have shown them how to be  men and how to fight for their nationhood, but as non-White men, they were the ones who were being hunted. And it is this realisation that continues to  come too late for a lot of people, even today.

Tragic Magic was originally edited and published in hardback by Toni Morrison during her fruitful years as an editor at Random House, and it was she who encouraged Brown to write about the time he spent locked up. It’s hard to imagine how the novel would  hold together without it. Not only does Tragic Magic critique masculinity in a way that is ahead of its time, it also critiques the American Dream and who it is supposedly for – and does so with a wisecracking energy that speaks directly to that immortal period of Black American cool.

Tragic Magic, published by Daunt Books

Mendez

Mendez is a novelist, essayist and screenwriter