dem by William Melvin Kelley

First published: 1967

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: Early 1960’s

Locale: New York, New York

Principal Characters:

• Mitchell Pierce, a white, middle-class advertising executive
• Tam Pierce, Mitchell’s bored and demanding wife, the mother of Jake and of unnamed twin boys
• Opal Simmons, the Pierces’ black maid
• Calvin Coolidge Williams (Cooley), Opal’s boyfriend, the father of one of the Pierce twins

The Novel

dem’s unusual title and its lower-case format are a revealing indication of the author’s intentions and orientation. The connotations of a certain vocal tonality and a certain grade of education that the title word conveys are far removed from the white, middle-class milieu in which most of the action takes place. The combination of lexical and auditory element in “dem” also indicates an attitude that, if not necessarily disrespectful, reduces to the status of a common noun material that is generally accorded the distinctiveness of a proper noun. This attitude not only embraces the realm of manners, which occupies the foreground of the novel; it also is the basis for the larger social, cultural, and political perspectives that the story entails, creating them initially by inference but ultimately in fully realized terms, an “us” that exists as an equal and opposite human entity to “dem.”

The provocative undertones of dem’s title are developed in a number of ways in the course of the story. The very setting of the main narrative interest, a well-appointed apartment in Manhattan, is one that does not occur frequently in African American fiction, and the family that lives in the apartment is equally unusual, simply by belonging to the white, professional, upper middle class. Despite the deftness with which personal milieu and general social context are established, the author is more interested in what lies underneath the plausible surfaces of the Pierce household than in reproducing whatever interest and quality those surfaces may have in themselves. The various references to middle-class culture are to its conspicuous consumption in such areas as smoking, drinking, and fashion.

For that reason, and as a means of informing readers that perspective is critical to what the novel intends to express, the Pierces are first seen from the outside. The first scene in the work concerns a mistaken perspective on Mitchell’s part when he is unable to recognize the human inhabitant of a curbside bundle of rags. This mistake anticipates a tissue of ineptitude in the workplace, emotional bankruptcy in the home, and, ultimately, a state of moral nullity. The assemblage of this tissue constitutes the action of the novel.

The action takes place in four sequences. There is an ostensible lack of relationship between each of these sequences. This lack is suggested by the culmination of the first and second sequences in shocking events that have no aftermath. The first of these is the murder committed by John Godwin, Mitchell’s workmate. The fact that this crime has no apparent repercussions is glaring both in itself and as a means of indicating that neither Mitchell nor Tam possesses sufficient sense of social responsibility to ensure that Godwin is brought to justice.

The murder and the Pierces’ irresponsible reaction to it establish a state of moral disregard that provides a point from which the irresponsibility of Mitchell’s unreasonable and irrational assault on and dismissal of his maid, Opal, can be viewed. The pretext for this action is Opal’s alleged theft, and the case is judged on the basis of guilty until proven otherwise, with no possibility of such proof forthcoming. Mitchell’s reaction to Opal is in explicit contrast to his reaction to the Godwin murders. In this case, also, he is free to act without sanction and without redress.

Again, the link between Opal’s fate and the next section of the novel is not obvious. In this third part, Mitchell becomes infatuated with a soap opera and pursues a woman whom he mistakenly identifies as one of the soap opera’s stars. The spurious freedom to which Mitchell’s outlook and social position evidently entitle him bring about, in turn, the laughable confusion of his infatuation. This scenario is a variation on the novel’s satirical treatment of the distorted relationship between freedom and responsibility among characters who represent America’s most powerful and typical class. In addition, because of the threat to his marriage that Mitchell’s abortive affair exerts, the focus of dem is now shifted to the inner world of Mitchell and Tam, the world of their sexuality, the world in which their individuality is most obviously at issue.

By concentrating on this dimension of the characters, the novel is able to devote its fourth and culminating sequence to the point at which Mitchell Pierce is unable to deny realities that he has spent most of his time hitherto evading. In order to reach the heart of the matter, Kelley has to resort to a medical rarity known as superfecundation, the fertilization within a very brief time period of two ova by two different sexual partners. A note at the beginning of the novel authenticates this biological rarity by referring to the appropriate medical literature. The unusualness of this circumstance has the function within dem of giving substance to the issue in his world to which, more than to others, Mitchell Pierce is blind.

This issue is race; one of the twins with which Mitchell’s wife Tam is pregnant is the offspring of Opal’s beau, who is known to the Pierces only as “Cooley.” As the novel’s landscape makes clear, considerations of race are unavoidable: The human being in the bundle of rags on the opening page is a Native American; John Godwin makes a number of disrespectful statements about Asian women; there are various references to Jews throughout; and a scene set in an Irish tavern is a brief satire of Irish America. It is only when his own interests are impinged upon with a black son that Mitchell attempts to confront the all-pervasiveness of race, and then only in the hope of erasing it. By means of such an outcome, William Melvin Kelley ratifies his hard-hitting exposé of the social origins and moral culpability of racism in America.

The Characters

The protagonist of dem, Mitchell Pierce, is, paradoxically, the novel’s weakest character, a paradox compounded by his being the least vulnerable character. His existence, whether at home or at work, at play or when deadly serious, in Manhattan or in the housing projects of the North Bronx, largely consists of following the lead of others. Although these other characters have nowhere near as strong a claim on readers’ attention as does Mitchell, it is with them that the power rests to shape the course of his life. Kelley adroitly provides them with that power by equipping them with an institutional identity and the security of the type. Mitchell is so consumed with himself that he continually exhibits an air of futile fretfulness and vague unsettledness.

It is Mitchell’s narcissistic absorption by the minutiae of his own needs and status that deprives him of a perspective on the world around him. However, the manner in which his ego blinkers him also effectively protects him from the moral consequences of his social and psychological immaturity. His compelling urge not to be disturbed by what the world brings to his attention—whether a murder committed by a friend or his wife’s giving birth to a black son—sees him through life’s moral challenges unscathed. His ludicrous and impetuous decision to forsake his wife for the bohemian Winky, whom he believes to be the character Nancy Knickerbocker from the soap opera Search for Love, has its issue at the same level of moral vacuity that pervades Mitchell and his world. Were it not for the quasi-incestuous attentions of his mother-in-law, it is doubtful if Mitchell would pursue his “co-genitor,” Cooley.

The only area in which Mitchell leaves aside his spinelessness, biddability, and prevarication is in his sexual relations with Tam. His assertiveness here is less a function of emotional adequacy than it is the implementation of manhood conceived of as a set of generic cultural codes and preconditioned responses. The series of events that leads Mitchell to display his torso for the edification of a bathing beauty, in the hope that she might find a way of reciprocating, leads to his falling flat on his face, showing him that his body is not as reliable as he had imagined and leading to a period of convalescence that makes Search for Love a staple of his days.

As the marriage of Mitchell and Tam elapses and as Tam’s pregnancy progresses, Mitchell’s sexual supremacy is increasingly undermined. Tam turns shrewish and dismissive and becomes given to bouts of disenchanted recrimination on the subject of vanished romance. Tam’s dissatisfactions are a mirror image of her husband’s. The feelings of unrelatedness and detachment that sap the marriage are an intimate microcosm of the deficient values that substantiate Mitchell’s position in the world. Tam is as absorbed in her own needs as Mitchell is in his. Her encounter with Cooley that creates the problem twins is the result of the tedium of Tam’s life with Mitchell, a life centered around visits to the beauty shop. These visits have the moral standing of Mitchell’s three-martini lunches. Tam’s resolve to keep the twins, regardless of color, is defensive in nature and is adopted to keep her appalled mother and speechless husband at a distance rather than to express a revolution in consciousness. The obstetrical, as opposed to the emotional, consequences of sex underline the essential barrenness of the Pierce marriage, a condition to which Tam makes as complete a contribution as the narrow range of her character can permit.

In contrast, the specifically black section of dem details Mitchell’s pursuit of Opal and Cooley. He attempts to provide them with a status that, under normal circumstances, he had arrogantly and unreasoningly denied them. This part of the novel has an atmosphere of community and vivid variety that the novel’s Manhattan world seems implicitly to repudiate and to be incapable of embodying. However, Kelley is careful not to make the contrast too stereotypical. The condition of Opal’s consciousness, the fact that she assumes a certain degree of moral complicity in the false allegations of pilfering on the basis of her association with Cooley, is also susceptible to the author’s critical exposure.

The need for the black men whom Mitchell meets to defend themselves, whether by militant rhetoric or more devious and subtle techniques of social survival, provides a telling contrast to the protagonist’s complacent lack of awareness. Also noteworthy is the readiness of such minor characters as Mitchell’s guide, Carlyle Bedlow, the resourceful go-between who occupies the cultural and moral space between exploitable Opal and opportunistic Cooley, to assume that there is an inevitable violent concommitant to Mitchell’s quest. The character of Cooley is more elusive, and for that very reason brings an understated eloquence to the didactic subtext that underlies and animates the satirist’s art in dem. All that transpires between Cooley and Mitchell, and implicitly between the worlds and cultures that the two represent, is a bond that is as inscrutable and subcutaneous as biological reality but that cannot be adequately acknowledged or addressed. The circumstances that bring the characters together and offer the possibility of twinning their destinies has the ultimate effect of bringing into focus all the reasons why the races remain apart.

Critical Context

The concerns in dem are addressed with such economy and directness that the novel’s considerable literariness may be overlooked. Its satirical extravagances, however, reveal the novel’s illustrious lineage. The complicated variations by which motifs of innocence and culpability, infantilism and maturity, intertwine relate dem to a number of age-old storytelling traditions. Among those that have the most resonance with regard to the modern, satirical sensibility of dem are the simpleton narrative, the tale based on the waywardness of fortune, the infant-substitution story, and the career of the confidence man. The latter is used to scathing effect in Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and there is in dem something of Twain’s mordant derision of human cupidity and blindness, though the overall effect lacks Twain’s bleakness.

In addition to dem’s intriguing literary lineage and Kelley’s transposition of it to a contemporary urban setting, it is the social and cultural background to that setting that provides the most accessible sense of the novel’s context and relevance. dem may be regarded as a cultural document of some significance. Reflecting very much not only the revaluation of black America that was attempted by African Americans in the 1960’s, the novel also reflects the revolution in African American artistic expression that that decade also witnessed. The daring themes, angry tone, and innovative sense of form that distinguish much African American art of the time are also prominent features of dem, though arguably Kelley does not endorse their revolutionary potential as wholeheartedly as other artists of his generation. The novel’s caustic anatomy of the ineradicable racist element in American society is, however, a noteworthy expression of the outspokenness and righteous impatience of its time, and makes both fitting and understandable its dedication by the author “to the Black people in (not of) America.”

Bibliography

Abraham, Willie. Introduction to dem. New York: Collier Books, 1969. Makes a strong case for the artistic and cultural significance of dem. Includes a consideration of Kelley’s social thought both as it emerges in the course of the novel and as it is developed in his fiction overall.

Bone, Robert. “Outsiders.” The New York Times Books Review, September 24, 1967, 5. dem is one of the novels reviewed in this article, which indentifies the novel’s scope and incisiveness and notes its contribution to African American letters.

Jaffe, Dan. “Almost Real.” Review of dem, by William Melvin Kelley. Prairie Schooner 42 (Spring, 1968): 83. Review of dem that is instructively averse to the novel’s satirical character. A revealing footnote to the critical reception of African American fiction.

Newquist, Roy, ed. Conversations. New York: Rand McNally, 1967. Includes an in-depth interview with Kelley. Of particular relevance are Kelley’s attitudes toward issues raised by the Civil Rights movement.

Rosenblatt, Roger. Black Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Discussion of dem focusing on the novel’s perspective on interracial relations, which has a crucial bearing on how the book’s conclusion is assessed.

Sundquist, Eric J. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Study of the literary representation of the relationship between Jewish Americans and African Americans after World War II. Includes a chapter on Kelley’s fiction.

Weyant, Jill. “The Kelley Saga: Violence in America.” CLA Journal 19 (December, 1975): 210-220. Examination of Kelley’s fiction focusing on his critique of the moral and physical violence of American society. Conceived as an overview, the article contains numerous scattered excerpts from dem to illustrate the overall perspective.

Wright, John S. Foreword to dem, by William Melvin Kelley. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 2000. Reappraisal of dem and of Kelley’s career from the point of view of the turn of the twenty-first century.