High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney

First published: 1992

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The 1960’s to the 1980’s

Locale: The “Old Country” (the South, especially the Savannah River area), Indianapolis, New York City, London, and Paris

Principal Characters:

• The unnamed narrator, a young, reluctant member of the black elite in search of his identity
• The narrator’s family, his parents and two sisters
• Grandfather Eustace, an old-style black intellectual whose influence the narrator cannot escape
• The beige stepgrandmother, Grandfather Eustace’s second wife
• Aunt Clara, the narrator’s great-aunt, matriarch of Opelika, Alabama
• Hans Hansen, the narrator’s best friend during high school
• Djuna Barnes, an aging writer for whom the narrator does odd jobs
• Maurice, the assistant managing editor of a publishing company where the narrator works
• The Power Bitch, the secretary of the publishing company’s managing editor
• Virtea, head of the publishing company’s Black Caucus

The Novel

Narrated in the first person by an unnamed protagonist whose story spans three decades, High Cotton seems obviously autobiographical, at least in broad outline. Like the novel’s protagonist, Darryl Pinckney is the product of an elite black family. His grandfather was graduated from Brown and Harvard Universities and was a minister. Pinckney too grew up in Indianapolis, was graduated from Columbia University, and worked for a New York publishing house, and he too has puzzled over the nature of black identity in America.

Yet how far the novel’s anecdotal details agree with the author’s life is another matter. The author was selective, both to be discreet and to make his points—around which he perhaps felt free to embroider and invent, since he presented his work as fiction.

The novel’s main story line traces the development of the young protagonist. It begins with his boyhood in Indianapolis during the era of the Civil Rights movement. As a child, the narrator gets mixed messages about his blackness: He is told that he is “just as good as anyone else out there,” but he still notices that some people “moved away from you at the movies.” For him, one of “the Also Chosen,” the future beckons, but still the past oppresses via the “collective power” of numerous older relatives who, heavy with their knowledge, “enlisted the departed” to their cause.

Most prominent among the “old-timers” is Grandfather Eustace, proud that he belongs to the black aristocracy, “a sort of dusky peerage with their degrees, professions, and good marriages among their own kind.” Grandfather Eustace is anxious to pass on his proud heritage to the narrator. Looking back, however, the narrator confesses that “I spent much of my life running from him, centripetal fashion, because he was, to me, just a poor old darky.”

The narrator and his grandfather, however, agree about the narrator’s neighborhood. After one visit with the narrator’s family, Grandfather Eustace refuses to return to their rundown house, which he says is “on the wrong side of Indianapolis.” The block has biting dogs, disreputable neighbors, and Buzzy, a twelve-year-old bully who throws bottles at passing cars and spouts Black Power slogans. Tormented by Buzzy, the bookish protagonist retreats into Anglophilic fantasies, imagining his home as the British Isles and himself as various British worthies.

Life opens up for the protagonist when his family moves to a predominately white suburb, right across from a country club. His grandfather coaches him on how to survive white classrooms, but happily he suffers “no traumas of any kind.” Instead, he becomes popular with his white classmates and teachers, and his best friend, Hans Hansen, is white. He has trouble only with black classmates, who call him “Dr. Thomas” or “Tom.”

The protagonist briefly joins the revolutionary Heirs of Malcolm, but he hardly seems committed (in a comic twist, Hans Hansen drives him to the group’s meetings in a sports car). He appears to join to satisfy his curiosity and his black critics and to reap “the social satisfactions of being a Black Power advocate in a suburban high school.” All in all, the protagonist seems well launched on a predictable life course. Thereafter, he enjoys “the paradise of integration” throughout high school, a trip to London, college at Columbia University, life in New York City, and a trip to Paris.

He seems willing to forget his blackness or to wear it lightly, as convenient—if the world will let him; however, the world does not. Despite his ease with the predominantly white world, it constantly reminds him of his blackness, which it sometimes defines in rude and stereotypical terms—for example, when Djuna Barnes insults him, when taxis do not stop for him, and when white women speed up their walks ahead of him. Other blacks, too, will not let him forget. One of these is his grandfather, who lives on in New York City and eventually dies in an Indianapolis nursing home.

The death of his grandfather compels the narrator to make a pilgrimage to the “Old Country,” Georgia. There, along the banks of the Savannah and Ogeechee Rivers, in Augusta, in family graveyards, and in the Thankful Baptist Church, the narrator finally confronts his black heritage. The novel ends with his profound and moving meditation on that heritage, the suffering it has involved, and the meaning of being black in America.

The Characters

High Cotton is replete with interesting characters, some developed only in brief sketches, others at more length. They are described directly, through the eyes of the narrator, who is marvelously observant and witty.

The narrator is characterized indirectly, primarily through his allusive language and wry tone. Otherwise, he is prone to be coy rather than confessional, at least about some aspects of his life. For example, readers learn nothing about his love life; in fact, the word “neuter” might best describe him, since the only principle he seems to represent is opportunism. He seems to have no strong commitments to any values or persons, including himself. Rather, he is in the process of finding himself, undergoing a prolonged adolescence supported by indulgent parents who send him checks even after he is graduated from college.

Once the narrator gets into a confessional mode, however, no one can be harder on himself. He acknowledges that for most of his life he has been “out of it,” that his indifference to the “old-timers” and the heritage they represent was “like a camouflage maneuver, a prolongation of the adolescent lament that I wasn’t real but everyone else was. . . .” He finally accepts his “responsibility to help my people, to honor the race.” In this sense, the whole book is a confession, an expiation, a modern rime of the ancient mariner (now become the black artist as a young man).

Many of the other characters are the protagonist’s relatives, particularly the old-timers, who fill in the sense of the black past and are lovable for their crankiness and personality. Each offers his or her record of suffering and response. Among these are Aunt Clara, who practically owns a small Southern town, and Uncle Castor, who found his outlet in jazz. Chief among the old-timers is Grandfather Eustace, who recognizes much of himself in the young narrator. Like the narrator, Grandfather Eustace is a highly intelligent man who endured a long adolescence and several trial careers before he found his calling. Unhappily, in the present Grandfather Eustace is “the emperor of out-of-it.”

Via other characters, the narrator surveys contemporary black life, from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements through equal opportunity and affirmative action. He gives a brief but charming portrayal of his parents, who take him to a civil rights march in chapter 1 and in the final chapter gently tweak him for not attending National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) conventions. A hilarious segment of the novel satirizes the Black Power movement, represented by Sister Egba and her followers in the Heirs of Malcolm. The publishing house where the narrator works contains another interesting collection of characters, including Big Boss, Little Boss, and the Power Bitch. After pressure from the Black Caucus, the bosses promote Maurice to assistant managing editor, but his new position only turns him into a glorified security guard “obliged to spy on employees.” His story demonstrates how equal opportunity and affirmative action have not brought an end to suffering and the need to respond.

Critical Context

High Cotton is a significant contribution to the discussion of race in America, providing a balance in several ways. For one, the novel calls attention to an often overlooked segment of African American society, a literate black middle class that has been established for generations. For another, it examines black identity as a complex concept that has changed over time and that is fraught with ambiguity. For still another, it stresses the weight of African American history on the present: “The past gets longer and longer,” the author notes. Finally, the book injects honesty into a public discussion almost stifled by stereotypes, clichés, ignorance, hypocrisy, and political correctness. Pinckney seems to take delight in opening up the discussion by revealing shibboleths and flinging around “bad” words (he refers to Harlem, for example, as “Valley of the Shines”).

In High Cotton, his first novel, Pinckney already has a successful voice, a voice that is shocking, erudite, entertaining, and distinctive. Prior to publishing the novel, he developed the voice by writing essays on African American literature for The New York Review of Books. So what if his narration in High Cotton does resemble a string of essays and anecdotes loosely tied together? This narration too seems to be part of his distinctive style.

Bibliography

Als, Hilton. “Word!” The Nation 254 (May 18, 1992): 667-670. Describes Pinckney as a writer who is interested in words rather than in promoting an agenda. In his criticism, Als writes, Pinckney explores black authors as writers “whose blackness, politics and flesh and blood made history through their language.” In High Cotton, Als claims, language is the key to the narrator’s search for identity, since it gives him “the voice needed to write his name in the field of existence.”

Bell, Pearl K. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 59 (Spring, 1992): 288-291. Pinckney struggles to convey the confusion and uncertainty about race and status that someone born into the black elite in the 1950’s had to try to sort out. At the end, the narrator is fiercely honest about the understanding he has reached regarding his blackness and about himself as an individual in relation to his race.

Chicago Tribune. March 3, 1992, V, p. 3.

The Christian Science Monitor. February 28, 1992, p. 13.

Fein, Esther B. “A Writer, but Not a Black Everyman.” The New York Times, April 9, 1992, pp. C17, C26. This article, based on an interview with Pinckney, notes parallels between him and the narrator of High Cotton. Mostly, however, the article records his desire not to be tagged as representative of any one class, race, or group. Rather, “he wants his book to be testimony not only of his race but of his devotion to literature as well.”

Kerr, Nora. “Part of My Story, but Not All.” Review of High Cotton, by Darryl Pinckney. The New York Times Book Review (February 2, 1992): 3. A generally favorable review that focuses on the main character of the novel, who, like Pinckney himself, is a young, middle-class African American from a highly educated family. Notes that Pinckney acknowledges that the book includes many of his own life experiences but denies it is autobiographical.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 23, 1992, p. 3.

Mars-Jones, Adam. “Other People’s Identities.” The Times Literary Supplement, August 14, 1992, 17. The narrator is one of the least self-revealing in literature. The novel shows a pattern of too little experience and too much analysis. Pinckney, or his narrator, seems to suffer from a morbid fear of direct statement.

The Nation. CCLIV, May 18, 1992, p. 667.

The New York Review of Books. XXXIX, March 26, 1992, p. 13.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, February 2, 1992, p. 3.

Partisan Review. LIX, Spring, 1992, p. 282.

Pinckney, Darryl. “Darryl Pinckney: An Interview.” Interview by Jan Garden Castro. American Poetry Review 23 (November-December, 1994): 9-14. Pinckney talks about the writers who have influenced him, among them Fyodor Dostoevski and James Baldwin. He discusses the characters in the novel and credits the unique narrative voice of High Cotton to his exposure to other authors’ experiments with narration.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVIII, December 6, 1991, p. 55.

Stuart, Andrea. “Invisible Man.” New Statesman and Society 5 (August 14, 1992): 38. Stuart finds High Cotton impressive technically but lacking in human qualities. She asks, “What is a black identity when poverty and deprivation play no part in your equation?” She describes the narrator as a nonentity (“the original invisible man”), dubs the book “a curiously chilly experience,” and wonders whether the author “has a heart at all.”

The Times Literary Supplement. August 14, 1992, p. 17.

The Washington Post Book World. XXII, February 23, 1992, p. 1.

White, Edmund. Review of High Cotton, by Darryl Pinckney. The New York Times Book Review 97 (February 2, 1992): 3. White applauds High Cotton as “the considered achievement of a seasoned mind.” In particular, he praises Pinckney for writing about race without succumbing to “a puerile political correctness’ [that] imposes hypocrisy on most writers. . . .” Instead, Pinckney “has dared to treat his theme with excruciating honesty” and “total freedom from restraint.”

Wood, Michael. “Living Is Easy.” The New York Review of Books 39 (March 26, 1992): 13-14. The narrator and Grandfather Eustace are the novel’s dubious but memorable heroes. The narrator does not deny his blackness but cannot accept the drastic simplifications that acknowledgment of blackness seems to imply. One’s color, the novel implies, is not who one is, but it is something one cannot fail to have.

The Yale Review. LXXX, July, 1992, p. 198.