Seduction by Light by Al Young

First published: 1988

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: Last decades of the twentieth century

Locale: Southern California

Principal Characters:

• Mamie Franklin, the protagonist, a former rhythm-and-blues singer and minor screen actress from Hattiesburg, Mississippi
• Burley Cole, Mamie’s common-law husband, the father of Kendall and stepfather of Mamie’s son, Benjie, and an avid junk collector
• Benjamin (Benjie) Franklin, the son who was conceived out of wedlock by Mamie and Harry Silvertone
• Harry Silvertone, the agent and film producer who helped Mamie start her film career in the 1950’s
• Theo, a handsome waiter at the Railroad Croissant café who becomes Mamie’s lover
• Brett Toshimura, a television news reporter

The Novel

Seduction by Light is Mamie Franklin’s story of her life and transition to death as she tells it in an exuberant, colloquial style. As if she were speaking in a conversation over coffee between old friends, Mamie often directly addresses readers: “You must know me well enough by now to know I’m kinda halfway out there mosta the time anyway.” Mamie’s monologue captures the earthy wit and wisdom of the former actress and band singer from Mississippi who works until her death as a domestic servant for an eccentric Hollywood couple.

The first part of the novel concerns Mamie’s relationship to her common-law husband, Burley Cole, whose death by heart attack in chapter 7 does not end their close relationship or his presence in the novel. Burley appears throughout the novel as a messenger to Mamie from beyond this world. He instructs her about the meaning of her own out-of-body travels, especially after she collapses on the sidewalk outside her house in Santa Monica, California, after the house is destroyed by an earthquake.

The aftermath of the devastating earthquake that rocks Santa Monica is the dramatic focus of the novel’s second half. The neck injuries Mamie sustains after being struck by debris as she escapes from her home with her young lover, Theo, cause the physical collapse that leads to Mamie’s spectacular travels into the unconscious realm, where she hovers in a dream state that is connected to both life and death. In her out-of-body travels, Mamie realizes important spiritual lessons, such as that her true spirit resides in a place distinct from the shell of her dying body.

Besides using her gift for double-sightedness to stay in contact with her late husband, Burley, and to perform her own out-of-body traveling, Mamie also contacts one of her heroes, the American patriot and inventor Ben Franklin. Mamie realizes that her connection to Ben Franklin stems from his helping to found a new nation, which is, in a metaphorical sense, related to Mamie’s enthusiasm for going beyond tired conventions and toward an embrace of new experiences, including the experience of life after death. Franklin tells her in comical but philosophically illuminating passages that he has been “appointed to inform” Mamie of her imminent death. Franklin’s role is to welcome Mamie to her “higher self” and to take her time-traveling with him through the ages. They visit France during the Revolution of 1789 and ancient Egypt, where Mamie discovers a resemblance between Ben Franklin and King Tut. Franklin’s warning to Mamie that her time on Earth is “severely limited” enables her to live in the moment and to feel a connection to all the people she meets. Ben tells Mamie to “bear in mind that ’now’ is the only time there is” and also to “let go of the idea that anyone else is separate from what you like to think of as yourself.”

Besides learning about the interconnectedness of all people through Franklin’s message, Mamie, in the aftermath of the earthquake that sends the city of Santa Monica into a state of emergency, learns at first hand about the bonds that exist among strangers through the power of television. The instant transmission of images through broadcast journalism disseminates news of Mamie’s tragic loss of all of her belongings throughout California via an on-the-scene report and an emotional interview conducted by a local television journalist named Brett Toshimura. Toshimura takes a personal interest in Mamie’s troubles and uses her position to publicize Mamie’s story. Toshimura’s interview leads the former actress, ironically, to a celebrity status well beyond the fame she was able to achieve when she was officially in show business. Her story touches a chord in countless viewers, whose donations to assist Mamie come to more than forty thousand dollars.

Mamie realizes at the end of the novel that she is, finally, on the verge of disconnection from her body for the last time. The last scenes affirm the general humanity of the community in helping Mamie through donations, but the last scenes also allow Mamie the space to settle her personal affairs. Prior to her death, she learns that Benjie, the talented son that she had conceived secretly with her agent, Harry Silvertone, has met with his true father, and that Benjie’s career in screenwriting will be assisted through Harry’s connections in Hollywood. “The world could do anything it wanted to now; I’d finally gotten my boy and his daddy together. Where they took it from there on out was their business.”

The ghost of Burley cannot accept his own death until he sees that his son, Kendall, is taken care of financially. Mamie is able to relieve Burley’s burden by helping Kendall to locate a mysterious set of important documents long buried in Burley’s trunk. Mamie’s mailing of these documents to Kendall just prior to her death helps to ensure his financial well-being.

The Characters

The energy of Seduction By Light’s narrative is sustained through the sheer dramatic force, poetic insights, and folk wisdom of the novel’s protagonist and overwhelming presence, Mamie Franklin, who is also the novel’s first-person narrator. Mamie endures and triumphs over circumstances, including an earthquake that devastates her home and that threatens her physical health, through a spiritual impulse that allows her to perceive a linkage between the living and the dead and an interconnectedness between all persons:

I dont go to church much anymore—only at Easter and Christmastime—but there’s a church in my heart I slip into now and then. The message I get whensoever I turn inside is always the same: There’s somethin bigger than me or the world or the whole universe that I’ll have to be answerin to by and by.

In spite of the trouble Mamie experiences—an attempted robbery of her home, the death of her beloved common-law husband, the destruction of her worldly possessions, and her death through the injuries incurred during the earthquake—her course is toward a liberation from the worries of the physical world and a heightened perspective from which she can experience a final and lasting peace: “And pretty soon I could tell at last there was nothin left to see but the sea, and nothin left to do but keep on swimmin upstream in that sweet, bright river of light.”

Although Mamie is a psychic whose out-of-body travels and conversations with the departed might suggest to some readers that her allegiance is strictly to an extraordinary reality beyond the physical world, her acceptance of death enables her to embrace life with vigor and intensity. Born on a farm in Mississippi, Mamie still gains a deep satisfaction from gardening, an act that literally connects her to the soil: “When I’m busy gardenin, I wanna be by myself. That’s where the happiness starts bubblin up from, from deep down inside nobody but me.” Her enjoyment of the physical world is also showcased in her lyrical descriptions of the passion and love she feels for her young boyfriend, Theo.

Mamie’s understanding of the interrelationship of life and death, of sadness and of joy, and of the comic and the tragic, as well as her thirst for experience, allows her to overcome the loss of her home and most of her worldly belongings in the earthquake. Her understanding allows her to still consider herself to be lucky because she survived the disaster. As she says, “If you play it right, you might come out with your life, which is all you ever had, anyway!”

Critical Context

In addition to writing novels, Al Young writes poetry of the African American experience. Part of his literary project, in poetry and in prose, has been to pay tribute not to the African American literary tradition to which his work obviously belongs but to the African American musical tradition from which his creative writing borrows much of its rhythmic language as well as many of its important themes. “That’s why I’ve written poems about [saxophonist] Coleman Hawkins, [blues singer] Ma Rainey, [blues singer and guitarist] Robert Johnson, and [saxophonist] Illinois Jacquet—a whole lot of geniuses,” Young has stated. Although Mamie Franklin is a fictional characterization, her story should be placed into this critical context of literary work that stands in praise of the African American performing arts.

One of the important ways in which Mamie Franklin experiences a spiritual identification with other persons is through African American music, dancing, and theater arts. Herself a professional singer in a minor but successful rhythm-and-blues band from the 1950’s called the Inklings, Mamie recognized early in her singing career the special role music has played in the lives of many African Americans. “Music, I began to figure out, wasnt exactly what we mostly think it is: entertainment. There was somethin medicinal about it too.” The value of blues singing, according to Mamie, should be judged by the degree to which the singer is able to make his or her experience appear universal and recognizable to listeners.

Young often expresses through his novel the importance other African American performing artists have played in providing role models for African Americans such as Mamie, who grew up under the yoke of Jim Crow laws in Mississippi before the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950’s and 1960’s brought the possibilities of political, social, and educational advancement to many African Americans. Mamie recalls how important it was for her to see actress Lena Horne in lead roles in quality films that required more of her than to “come on glitterin real slinky and glamorous and sexy to perform some song.”

Through Mamie’s observations about the healing powers of African American music and through her recognition of the importance of African American visibility in Hollywood films, Seduction by Light becomes a powerful homage to the spiritual dimension of the African American performing arts. It is a monument to the influence African American culture has had on national and international culture since the breaking down of racial barriers in the late 1950’s allowed the folk, blues, and jazz music of African Americans to be heard throughout the world.

Bibliography

Broughton, Irv, ed. “Al Young.” In The Writer’s Mind: Interviews with American Authors. 3 vols. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989-1990. Young discusses the importance of black rituals, storytelling, the idea of music as a social force, his relationship to the South of his childhood, and the need to “believe in something more all encompassing than one’s own limited sense of self.”

Carroll, Michael. “Al Young: Jazz Griot.” In African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behavior, edited by James L. Conyers, Jr. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Examination of Young as a “jazz griot,” that is, as mixing and reinterpreting the conventions of traditional African storytelling and modern African American jazz.

Fairbanks, Carol, and Eugene A. Engeldinger. Black American Fiction: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Includes a thorough bibliography of Young’s poetry, novels, short fiction, and jazz criticism, as well as of reviews and essays about Young’s work until 1978.

Harper, Michael S., Larry Kart, and Al Young. “Jazz and Letters: A Colloquy.” TriQuarterly 68 (Winter, 1987): 118-158. Young discusses the relationship between poetic language and the rhythms of jazz music, as well as the role of Jack Kerouac in shaping a jazz-inflected American literature.

O’Brien, John. “Al Young.” In Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Young discusses his theory of poetry as the journey of the self as it seeks unity with other people and nature.

Schultz, Elizabeth. “Search for ’Soul Space’: A Study of Al Young’s Who Is Angelina (1975) and the Dimensions of Freedom.” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1982. Although this essay focuses on Angelina Green, a hero from one of Young’s earlier novels, Schultz’s understanding of Angelina’s character creates a suggestive reading for the character of Mamie Franklin.