The Hottest Water in Chicago.

A work of jazz-prose, Gayle Pemberton's The Hottest Water in Chicago eclectically ruminates on family history and personalities, American history, race, pop culture (especially the movies and television), and gender as shapers of the writer's and others' individual identities. The fifteen essays eschew traditional, linear argumentative structures; instead, themes appear, are abruptly and without transition replaced by other riffs, and then, in the context established by apparent diversions and irrelevancies, reappear in last (but not final) chords. Throughout, amid a profusion of other topics, the book explores racist uses of images of blackness and black strategies of resistance in both audience and artist.

The jazz aspect of Hottest Water appears not only in the structure of the essays but in Pemberton's understanding of their collaborative genesis. Despite being a loner, Pemberton accents connection: "Only at rare times have I shortened this distance created between the world and me and participated with my whole self. Though I love a number of people and, to my chagrin, am still in love with one or two, the only love songs I have to sing are to my family" (117). Her epilogue, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," expands this tribute, playing off Montaigne's understanding of autonomous self, self-created: "I had no memory, no consciousness, no sight, no hearing, no touch, without the pure simplicity and utter intricacy of the fabric woven of my life and the lives of my family. My book is |consubstantial with its authors.'" (258).

The printed jazz composition-cum-autobiography-cum-cultural meditation might be profoundly irritating with a less skilled writer. Here, however, the reader gets not only substantial intellectual insights but the sense of gradual discovery that characterizes the process of making a friend. For a writer who values privacy, Pemberton makes herself truly vulnerable by recounting not only formative events, often quite painful, but also the eccentricities that most people hide from all but intimates. The reader stays interested because of Pemberton's wit, incisiveness, and originality.

Pemberton follows many essayists (such as Ellison and Baldwin) who have expressed the ironic absurdities of black American experience; she adds a wicked sense of fun in deflating pretense--her descriptions of an academic gathering where "a lorgnette salesman could have made a killing" (203) and an English department picnic should become classics. Though the jazz structures may puzzle the reader who misses the significance of a reference, individual sentences sparkle with clarity: "Those who criticize [literature] in terms of public relations and sociology run the risk of becoming censors--a filthy avocation, and particularly dangerous to anyone who belongs to a minority group" (100). Advanced composition classes might profitably ponder that choice of avocation.

This incisive wit combines with originality to surprise the reader out of old patterns of thought. For instance, Pemberton contrasts the traditional activities surrounding a son's and a daughter's birth by mentioning the immediate addition of "& Son" on business cards or the initiation of a college savings plan for the boy, coupled with the assumption that the daughter will pursue domesticity exclusively. As a sage feminist, I nodded premature agreement with the expected follow-up analysis of female victimization only to be greeted by: "These extremes illuminate just how easy it is for sons who resist programming to be disappointments, and how daughters can rise far beyond their parents' dreams" (241). Pemberton's often understated wit changes the perspective and rhetorically reverses the power in situation after situation. Having experienced class-condescension from a former friend eager to have Pemberton work in organizing an exclusive African American feast to Feed Biafra, Pemberton notes that the incident was in "awful conformity with my belief that giving money to someone doesn't change the giver, doesn't alter the system" (206). The neat turn of phrase shifts from the cultural assumption that, of course, the recipient of largesse must be helped/forced to change in order not to need the gift; it assumes instead that social conditions constructing the giver are the necessary focus of reform.

All of the collection's essays forcefully analyze specific experiences filtered through a self-aware consciousness with a wide range of referents. At their best, they have a kind of Baldwinian intensity (though th structuring makes for more variation in pitch than Baldwin's prose often possesses). Taken separately, the different pieces offer divergent pleasures, and every essay offers surprising insights. "Professor Dearest," for example, mentions offhandedly the writer's discovery of her great-grandmother's scrapbook of newspaper articles on black people, which is also her annotated cookbook--shades of Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills! Those interested specifically in literary criticism may be most interested in "The Koan of Nana," which moves from a discussion of Ellison and Wright to contemporary black women writers, and in "O Porgy! O Bess!," which develops a concept called "triple consciousness," a bit of signifying on Du Bois.

One of my favorites, "On Andrew Wyeth, Checked Suits, Broken Hair, Busted Dreams, and Transcendence," gives some idea of the book's method in the title. As the heterogeneous series suggests, it progresses through many issues related only by associations in Pemberton's consciousness. While the other essays ground their discussion of images largely in movies, "On Andrew Wyeth" considers photographs. The essay begins with a quotation from Roland Barthes on the photograph, then moves to a remembered image of five children from the infamous Cabrini Green housing project crossing a street in Chicago, at Easter time, which she and her sister witnessed. Profoundly disturbed by the children's apparent abandonment by adults, they grieved particularly for the oldest, whom they imaged as prematurely adult.

From there, Pemberton moves to memories of Easter during her childhood. Soon she is telling us about her sister and herself as photogaphers, then admiring her sister's dedicated sixteen years of teaching French to inner-city high school children. Admiration has not always been her chief attitude toward this older sister, however, and she remembers their very early violent sibling interactions. This early time is preserved in their baby photos, which she uses to test and discard another Barthes quotation on the flatness of photos. A long description of her sister's struggles with disfiguring eczema and segregated Kansas schools segues into remembered sibling battles. Finally prepared to win, the child Gayle prepared one hundred snowballs to ambush her sister--and was too tired to throw them. Her sister, however, photographed the snowballs and their exhausted maker.

Pemberton then summarizes the sisters' developments and considers a new quote from Barthes about the production and consumption of images in the United States. Barthes stimulates her to think about the images of blacks, particularly black men, in movies. From there, she remembers a picture of the murdered Emmett Till and other pictures of racist violence. Almost in compensation, she moves to one of her father's pictures, a photo of the 1963 March on Washington with Camilla Williams, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther, Stokely Carmichael, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Again, judging from her complex reactions to this picture, she rejects Barthes's notion of the flatness of a photo. Her mind turns to Andrew Wyeth's Day of the Fair, whose black subject she identifies with her sister; further, "if the girl in the painting were white, the emotion expressed would be sentimental and transient, without the power that the blackness and its historical meanings and racial longing bring to it" (62). Returning to the Easter sight of the Cabrini Green children, she struggles to

recognize that the image their procession

burned into my mind is useless

to me unless I can redeem it. For seeing

them as pathetic specters, gliding

toward the obscenity of their housing-project

home, makes them dead to

me--and they are not.... They are not

flat on some page of my memory, but

attest to the truth and the lies about

people living blighted lives. And for

all I know (and this is not madness

either) someone is--some ones are--eagerly

waiting for them to come home.

(63) Among its several subjects, the essay gives a fine portrait of the sisters' changing relationship over many years. Through Pemberton's sister, it portrays and analyzes the courage of a severely ill child coping with social ills like racism. But in the end, this wandering meditation comes home to the children of Cabrini Green and affirms their reality and complexity above any interpretation of them, even Pemberton's and her sister's. The viewer's power to redeem an image--indeed, the viewer's responsibility to do so with images like that of the remembered children--prefigures Pemberton's later discussion of black artists' subversion of racist texts through their triply-conscious performances.

As the consideration and complication of double consciousness might suggest, Du Bois provides one of the unifying motifs for Hottest Water. These begin with the third essay's title-allusion, "Is it Maya? Or: Notes from Beyond the Veil," and progress through the full-scale examination in "On the Lower Frequencies" of what The Souls of Black Folk might have meant to her maternal grandfather: A contemporary of Du Bois, Papa annotated his copy and probably composed the poem, "From Behind the Veil," that Pemberton finds written on the back flyleaves. In many ways this book works against the obliteration of black history, imaged in an early essay by the freeway whose construction destroyed the L.A. home of Pemberton's grandparents, and hence a part of her childhood. Musing on Du Bois allows Pemberton to connect her experience not only with the recognized, public, intellectual forefather but with the unknown and perhaps finally unknowable but nevertheless valuable grandfather.

Her expansion of double consciousness to triple consciousness in "O Porgy! O Bess!" moves beyond individuals to sketch a group strategy of aesthetic resistance related to masking. Masking, however, has usually been explored as a subversive technique of individuals facing overwhelming force--the actor conforms for a limited time to the white audience's expectations for his/her own purposes, redeeming the behavior by its final results. Triple consciousness accents communication between African Americans rather than black-white communications, relying on an awareness of black history in both actors and black audience to change the meaning of whole artistic structures.

The Hottest Water in Chicago offers a model of simultaneous participation in literary creation and literary criticism. To offer only one example, "I Light Out for the Territory" examines Pemberton's 1965-66 experience as a foreign-exchange student. The title, of course, alludes to one of the most famous of nineteenth-century literary searchers for freedom, Huck Finn; ironically, Pemberton's "territory" turns out to be England, whose social milieu allows her

to live with a self I had had no opportunity

to know in the confines of an

American Middle West where race and

habit retarded a teenager's discovery

of her own character and mettle.... I

began to realize that one of racism's

aims is to keep black people intellectual

and emotional provincials. The necessity

of concentrating on surviving in

black skins saps the energies; not only

does it keep real political and social

power in the hands of whites, but it

makes the self no more than a sociological

fact, dancing, marionette-style, to

a degrading tune. (142)

This last image skillfully moves the reader from Huck Finn to Invisible Man (Tod Clifton displays such a puppet). Pemberton never approaches literary traditions as sufficient in themselves to address subsequent experience. In this case, her insight into racism's limiting effects developed from her inability to respond articulately to an English person's challenge to justify the war in Vietnam. Pemberton's writing insists on further growth on the continued meditation on a continuing black American experience.

An eminently usable book in the classroom, The Hottest Water in Chicago would work well in courses on American literature, African American literature, autobiography, the essay, and literary or cultural criticism. Hottest Water breaks through the totalizing terms and stereotypes so quick to arise within multicultural syllabi that use a very few pieces of literature to represent various ethnic groups: Pemberton's family lived in Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Kansas, and California--nary a Southerner among them; her mother did not work outside her home after marriage; one of her grandfathers was a city architect who designed, among other more lasting structures, ice palaces in Minneapolis. As part of a course in African American literature, the book might offer commentary on many themes--other black women's complex reactions to racist movies in contrast to Pauline Breedlove's internalization of their racist images in The Bluest Eye, for example, or the influence of Du Bois on subsequent generations. In a class on the personal essay, any of Hottest Water's selections would supply interesting issues in organization and development. As a collection, it's a kissing friend to Baldwin's and Ellison's essays, a sister to the melding of personal experience, historical experience, and cultural examination in Patricia Williams's The Alchemy of Race and Rights. As a contribution to new forms of women's autobiography, Hottest Water ranks with Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior.

Pemberton at one point puzzles over the reason that she has not engaged in academic publishing, which she generously assesses as only 80 percent junk. Perhaps some of the answer lies in the exclusion, until very recently, of personal history and perspective from literary criticism. Pemberton's comments on American literary traditions and more broadly on American cultural productions might enliven classes in literary criticism in much the same way that Leslie Fiedler's work did for an earlier generation, but I'm betting that her work will wear better. The Hottest Water in Chicago rewards serious attention: Read it, talk about it, teach it.

Pemberton, Gayle. The Hottest Water in Chicago. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992. 226 pp. $19.95 hardcover. Garden City: Doubleday, 1992. 226 pp. $10.95 paperback.