The "also and also" of joy

The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In Albert Murray’s melodic, synchronistic universe of The Spyglass Tree, the second novel of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Scooter is the ecstatic, signifying, smile-cracking, knowledge-devouring, hard-working eyewitness and proclaimer of goodness in the midst of the darkest days of Jim Crow. He voraciously pursues his studies at a university alerted by the chiming of the same plantation bell that metered the lives of slaves only generations before. Scooter is still the kid in the chinaberry tree in Gasoline Point cataloging what he could and couldn't see from the most prestigious perch in his yard but his vision has expanded and he desperately and joyfully identifies and names every good thing, every good person, everyone who ever worked with him and contributed and cared and challenged him to get where he knew he could get. Ask yourself, whatever color yourself is, what kind of image of young African American males you’d have if the only information; visual, written or aural was pulled from your daily surfing of the internet. When you think about the word “intellectual” what images come to mind? It’s as if Murray knew, because his universe is simultaneously past, present and future, that no one would believe that these outwardly cool, hip, jook joint jiving young black men were smarter than “all y’all” combined, to quote my friends in the South, so he proves it by frantically but carefully and precisely documenting every book, discipline, artistic nuance, sensibility, skill and discovery of Scooter and his classmates whose insular academic community existed almost invisibly within a Southern white world that all too often relegated the entire student body to the mythological realm of no good n-----s. Encounters with whites were avoided or carefully managed and the city and surrounding landscape were divided into black and white zones in which each respective community circulated freely, careful to avoid friction along the edges. Murray doesn't ignore the bad folks, black or white, but they intrude on Scooter’s world uninvited and he manages them and spends no more time than necessary doing it. This portrait of the artist as a young man is exuberant, lyrical, eye-opening and humbly awe-inspiring.



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