‘They Call it Stormy Monday. . . and Thursday’s Oh So Sad’: Notes on John Ridley’s National—which is to say personal—Pride by Ed Pavlić

‘They Call it Stormy Monday. . . and Thursday’s Oh So Sad’: Notes on John Ridley’s National—which is to say personal—Pride by Ed Pavlić | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
. . . Thursday morning, half awake at 6:30-something, there’s a NPR interview with John Ridley, screenwriter for Twelve Years a Slave, in the air. Calm voices. Near the end of the interview, led by the obliquely-leaning question and gauging the distance between “then and now,” Ridley said: “I think that what cannot get lost is where we’ve come as a country, and I think there has to be a sense of pride that we have come this far.” Then, after an anecdote about a recent moment when, at an event—one suspects a fund-raiser or something like it—at his children’s school, his father had a casual conversation with a white woman named Ridley about the possibility that her family may have owned his in Virginia. Ridley continued: “why don't we find out how we got to a point now where our kids or our grandkids are in the same school, enjoying the same privileges, that we are citizens in the same country and can actually talk about this.” What snapped me awake was the blurry space between where “we’ve come as a country” and how “we got to a point where our kids. . .”. Half-awake, I wondered: ‘is that the same we?’  
Awake and at work, and in a collapsing interval of time before my morning class, I go back to his statement because, half-asleep, I’d taken him to mean that “all our kids” in this country “where we’ve come,” in which we are citizens, go to “the same school[s] and enjoy the same privileges.” Which is outrageously false, of course. I listened again, basically, to check his (or my) sanity, and now I see that, in the latter comment, he was talking in very precise terms about the conversation between white and black Ridley's, who once may have been owner and owned and now can meet eye to eye as fellow citizens, as equals. Interesting. 
But, one wonders what demographics permitted that instance of equality between “citizens”? For instance, is that a public school event? I doubt it. If so, since the word “public” as pertains to schools needs some serious scrutiny, what kind of public school? Is it really public or is it serving a restricted, elite segment of the public? Are there any really “public” schools? Or, leaving the real private schools out of it, are there high-end, quasi-public schools and low-end disasters? And, how many of each and who has “got to a point” where they can be together in which?
Demographically, one suspects, it’s exactly the distance between these two Ridley’s and the rest of their “citizens in the same country,” who, one knows, absolutely do not “share the same privileges,” that makes the conversation—not to say the so-called “pride”—possible at all. Not to mention what the word “privilege” is doing in a conversation about “citizens.” Citizen is a designation, last I checked, that had to do with a Bill of Rightsand amendments not privileges. One of those rights, for instance, in the 14th Amendment, guarantees, as a right, equal access to public accommodations and institutions. Like, schools for instance? Why not? 
This silent slip between the “pride” of personal success as a gauge of “where we’ve come as a country” is, in fact, a very very common and very dangerous rhetorical—or maybe a psychological—ploy. Or, maybe it’s really a commercial ploy. So, it seems at every turn, even as relates to a film, an acclaimed film, about slavery, the conversation between “citizens” is padded, partial, leaves so much out, not only facts but textures of experience. In short, such conversations feel and taste exactly like any other sales pitch for Gatorade or Chevy trucks. Is it an accident that commercials for Twelve Years a Slave feature the tag line “the story of one man’s struggle. . .” in a way that slips almost imperceptibly into ads that begin, “A man and his truck. . . “?
And, Ridley's statement is about a singular conversation and likely a relatively exclusive one, ok. But, it’s positioned in a way that easily, for me way too easily, slips into place as a general comment. The former—singular success in a family—is what it is. It describes precisely the sort of “progress,” an American exceptional, individual progress, that’s always been part of the tale the country tells about itself. Usually, as Robert Frost would have it, that story is told with a sigh (by which Frost meant, a lie), ages and ages hence. Romance. The latter—the singular story mapped onto “where we’ve come as a country”—insidiously silences terrains of violent inequality that threaten any meaning the word “citizen” or “public”—not to say “pride”—can possibly have. In that sentence a citizen is someone with a credit card at a mall, public is a place where you go for yours—or your kids—and I go for mine—or my kids—, and pride means ego.
Beyond the mutual collapse of meaning borne by the term citizen and public in those sentences, which is to say in our lives, I’d argue that individual achievement understood as a sign of national success isn’t a sign of pride; it’s a sign of vanity. When such vanities are dispersed in the media via interviews, commercials and films—and in ways that make it hard to tell which is which—they challenge one’s sense of reality, even the reality of one’s own life.
Now, as pertains to citizens, as Malcolm used to say, “if you're a citizen, why do you have to protest for your citizen’s rights?" Rights are rights: rigorous, legal indexes for citizenship: votes, schools, wages, access to health care. This rigor is a necessary, ideological debate. Privileges are things that you lose if you misbehave on the golf course. Confusion between the two is dangerous to relationships between citizens even if it doesn’t always threaten the chat at a cocktail party.      
If they’re going to be art, I think films and poems and novels with integrity must be pills that such a discourse simply can’t swallow or at least can’t comfortably digest. If one’s safe, or feels safe, or thinks he or she feels safe, sales pitches like Ridley’s are reassuring, I suppose. The NPR interviewer seemed to be doing fine. I can't really see how this works but, as I look around, it seems the only conclusion is that it does work. Whatever that means.  Maybe that’s what’s taking all the jobs?
But, what if one isn’t safe? What if one is in debt with questionable employment; what if a bank that used to support the owners of one’s family—or someone’s family—just took the home equity one had managed to accrue over 20 years; what if one’s kids don’t go to school with the Ridley’s and Beaver Cleaver and them? Then, such sales pitches simply can't be accommodated. One tunes it out along with the confederate flags and other commonly encountered assaults on our humanity and our citizenship. This work requires a dangerous kind of numbness. Otherwise, one listens and either feels slightly crazy because one’s life, one’s real life, the one happening off-mic, bears no relationship to what’s being described, or one gets mad. Or, both or all three.  
And, numb, crazy or angry (or whatever combination), man, that’s no way to start one's day as a citizen. Stormy Monday. In a moment of weakness, one guesses it would be better to start out prideful and safe. Sure. You know, and if we’re going to be vain, I'd like my Ferrari waxed and waiting for me each morning when I come out of my message session, too. Or, at least I think I would, which is option number four, longing for what the Jones’s, or the Ridley’s, have, for the kind of success that passes for national progress. For “privileges.” And, that’s the American psychosis in a nutshell. Ok. What'd I say? Good morning, blues, sit down. But, you know what flies on Friday. Same as what talks. And, we all know what walks.
At one moment John Ridley talks about “where we’ve come as a country” and, in the next, explains it with an example of where he, and his family, are. At the very least, he could note the fact that, one, the “white Ridley’s” might have been there for quite a while already; and, two, when the other Ridley’s arrived at whatever prideful place in the pyramid provided the—peculiar?—sensation of arrival, it’d be nice if he made it clear that the whole country didn’t—and due to the unfortunate nature of pyramids, couldn’t—come along. Otherwise, one’s pride can only be vanity, a disguise, to be—and it will be—used as a refutation of other people’s reality and an indictment of their integrity, a typical Thursday between occupants of the dreamland. A real conversation between citizens would have to talk about how and why most of us are right here***

Ed Pavlić’s  most recent books are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009),Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (UGA P, 2008) and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue(Copper Canyon P, 2001) and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minn P, 2002). His prizes include the National Poetry Series Open Competition, the Darwin Turner Memorial Award from African American Review, The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, and the Author of the Year Award from The Georgia Writers Association. He has had fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The MacDowell Colony, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.