Ofay

by Earl Shorris

Josh loved Negroes. On the worst street of the ghetto, a street of junk and jazzing, hipsters and hustlers, he tried to forget he was white.

Genres: Fiction

191 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Earl Shorris was an American writer and social critic. He is best known for establishing the Clemente Course in the Humanities, named after baseball great and humanitarian Roberto Clemente. The Clemente Course is an "educational institution founded in 1995 to teach the humanities at the college level to people living in economic distress." He was critical of Western culture as "sliding towards plutocracy and materialism." Shorris published extensively on Mexico and Mexican history. Shorris made the acquaintance of Miguel León-Portilla, who published a widely-read anthology of accounts of the conquest of Mexico from Aztec viewpoints, The Broken Spears. The two subsequently published an important anthology of Mesoamerican literature, bringing to a mass market the existence of significant body of writings by indigenous Mexicans.

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

1966. I just finished this fabulous book. A white kid with a brief recollection of being nursed by a black nanny when he was five, becomes convinced that black people's lives are more real, have more depth, life, immediacy to them, than his white suburban life could ever have.

He moves from Chicago to East St. Louis and gets a job heaving sacks of mail onto trains. Eventually he meets a black man at work who takes him to a hotel where whores and heroin are what it's all about. The white kid falls in love with a black social worker, smokes a lot of pot and sleeps with some hookers, but the girl won't marry him and he ends up going back to Chicago eventually. The ghetto gets too ugly for him.

This book was written with great honesty and sensitivity I thought. The kid really wants to understand the racisl divide, but even when he understands it, he can't bridge it and he can't escape his own privileged position in society.

It was sad, moving, gripping, idealistic, and perhaps a bit too sincere. I'd say Shorris was young at the time and if he had to do it over now, he could probably leave out some of the sentimentality.

Incidentally ofay, black slang for white people like honky, is here said to be foe in pig latin.