Excerpts from Meeting of the Waters copyright 2002 by Kim McLarin. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from other various works are done in accordance with the Fair Use Act. "At 4 PM on Wednesday, April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley, California rendered not-guilty verdicts in one of the most sensational police brutality cases in history, the beating of Rodney King. The verdicts surprised and shocked the nation and the world." - from Understanding The Riots: Los Angeles Before and After The Rodney King Case by the staff of the Los Angeles Times "She loved black men. She would be stupid not to. It had just happened that when she fell in love her heart forgot to notice the skin color." - from The Color of Trouble by Dyanne Davis Kim McLarin and I once had a good laugh over something I told her I'd read in Sol Stein's book How to Grow a Novel: "Writers write what other people only think." This quote applies to McLarin perfectly and exactly; the brand of emotional truth she seeks to examine in her fiction packs a measure of frankness that can make both characters and readers squirm. An observation such as "To have children is to understand the impulse toward child abuse" (from her third novel, Jump at the Sun) is for the ages. I once observed the impact of this writing on a live audience, at a reading Mclarin gave at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge, Mass. I was familiar with the material, but the startled wows on the faces of those who weren't was pretty palpable. McLarin's 2002 novel Meeting of the Waters is ostensibly about an interracial romance. On repeated readings it reveals itself to be about so much more - communication breakdown, the mystery of romantic love and attraction, large social questions that seemingly have no immediate answers, the role of journalism in contemporary American society. Here's an oversimplified synopsis of the plot: Lenora (Lee) Page, a black female reporter for a Baltimore paper, is in LA to cover the verdicts in the Rodney King beating case. She crosses paths with Porter Stockman, a white male reporter for a Philadelphia paper who is in LA for the same reason. After she saves him from being savagely beaten and perhaps killed by the crowd he loses touch with her but continues to hold her in memory. A few months later she takes a job at his paper and he begins to pursue her romantically. Initially she resists but, eventually, succumbs to her attraction to him and they become a couple. The relationship isn't easy, and the novel concludes on what we may characterize as a cautiously optimistic note about their future together. Within and around the self-imposed limitations of this kind of familiar plot outline McLarin composes a complex texture of universes - Lee's, Porter's, that of the two of them together as a couple, and those of numerous secondary characters who operate simultaneously both as characters and as a kind of Greek chorus. Scene after scene after scene introduces commentary. This commentary comes from many sources: parents, friends, co-workers, onlookers at a riot, old people destroyed by a hurricane, ex-lovers, blind dates, trusted merchants, Bill Clinton. The input they offer both illuminates and confuses; almost all of it helps insofar as it clarifies and reaffirms beliefs Lee and Porter already have, but almost none of it helps clear up the trouble that surrounds the relationship. The two of them exist in a kind of love purgatory which neither has created but which both constantly perpetuate and inflame. Broadly, the novel deals with thorny public issues; narrowly, the main question it asks why just is it that two people fall in love? - is largely left unexamined (though after a certain point it's asked on virtually every page!). As I mentioned in the introduction, in studying a novel with the aim of arriving at a confident level of understanding I've often found it helpful to pick out one exceptionally strong, vivid image out of the prose and affix it with really deep lucidity in my mind's eye until it begins to breathe. This image becomes the defining mental picture, the reference point, the bedrock foundation out of which all further inquiry into the novel's meaning and significance depends. In this novel the primary image comes pretty early on, and we'll quote the scene in a moment, but first I'd like to substantiate the idea and buttress the point with a passage from a book that McLarin herself turned me onto, Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel: "The basic substance of imaginative literature (novels, plays, poetry) is not reason but emotion, which is experienced not by the detonation of words, nor the grammar of sentences but through the connotations and colorations as employed by the author's style. Once a story has been put into words, people can analyze it, ponder it, hold it in their minds, come to know it, change it willingly, learn from it. But it exists not as words written in books but in images with feelings attached." Let us then take a look at the primary image. Porter is in LA to report on the aftermath of the trial of four police officers accused of brutally beating the motorist Rodney King. The cops are acquitted, and consequently the City of Angels is about to explode. (With the instincts of the news reporter she used to be, McLarin has a powerful understanding of the dramatic promise of placing fictional characters inside settings of real historical events, as we see here with the riots and with a Florida hurricane, as well as in her first novel Taming It Down, in which protagonist Hope Robinson visits a real African nation in the throes of an actual civil war.) The scene in which Lee firsts come across Porter on the streets of LA comprises the primary image. In leading up to it McLarin crosscuts within the real time of the fiction to show us two different sets of circumstances, in two different locales, happening simultaneously. The dramatic purpose is to lead up to the moment when Lee saves Porter from a serious beating for no apparent reason other than "Somebody had to do something," which becomes a kind of catch phrase that is employed later in two or three other scenes, a kind of substitute explanation for behavior whose explanation really can't be pinned down. In the moments just before they meet Lee has been in a nearby church and Porter's been watching an arrogant member of the crowd spit on a female officer. I identify this as the primary image of the book because it crystallizes a fundamental state of affairs: the mystery of the couple's attraction to one another. While this attraction is the source and subject matter of the book, it's never really investigated fully. Why are these two people, who seem to have so many fundamental obstacles and disagreements and assumptions in their way, so many personal and social roadblocks, so determined to be together? For most of the first half of the book Lee is indifferent to Porter, eschewing his advances and telling herself that she doesn't date white men, period. (We, because we have observed the primary image from a distance, from outside the story, know otherwise.) It's not until halfway through the long novel that Lee admits to herself that she wants him: "She was tired of fighting this attraction; tired of the suspicion in which she'd held him from day one. She was like a driver on a road late at night who only wanted to close her eyes." Still this doesn't really explain why she finds him attractive. I asked McLarin about this; she told me that she was aware of it, making the observation that she believes perhaps only ten percent of what a writer is exploring while working is at the conscious level, the rest being subconscious. The primary image comes in a passage in which Lee observes from a distance as Porter tries to jot down notes while a resident of South Central LA speaks to him: "Without knowing why, she stopped to watch him. The guy was listening to a brother with dreadlocks, this look of utter and complete absorption on his face. Lee was amazed. She could not imagine what the dreadlocked brother must be saying to keep the white guy so enthralled, but it must have been something good because self- preservation demanded that the white guy hit the bricks immediately. Yet there he stood, nodding and scribbling, ignoring the coming riot, his face intent. He looked transfixed, and for some reason the image of him there transfixed her too. There was something about him, a durability that intrigued her." (Italics added.) Two points stand out here. First, it's important to notice that this is not presented as a conscious thought, existing in words, on Lee's part. It's more like a visual impression registered subconsciously. She's not standing there thinking, "There's a durability about him that intrigues me." Remember - she doesn't date white guys. The second point is going to lead us into a discussion of the differences in mental software, in programming, that Lee and Porter bring to the relationship, to each other, to life. Before getting into that I want to stress again that I take the primary image to be that of Lee, transfixed by Porter, who is in turn transfixed by what the dreadlocked brother is saying. Remember that while this is going on the city is exploding into riot: beatings, shootings, lootings, murder, fire, helicopters in the sky, madness and chaos unprecedented. As we've seen, Lee wonders what it is that the dreadlocked brother is saying. It turns out that he is educating Porter on some matters of race and prejudice that lee wouldn't need to be educated about (because she's black) and that Porter, who considers himself an enlightened white liberal, is clueless about. The dreadlocked brother and Lee have connected about the issue subconsciously, in the abstract, without ever having or spoken to each other - merely by virtue of their being blacks in America. And the proof of this is that they both utter virtually the same phrase, hundreds of pages and eons of context apart in the novel, again, each never having met or spoken to the other. The dreadlocked brother says "But what's really wrong with these my unschooled young sisters and brothers is that they've swallowed your American Dream hook, line, and sinker. They've bought into the American idea of material goods, material wealth, as the true measure of freedom." Much further into the novel Lee says something expressing the identical thought: "Also, the problem isn't just that these kids who looted are 'locked outside the American Dream,' she said, taking one of the phrases he had used. "The problem is how deeply they've bought into that dream, which is about consumerism and materialism." That Lee is aware of this and Porter is not only serves to point up the deep divide between their respective racial consciousnesses. Porter at one point reflects: "If there was one crimp in his happiness with her, it was her constant references to race. She seemed very nearly obsessed with the color of her skin. Some days it was barely present, and then some days he felt race as a scrim she kept hanging between them. When he said it didn't matter, the color of her skin didn't matter at all to him, she would laugh or shake her head or just look at him as if he had asked where babies come from. Race was a constant with her, in thought and in deed. She was a member of the National Association of Black Journalists, contributed to the NAACP and UNCF, bypassed six other gas stations to buy gas at one that was owned by a black man, looked for black clerks in every store and refused to shop in those with none. This obsession perplexed and worried him. And, although he understood it on an intellectual level - oppression, racism, consciousness of being "the other" - et cetera - sometimes it got to be just too damn much. Couldn't she just let it go? Did she have to seek out a black doctor? Did she have to count the number of stories about Africa in the paper every Sunday? Did she have to breathe a sigh of relief when it turned out the latest perpetrator of the latest hideous crime was white instead of black? Did she have to see race everywhere they went?" He's simply incapable of seeing the world this way, from her point of view. It's totally alien and foreign to him. At one juncture she attempts to engage him in a conversation about the differences in behavior between presidential candidates Bush (that's 41) and Clinton when they're around black people - he's absolutely clueless, unable to understand what she means. He doesn't even perceive what she points out, never mind intellectually get it. In the scene with the dreadlocked brother that we alluded to earlier, the crowd yells at the LA cops, "This one's for Latasha!" Porter asks the dreadlocked brother who Latasha is. The response, "I know who she was. The fact you don't says everything," is a great summary of the vastness of the chasm that separates Porter's and Lee's senses of awareness about race. ESSAY TO BE CONTINUED Back to Finite