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Review: Charles Blow's 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones' a moving memoir

 
Louisiana native and New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow, author of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, was the fifth of five sons.
Louisiana native and New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow, author of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, was the fifth of five sons.
Published Sept. 2, 2015

Charles M. Blow's exquisite memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, is a meditation on the moments, the larcenies small and grand, that strip innocence from childhood and their enduring consequences.

Blow, a Louisiana native and op-ed columnist for the New York Times, has rendered a portrait of the small-town South at a liminal moment, the 1970s and '80s — close enough to a turbulent past for change to be apparent yet in some ways fundamentally the same place it has always been. A fragile detente exists between white and black, shored up by an unspoken etiquette that allows both groups to coexist in what passes for peace. Yet race is not the primary concern of this memoir; rather it is ambient — ever-present and contextual, camouflaged by its ubiquity.

The epithet that most scars Blow's young life is not the one most hurled at black Louisianans. That word falls from the mouths of people exiled to the periphery of the world Blow inhabits, but he is teased, challenged, ridiculed as a "punk" — the local aspersion for gays — by those close enough to do damage. Blow's book is as much about his navigation of the rough, unyielding boundaries of masculinity in a distinctly black, Southern, rural world as it is about the social forces that produced that world in the first place.

Sixty-two years ago James Baldwin's searing debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, elucidated the social, sexual and psychological tensions of Harlem. Blow's memoir is, in some ways, a furthering of those themes, set apart by time and geography but concerned with the spiritual workings of a community that is internally roiling with contradiction, conflict and a sometimes faltering grasp of its own humanity.

Blow is the fifth of five sons born to his mother, Billie, and heir to a line of women who are neither so soft as to be subsumed by the hardships of the South nor so hard as to be immune to the appeal of the men with whom they fall in love. Billie, who keeps brass knuckles in her purse and gives her youngest son a just-in-case gun as he heads to college, shares a turbulent relationship with Spinner, Blow's father, an itinerant presence in the lives of his sons.

The dissolution of their marriage plunges the family into a kind of instability that tests even Billie's substantial fortitude. When a truck transporting cattle turns over on a nearby highway, Billie deploys her brood to help gather up the windfall, left dead and strewn across the Interstate. They live on a tenuous edge of subsistence, and she recognizes scavenging as more noble than theft or charity.

The dissolving family has another consequence, one that becomes a central preoccupation of Blow's young life. He is deprived not only of paternal resources but, crucially, also of paternal protection. The older cousin who takes an interest in the pensive 7-year-old Charles also coerces him into a "game" that is a weak euphemism for molestation. When an uncle attempts to grope him a few years later, Charles is already wary — and weary — enough to not fully trust adults, even those closest to him.

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His burgeoning interest in girls coexists with spectral male images, not quite erotic, not entirely innocent, that impose themselves on his thoughts. In a particularly evocative passage, he recalls running across a basketball court to greet his mother during a break in a game. He pretended not to hear the snickers of people amused by his gait. His mother did not pretend. "When I reached her, all smiles and open arms," he writes, "her eyes were oozing dissatisfaction and fear. She laid into me in front of everyone. 'Don't you run like that!' "

His mother's reaction is not solely a matter of embarrassment. Effeminacy exists here at a hazy juncture between a femininity that is of lesser value and manhood that is understood as the primary ideal that the white world has denied to the black one and therefore the one most vigilantly sought and diligently policed. Years later, Blow's cousin, one of two openly gay men in that community, is tied to a bed by an unknown assailant, tortured and killed.

Blow's journey to adulthood is pockmarked by halting attempts to achieve that masculine ideal. He immerses himself in religion; he choreographs his movements to betray no hint of his inner struggles. He recognizes violence — enduring it, administering it — as the lingua franca of male communication and, as a fraternity pledge, becomes fluent in it.

None of this delivers him from the tortured doubts and attractions that he, at least for the bulk of his youth, traces to the violations of his childhood. That he achieves some modicum of reconciliation is a signal achievement of both his life and the book. Delicately wrought and arresting in its language, this slender volume covers a great deal of emotional terrain — much of it fraught, most of it arduous and all of it worth the trip.