Two book reviews. The first is fiction, the second nonfiction.

The Horror Of Lynching (And The Power Of ‘Passing’), Through The Eyes Of The Black Press

Incognegro.
By Mat Johnson (Writer) and Warren Pleece (Illustrator).
New York: Vertigo/DC Comics.
136 pages. $19.99.
ISBN-10: 140121097X
ISBN-13: 978-1401210977

It’s become a cliché to say that both lynching and “passing” are parts of the African-American experience most Americans, including and perhaps especially African-Americans, would like to forget. However, the recent Black media rallying over the Jena 6 case—in which nooses were found under a tree under which Black teenagers were allowed to sit near a Louisiana high school—have brought up the ugly history of the former again. The latter—in which light-skinned African-Americans would, in effect, secretly cross enemy lines, disguising their true identities—has, interestingly enough, found new, “overground” currency in post-modern America, with famous light-skinned Blacks now being able to publicly claim their inter-racial “diversity,” in effect refusing to take a side in the classic divide.

Taking a side is what this graphic novel—a fictional tribute to NAACP leader Walter White’s real-life, death-defying lynching investigations almost a century ago—is all about. Harlemite Zane Pinchback’s secret identity is “Incognegro,” the muckraking investigative columnist for the best Black newspaper in town, The New Holland Herald (an obvious play on The New York Amsterdam News). He’s light-skinned enough to “pass,” so he can investigate lynchings close-up, literally risking his neck in the process. Although he wants to place his real byline into the Harlem Renaissance vortex swirling around him, he’s summoned back to wear the mask one more time to free his brother, who’s been framed for the murder of a white woman.

Johnson—winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, an increasingly major Black writer peer honor—beautifully alternates humor and horror, turning even a profanity-filled phrase as easily as blood flowed from the lynching trees. The colors, notably and powerfully, are absent; all is, appropriately, in black and white. Pleece’s simplicity in draftsmanship keeps the attention on the story and characters, not the pretty pictures. And since lynching is the subject, the pictures should be only so pretty. A powerful, passionate, funny adult work to be read and discussed by old and not-so-old, especially the teenagers who want to know what all that Jena fuss was about.

*****

To One Japanese Journalist, Gun Violence Is ‘In America’s DNA’

Democracy With A Gun: America And The Policy of Force.
By Fumio Matsuo. Translated by David Reese.
Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press.
296 pages. $26.
ISBN: 978-1-93330-46-4

Mary Matalin, the Republican strategist who has made her name and fortune by trimming both Bushes, asserted last Sunday (11/25) on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that gun culture was “mainstream culture” in the United States. “I’m from the (Dick) Cheney Way,” she said, referring to the vice president who will be forever known for his 2006 accidental shooting of a friend during a hunting trip. “If you come hunting for me, I’m going to shoot you.”

Matalin may or may not agree with veteran journalist Fumio Matsuo that America’s use of force is in its DNA, from the Revolutionary War through Columbine and into the United States’ occupation of Iraq. But it’s clear that Matsuo, a longtime American correspondent and former Washington Bureau Chief for the Kyodo News Service, creates a masterful outline of American political and legal history from the point of view of the gun. He traces the story of the Second Amendment, explaining how it could lead to the scorched-earth philosophy behind the World War II bombing he miraculously survived as a boy in Japan. He learns the latter by digging up the history of the bombing and profiling its generals. The work is completely thorough.

Any writing elegance, for the most part, might have gotten lost during translation, but Matsuo deftly walks through three centuries of America. He dispassionately teaches the American way of violence to other Japanese first (the book was originally published in Japan), then calling for better U.S.-Japan relations by asking for a real, public reconciliation based on the acknowledgement of both sides of the atomic fires of World War II. Fundamentally an optimist, he sees America’s racial diversity as its strength, but he also analyzes why he thinks that the neo-conservatives who got America mired in Iraq are the next coming of “The Best and the Brightest” White House intellectuals who got the nation sucked into Vietnam. Matsuo depends on the reader to draw his or her own conclusions—an increasingly rare attitude in political books these days. It’s an important view of America from someone who knows parts of it better than most natives.