My grandmother was fond of repeating, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” As a reader, I bring my few tools to construct meaning from stories that strike me. My tools are fundamental, I copy the story in my own hand grasping for its registers, searching for its metaphors, feeling its nuance. Then I apply another tool – comparison to a handful of stories I know. I copied Jamel Brinkley’s “Arrows” from his latest collection Witness. I found different registers in his writing, professorial and common, prudish and erotic, traditional and contemporary. The registers struck me from the opening scene in Helana’s bedroom where the narrator confronts the ghost of his mother. And I heard these registers ringing throughout, calling on several traditions, one of which I’m familiar with.
Brinkley teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop and “Arrows” reminded me of another Iowa Writer’s story – Flannery O’Connor’s, “A Good Man is Hard To Find.” A Good Man’s grandmother did not want to go to Florida; Arrows’ grandfather did not want to go to the old folks home. The grandmother is unreliable with directions. Hasan, Arrows’ main character, is unreliable with narration. Well after the grandmother directs the car down the deadly dirt road does she realize that the plantation house was in Tennessee not Georgia. Hasan tells his ex-wife he’ll cook for their son, but then orders Chinese. He tells us that the three of them heartily enjoy it, but then he complains that his father is eating his “Last Supper” like a “martyr” and his son throws a temper tantrum. It seems to me that only Hasan enjoyed the lo-mein.
Red Sammy’s wife is the only decent person in A Good Man as she tries to warn the family. The grandfather and Hasan’s son, Zahir, seem like the only half-decent people in Arrows. Hasan is as bratty as June Star and John Wesely when Hasan is annoyed that his blind father is annoyed that Hasan moved the furniture. Like June Star tells Red Sammy’s wife, “I wouldn’t live in this dump for a million bucks.” Hasan gives his dad the last kick in the pants before shipping him out of the family home.
As a child of the Eighties, I would diagnose A Good Man’s grandmother with low self-esteem. Not so much because she is forced to live with her son, but because of her racism, her plantation fantasies, and laments that a good man is hard to find. By the time Hasan slinks over to his irked ex-wife, he comments that her whole goal in life must have been to marry an old rich white pervert, like the irked man in the driver’s seat, who won’t give Hasan the time of day. And she, Tabitha, was just slumming it when she married Hasan. Before Denis drives her off to the Hamptons, Hasan has to find something wrong with her…hmm….it’s her visor, that’s what marks her as the pervert’s trophy. I can feel how Hasan’s low self-esteem triggers historical revisionism like the grandmother’s dirt poor roads lead to Gone With the Wind plantations.
Whenever I read O’Connor, I go back to my grandmother’s house in Bills’ country. The hedges in front of the white house and old chicken coops in the back remind me of O’Connor’s Andalusia Farm. My grandmother who convicted O.J. of murder before he was a suspect, who made my uncle redo his confession because he went to the Italian Catholic Church instead of the Irish one, who kept a portrait in the living room of her long-deceased husband until the day she died, reminds me of several O’Connor characters. I never met my grandfather. But the way my grandfather hung as a specter of past order and the way the wood was polished in the bedroom and the way the wind-up alarm clock kept still as if it were still 1957, reminds me of Helena’s room. Arrows causes me to wonder whether my grandfather’s spirit remained in the house after it passed out of the family like Hassan wonders about the fate of his family ghosts when he sells the house.
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The pursuit of the erotic, absent in A Good Man, fails to satisfy Arrows’ characters. Helena’s trysts with various men, with her husband’s approval and to her son’s humiliation, can’t free her from the confines of her room. Tabitha’s pursuit of love marks her as a simpleton and a trophy. When Hasan sees his father go for one last night in Helana’s room, the house becomes his personal Getheeme. Hasan flees downstairs and lies awake all night in agony.
O’Connor uses a roving third person to show the different parties as the story develops – Bailey Boy and the grandmother, June Star and John Wesley, Red Sammy’s Watchtower, and the Misfit’s Crew. Though I identified the grandmother as the core actor, the perspective allowed me to empathize with other characters. The Misfit with his stolen jeans and radical Christianity remains in my mind as the most unforgettable secondary character I’ve read in a short story. Arrows’ first-person drives home how self-centered Hasan is and showcases his voice. I see Hasan’s annoyance with his father’s furniture complaints, his son’s temper tantrum, and Tabithas’ irritation at having to drive out of her way to drop off his son as if Hasan never thought about meeting her in the middle as if Hasan isn’t the cause of his son’s tantrum, and Hasan didn’t shift the furniture. Hasan is so self-absorbed and unreliable that it made me feel sorry for the other characters. Heleana feels most developed because the opening teases the third. Through Hasan’s narration, the other characters are a trophy, a fickle kid, a pervert, and a blind old man.
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In the end, neither main character gets to where they want to go, but at least the Grandmother does not go to Florida. Both stories end with a revelatory moment. The grandmother exclaims, “You’re one of my children,” which offers me hope that she realizes she’s part of a bigger whole, maybe if she follows O’Connor’s tradition she is redeemed like the thief on the cross. She comes to this revelation by accident and through dialogue with the Misfit, like the thief on the cross her working days are over. Hasan purposely drives the three generations of men to the river because he is seeking to lay his inner burdens there and he wants to find transfiguration. Instead, he watches Zahir and his father flee from him, surprisingly fast, as if he was not one of them. I grew up a few stops on the Hudson line from the final scene, and I would never swim in that river. Neither will Hasan be cleansed by it.
Lacking the tools to use story to build empathy and self-discovery, Hasan stews on the riverbank, emasculated by two women, abandoned by his father and son, spiritless, cut-off, and deserted. Hasan ends up in a position all too common in our age of despair, an all too Everyman in an off-balance world, a world where, as the Misfit concludes, “There’s no real pleasure in life.”
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Dave Nash writes when he should be working. Dave is the Nonfiction Editor at Five South Magazine. His work appears in places like The South Florida Poetry Journal, Bulb Culture Collective, Jake, and The Hooghly Review. You can follow him @davenashlit1.
