Marse Compton
The family lineage of the narrator is passed along to him in stories passed down from generation and conveyed to him by his mother in a way more than passingly similar to the stories of William Faulkner. One character in this legacy of oppression is described by the slaves under his watch—whenever he is not around—in a particularly Faulkneresque example of imagery:
“Marse Compton hadn’t aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went.”
Being Black in Santa Monica
Being black in Santa Monica—at least for the narrator—means a view of both blackness and whiteness that is skewed by inexperience. The narrator’s description of whiteness only barely seems connected to the reality of any white youth not connected at the hip to California surfer/skater culture, much less the same planet as pop culture stereotypes of black youth from the same period:
“Santa Monica whiteness was Tennessee Williams’s Delta summer seersuckersuit blinding. The patchy clouds, the salty foams of the cresting waves, my friends, my style — all zinc oxide nose-cream white. My language was threefoot swells that broke left to right. `No waaaay, duuuude. Tuuubular biiitchin’ to the max.’”
Cultural Dissonance
An extreme case of cultural dissonance occurs once the narrator is ripped out of that skater boi culture by his mom and plopped into the more comfortably segregated (for her) neighborhood of Hillside. His first morning in class at Manischewitz Junior High is also his first experience in a roomful of black people unrelated by blood and is a rude awakening described in poetic imagery:
“I sat like a tiny bubble in a boiling cauldron of teenage blackness, wondering where all the heat came from. Kids popped up out of their chairs to shout, whispered, tugged at each other. Homeroom was a raucous orchestral concerto conducted by some unseen maestro. In the middle of this unadulterated realness I realized I was a cultural alloy, tin-hearted whiteness wrapped in blackened copper plating.”
The Voice of a Nation
The narrator achieves fame early in life as a poet. The kind of fame that transforms not just the life of the individual, but of an entire cultural awareness. Which makes it all the more ironic that the imagery he engages to describe those moments of epiphany when poetic inspiration hits are so brutally and ironically mundane:
“It occurred to me that maybe poems are like colds. Maybe I would feel a poem coming on. My chest would grow heavier, my eyes watery; my body temperature would fluctuate, and a ringing in my ears would herald the coming of a timeless verse.”
