I can claim no credit, but I was Mat Johnson’s editor in the long-ago days before he’d published his first novel, and I was recently delighted to discover that he’s become a literary fiction success-story, who is just as hilariously funny now as he was back then. Loving Day, which came out May 2015, is his fourth novel and—breaking news!—just this week it was announced that Showtime has acquired the rights to the book as a potential TV show.
Johnson is one of those writers who you can’t put down because of the dryly funny lines, which just keep coming. A lawn is “utterly useless, wild like it smokes its own grass and dreams of being a jungle.” A dilapidated house is “covered in all the paint that’s failed to chip.” Of a man wearing a dashiki, Sudanese mudcloth pants and a kente hat, he says, “It’s like Africa finally united, but just in his wardrobe.”
Loving Day is about a very light-skinned, mixed-race black man, Warren Duffy, who suffers what he calls “a disconnect in my racial projection.” He is often taken for white, but as he says, “I know I’m black. My mother was black—that counts no matter how pale and Irish my father was.” The term the novel uses for him is “sunflower”—yellow on the outside, brown on the inside. As one of Johnson’s characters explains, it’s “a slang term for a biracial person who denies their mixed nature, only recognizing their black identity.'”
After a failed marriage to a Welsh girl, he’s back in his hometown of Philly to deal with his late, white, father’s inheritance when the story starts. The inheritance (yes, a loaded metaphor) is a crumbling, totally ridiculous mansion that he doesn’t want. (Whiteness, that’s you.) He’s broke. He’s recently discovered he has a teenage daughter, and hijinks ensue that require him to teach at the Melangé Center, a high school to help people like Warren find balance. He calls his tribe “the human equivalent of mismatched socks. The people whose racial appearance fails to mimic the ethnicity of their inner spirit.” The school teaches “inclusion of all perspectives of the black and white, mixed-race experience.”
Warren, with typical humorous candor, likes it because:
“Finally. I—lighter than some white people walking around this world, always the palest of any black person, a man who can barely hold on to that mantle–am like an Asante chief in this room…. These people, they are not black like me. They are less black than me, and therefore I don’t trust them. And I love it. Embattled groups have to police membership, for their own self-protection. But with policing comes power, and all power’s usual intoxicants…. This, I realize, is a singular element of the Black Experience I’ve been previously denied. The guilty satisfaction of sitting in judgement over others for their insufficient blackness. I forgive everyone who has ever done this to me maliciously. How could anyone resist such a pleasurable self-righteous indulgence!”
But it’s not that simple. As he knows, and as his friends point out, by embracing his whiteness, he’s betraying his race. The people at Melangé are “‘trying to cut black America loose, so they can live some post-racial fantasy. That shit is dangerous. It weakens us, as a people.'”
Warren’s ultimate revelations are more about loving his new-found daughter and himself than they are choosing one group over the other or solving this race dilemma. Which, in it’s own way, is the solution. The “Loving Day” of the title is a real holiday, June 12th, on which people celebrate the Supreme Court decision in the case Loving vs. Virginia, which in 1967 struck down all the remaining miscegenation laws in the United States. Johnson, very nicely, in the end chooses to focus on not the mixed children but on the love that created them.
It was a great book, which I really hope gets made into a TV show. And if it does, pull this character from the margins:
“It’s called home. Oh yeah, you betcha,” an ebony-skinned woman says next to me in a thick white-girl accent that sounds like it was obtained in North Dakota.
And here’s one last laugh/insight that I really appreciated:
“‘Look, my life is hard and boring too, just like everyone else’s.”
Amen.
An Anthology of Clouds 
Thank you for tackling this one! And wow, thanks to the link you provided about the potential TV show, I learned Johnson’s got a hand in almost every genre, including non-fiction and comic books.
Meanwhile, as a huge fan of the soon-to-conclude hilarious Key and Peele sketches, I look forward to, 1. breaking through my “Oh no, not a novel!” syndrome, and 2. fingers crossed, next watching how Johnson’s characters and crises come across a screen.
I had never heard of Key & Peele and it sounds cool. I will have to break through my “oh no, not television” problem tho! Thanks for commenting.
I heard about this book when the author did an interview on NPR. He said that he wrote this book so he could stop talking about it–being mixed race–and that he was tired to death of it. The author also commented on bringing to life homes that really do sit around the area in which the mansion in the book exists. Neighborhoods like that are real, he said. It sounds cool, and I have it on my to-read list.
That’s funny. The character, which is autobiographical, is the kind of guy who shoots himself in the foot. And I really question saying “I’m so bored of this topic” on NPR. It’s a big book and a great topic. He should be encouraging people to care! Also he has 65K Twitter followers and has just decided to quit Twitter. On the eve of making a TV show? Mysterious…..
Maybe he’s an introvert. Also, he didn’t say that he didn’t care about the topic. When he said he was tired of talking about it, it was more like the fact that his parents were different races were the only thing anyone seemed to care about regarding him, but there is so much more he does and cares about. It was more like a “can we talk about something else??” moment.
Yeah, I can see being sick of talking about a topic, even if you care about it.