Erasure by Percival Everett Page B

mean?
    Kirchner: Imagine how I would feel if monsters like that tolerated my work.

    “Monksie, are you feeling okay?” my mother asked. She sat down on the sofa beside me.
    “I’m fine,” I said. “What about you? How was your nap?”
    “Like a nap.”
    “Would you like me to make us some tea?”
    “No, honey, stay where you are. Relax. You can’t run yourself ragged because of an old lady.” She looked at the fireplace. “Thank you.”
    “Pardon?”
    “For coming to live here,” Mother said.
    “I love you, Mother,” I said, as if to say of course I’d be there.
    “I miss Lisa,” she said.
    “Me, too.”
    Mother arranged the fabric of her skirt on her lap. “I’m lucky to be able to get around the way I do. I even make it up those stairs without getting winded.”
    “That’s terrific.”
    “Will Lisa be coming by later today?”
    “No, Mother.”
    “Because I miss her. Did I say something to hurt her feelings? I know she and Barry broke up.”
    “I don’t think so, Mother.”

    I called my agent to check on the status of my novel and he had no good news for me. Three more editors had turned it down. “Too dense,” one had said. “Not for us,” a simple reply from another. And, “The market won’t support this kind of thing,” from the third.
    “So, what now?” I asked.
    “I don’t know what to tell you,” Yul said. “If you could just write something like
The Second Failure
again.” The ice clinked in his glass.
    “What are you telling me?” I asked.
    “I’m not telling you anything.”

    Second Failure:
My “realistic” novel. It was received nicely and sold rather well. It’s about a young black man who can’t understand why his white-looking mother is ostracized by the black community. She finally kills herself and he realizes that he must attack the culture and so becomes a terrorist, killing blacks and whites who behave as racists.
    I hated writing the novel. I hated reading the novel. I hated thinking about the novel.

    I went to what had been my father’s study, and perhaps still was his study, but now it was where I worked. I sat and stared at Juanita Mae Jenkins’ face on
Time
magazine. The pain started in my feet and coursed through my legs, up my spine and into my brain and I remembered passsages of
Native Son
and
The Color Purple
and
Amos and Andy
and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting
dint, ax, fo, screet
and
fahvre!
and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?”
    I put a page in my father’s old manual typewriter. I wrote this novel, a book on which I knew I could never put my name:

MY PAFOLOGY
by Stagg R. Leigh

Won
    Mama look at me and Tardreece and she call us “human slough.” That how it all start up. “Human slough,” she say, “You lil’ muthafuckas ain’t nuffin but human slough.” I looks at her and I’m wonderin what “slough” means and I don’t like the look on her face and so I get up from the chair I been sittin in and I walk across the kitchen and grab a big knife from the counter. She say, “And what you gone do wif that, human slough?” And I stab Mama. I put the knife in her stomach and pull it out red and she look at me like to say why you stab me? And I stab Mama again. Blood be all on the floor and on the table, drip drip drippin down her legs and my baby sister starts screamin and I says, “Why you be screamin, Baby Girl?” And she look at me and she say it because I be stabbin on Mama. I look at my hands and they all covered wif blood and I realize I don’t know what goin on. So, I stab Mama