The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. - book reviews

American Visions, April-May, 1994 by David Nicholson

Chesnutt was born into a free family. After the Civil War his family moved to North Carolina, where he kept a series of journals from the time he was 16 till he was 24 (The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, Duke University Press, 1993). Possessed of moral courage and a profound belief in himself, he refused to give in. "I will live down the prejudice, I will crush it out," he wrote in 1878. Three years later, confirmed in his decision to become a writer, he noted, "I want fame; I want money; I want to raise my children in a different rank of life from that I sprang from. ... I am confident I can succeed."

How different from McCall's "dark and limited" black world! Racism may well have been to blame for McCall's detours, but some readers may see other reasons for his career of thuggery--an overwhelming desire to belong that led him to the streets, an inability to imagine himself as anything other than a thug until it was almost too late, and the disturbing unwillingness to take responsibility that runs throughout the book.

After a year in prison, McCall began to feel the weight of his sentence. "You can't get help for prison depression," he writes. "You can't go to a counselor and say, |Look, I need a weekend pass. The punishment thing is taking more out of me than I think it was intended to take.'" But the point is that he didn't get to say whether his punishment was fitting because he had already made his choices. By the time he was sent to prison, McCall had shot one man, come close to shooting another, and participated in countless gang brawls and numerous armed robberies. Most of his victims, it bears pointing out, were black.

To be sure, McCall's is an honest portrayal, and the events recounted in his serviceable prose are often compelling. And to his credit, McCall turned his life around in prison, reading widely and studying seriously enough to win a one-year college scholarship.

In the end, however, Makes Me Wanna Holler lacks the qualities of insight and transformation that we expect from autobiography. Race remains the chip on McCall's shoulder. It comes as a relief when a white friend challenges McCall. "God, Nate," he says, "you think about race all the time. Give it a rest. It ain't healthy." And to no one's surprise, except maybe McCall's, once he begins to let down his guard and allows himself to socialize with whites at work, he finds there are some he likes.

The true heroes in this narrative appear hardly at all. Watching them on his graduation from high school, McCall realizes what he has missed by embarking on his course of crime: "It seemed the guys who got the biggest scholarships were the very ones the fellas and I had considered lames throughout school. They were the ones we made fun of and harassed. They'd sacrificed popularity to do their work; now this was their day."

David Nicholson is an assistant editor of the Washington Post Book World, on leave in 1994. His last article for American Visions, "A Roundup of Reference Reads, " appeared in the February/March 1994 issue.