Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. - Review - book review

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by John F. Callahan

Robert B. Stepto. Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. Boston: Beacon P, 1998. 209 pp. $23.00.

Like the most engaging autobiographies, Robert Burns Stepto's Blue as the Lake moves from recapitulating the past to anticipating the future. The book is an unabashedly "personal geography" organized around Stepto's desire to locate his evolving self over the first fifty-some years of his life and in the lives of his ancestors. The focus is place, the theme the intersection of space and time in the writer's personality. The book passes from "Idlewild," the opening essay's account of boyhood summers at a black resort village up in Michigan--more truly home to Stepto's grandparents than to his parents--to "Vineyard," the grown man's realization and imagination of life under his own aegis on Martha's Vineyard. Stepto's vivid evocation of several changing and unchanging natural and social landscapes parallels his book's conscientious inner geography, the mapping of a self still very much in progress. After hinting at his mother's lonely restlessness and laying bare his father's emotional homelessness in the midst of abundant, fine possessions, Stepto makes explicit his resolve to enact his grandfather Ocie Burns's dream of serenity. In his time and place Stepto follows his ancestor's example of learning how to be at home in his skin and in the world around him.

Blue as the Lake consists of nine essays, five of them previously published. Part I, "Paths of One's Invention," maps the topography of the author's boyhood and youth in Chicago, where his family's gradual prosperity is mirrored in moves from Washington Park to Woodlawn and, in 1958, to outlying Chatham, with its feel of suburbia--and summers at Lake Idlewild in Michigan. "Migrations," the middle section, departs from the method and focus of Parts I and III of Blue as the Lake; here, as if to catch his breath, Stepto becomes a conventional family historian. In "Up to Baltimore," his is a youngster's cameo appearance asking his grandfather for his side of the contested story of an alleged courtship trainride with the young woman who was to become his wife and, later, Stepto's paternal grandmother. But Stepto disappears almost entirely from the other two essays in this section as we imagine him poring over family documents, census records, and birth and death certificates in search of any official or unofficia l clues to his ancestral territory.

In between the interlude of "Migrations," Stepto composes the story of his life as much or more than he reconstructs family history. Along the way he has a keen eye for what Henry James called "the American scene." He brings a sense of scale and context to his personal meditations by registering changes in scene--the dual scene of society and self--as he sees the world and writes. Inspired by his cousin, jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, Stepto masters the breaks and plays solos that are all the more telling for being so deceptively nonchalant. Usually the solos locate Stepto in familiar spaces become unfamiliar and somewhat menacing with the passage of time. He returns to Good Shepard Church for his Aunt Marge's funeral and, conscious of his Sunday best clothes and the money in his pocket, declines to walk around the corner to check out his grandmother's old house. At the funeral the now elderly scoutmaster with whom Stepto had youthful run-ins over Jim Crow, which still sear his memory, Fails to recognize him. To make matters worse, "the fact that, when it was time For me to speak, I was actually introduced as a friend of the family, and not as family, not as the firstborn nephew of the woman we were burying, made me aware not just of the corrosive forces of time, but also of what the young put in lace to create chasms between the generations."

Elsewhere, Stepto recounts the "blues ride" he is subjected to--and with a writer's retrospective, enjoys--in a "utilitarian van of the A2B Coach Company, a black-owned outfit that serves the University of Chicago by way of stopping half a dozen places where black folks might want to go." Unlike West Indian or West African immigrants who give new meaning to uplift, the driver hails from Arkansas. His patience tried by demands first for air conditioning, then for heat, the frustrated driver treats his passengers to a lament for Arkansas, where "'Black folks knows when they wants hot, and knows when they wants cold.' Then he half-turned his head and said, 'And the white folks are comprehensible!' " Stepto knows to let such scenes speak for themselves. Observing the icons of American culture, he also knows when to riff on the theme and variations of race and identity, as he does with wit and skill in relation to the "civility cards" proposed for visitors to Martha's Vineyard. His riffs sometimes lead him to new melodies, such as his choice of not one or another obvious race tee-shirts sold on the Island but a shirt from the South Carolina Sea Islands whose photograph is of woven, seagrass baskets. "Of course," Stepto observes, "the baskets speak of a culture and history, but Ellisonian that I am, I also sense in them an expression of possibility; provisions can fill those baskets, and the imagination can fill them, too."