We’ve seen a good deal of tension between generations this semester: from Esther Greenwood’s rejection of her mother and Mrs. Willard’s narrowly defined gender roles, to Alison Bechdel’s complicated efforts to distinguish herself from her father, to Jason Taylor’s repeated conviction that his parents have no idea what his daily life is really like. Perhaps generational tensions are inherent to coming-of-age narratives: parents have one view of what their children’s life should be like, while the children’s self-definition often entails setting themselves apart from those values.
But Sag Harbor presents a starker rift between generations than any of these, and this generational story seems fundamental to the larger story Whitehead is telling. We’ve talked in class about how Benji and his friends have to deal with very particular issues of self-definition, as paradoxical “black boys with beach houses.” Their racial identities—their sense of themselves as part of a larger context of Black culture and history, their personal navigation of racial stereotypes, even their musical tastes and fashion choices—don’t seem to come “naturally” to them. The culture at large views them as a walking paradox; The Cosby Show notwithstanding, Benji is all too aware that to white America, he and his friends don’t exist. There’s a particular view of what being black in America means, and this doesn’t seem to include a doctor father, lawyer mother, midtown apartment, elite private school, and a beach house near the Hamptons. Of course, Benji doesn’t experience his own circumstances as a contradiction: “what you call paradox, I call myself” (72). It’s the life he’s born into. There’s nothing strange about Sag for Benji and Reggie and their crew—they’ve literally been coming out since they were in utero.
The enclave of African American families who own beach houses in Sag Harbor has a long history, and these boys are born into that history. They have been taught about this history, too. Benji might not be sure who W. E. B. Du Bois is, but he knows the name Maude Terry, for whom Terry Drive in Sag Harbor is named. The narrative fills us in on what Benji has been taught about this history. Maude Terry is “the spiritual architect of the developments”: “She was part of a group from Brooklyn and Queens who started coming out in the ’30s and ’40s. . . . One day our Maude, after walking through the dirt paths summer after summer to what would become Azurest Beach, decided to investigate who actually owned these woods” (95). She finds out they’re owned by a guy named Gale, who gladly sells the seemingly useless stretch of land to Terry, who then divides the parcel into lots and sells them “to her friends, to her friends’ friends, and so on, the middle-class black folk of their acquaintance” (95). Hence was born the “first generation” of black Sag Harbor. Benji and his crew are the third.
The history of Sag Harbor mirrors the larger course of Black history in the twentieth century. The first generation, Maude Terry’s crew, represent the pre-civil-rights-movement individual strivers, those who put up with all manner of prejudice and bigotry to carve out a modest piece of the American Dream for themselves in New York. (Du Bois, who reputedly enjoyed fried fish with this crowd once himself, would have called them the “talented tenth.”) A beach house on Sag is a pretty good token of “making it” in America. The second generation—Benji’s parents—represent what some cultural historians have called the Civil-Rights Generation. They have a strong and even combative sense of racial identity, and Benji’s father is sharply attuned to even the subtlest of racist insults. They’ve lived through the strife of the 1960s and its aftermath, they have a strong awareness of Black history and their place within it, and they enjoy the fruits of their labor with a proud defiance. (Benji’s father lives his own kind of “paradox,” switching between easy listening and Black-nationalist talk radio on the drive out to Sag.) Benji’s mom and dad have had to fight for what they have, and they see themselves as closely connected to an ongoing racial struggle in America. They send their kids to private school, but they’re upset when they have no idea who Marcus Garvey is.
And here’s where the novel’s generational conflict comes to light. What about Benji’s generation? What’s their relationship to the history of the African American Sag community, or to the larger context of Black history in America? They are living in the wake of the civil-rights movement, presumably enjoying the hard-won spoils that their parents’ generation sacrificed for. Whitehead doesn’t let the reader indulge in the white liberal fantasy that once buses and lunch counters were desegregated, America was on a clear and direct path to racial equality. From the first chapter, thanks to his dad’s radio listening, we hear references to contentious current events in New York that call into question how much “progress” has been made: “The playlist of the city in those days was headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by cops, Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs” (19). But while his father is constantly chiming in with his own affirmation of this outrage, Benji and his brother are just trying to sleep in the back seat. This image aptly illustrates the generational dynamic in the novel as a whole: the father muttering about racism on his way to some hard-earned peace and quiet and grilling at his beach house, while the teenage boys just want to get some more sleep.
Benji and his crew represent what has been called, variously, the Post-Civil-Rights Generation and the Hip-Hop Generation (subsets of the larger category Generation X--your parents' generation): the kids who are coming of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, whose parents lived through the civil-rights era. As Whitehead points out, his generation is coming of age alongside the emerging hip-hop culture—he and Ice Cube were born the same year, and they both grew up listening to Run-DMC (176). In his narrative, the kids and hip-hop itself “lose their innocence” around the same time: the “golden age” of the late 1980s gives way to the hypermasculine violent rhetoric of gangsta rap as these kids grow into men. Hip-hop is just emerging as what will become a dominant, global cultural and economic force, and kids like Benji and Reggie and Nick are riding the cusp of this movement.
What is this novel’s view of the Hip-Hop Generation and its relationship to the larger narrative of African American history? Do Benji and his friends see themselves as part of a proud tradition? Do they even seem to appreciate how lucky they are? The opening chapter sets up the blank slate of a summer in Sag as replete with possibility and transformative potential—a time for “self-reinvention,” which also represents Reggie and Benji’s most extensive exposure to Black culture (he has to learn all the new slang and handshakes and hairstyles). But once the novel gets under way, this potential seems squandered. Benji and Reggie seem to work all the time, and when they don’t work, they sit around, or drive around. The days seem empty and aimless. They get themselves into trouble for no good reason at all (“discovering a new way to kill a chunk of summer” [157]), and they spend all their time gorging on ice cream, watching TV, and listening to the radio. In previous summers they played video games, but now they’ve outgrown that in favor of sitting around on the beach talking shit, boasting, and putting each other down in new and creative ways.
Benji does give some respect to Bobby’s grandfather: “a real gentle guy, always kind to our mangy bunch when we came over. Gentle in that way that said he’d seen a lot of racist shit in his life and was glad that things had turned out better for his children and grandchildren. That cool old breed. . . . He had a right to be proud. And a right to get some damn sleep at the first hints of twilight” (152). But what are Benji and his friends up to, while Bobby’s gentle grandfather retires for the night? Posing with Randy and Bobby’s new toy guns, pretending to shoot each other, calling each other “pussy” for not wanting to play along, making empty boasts about “sticking up some pink motherfuckers” at school in the fall. The contrast is stark. Is this what Bobby’s grandfather and his generation worked so hard to establish?
There’s a definite sense of decadence to Whitehead’s depiction of Benji’s generation. It’s not that the “racist shit” they have to deal with isn’t real—they’re all too aware that, as “black boys with beach houses,” they don’t have the freedom to completely define themselves. They are constantly anticipating how others might view them, and calibrating their behavior and appearance accordingly, and Whitehead isn’t clearly mocking or belittling the various strategies they pursue (the “prep-school militant” is a bit of a punchline, but Benji is ultimately sympathetic to the fact that he and his friends can’t merely “be themselves”—they have to project a certain “front” to the world). The Head-Patting Incident is a big deal—or at least it’s maybe a big deal, depending whether or not Martine is Black. And they can’t tell if he is or not. So maybe they’ll do something about it, maybe they won’t. And when Benji does (sort of, passive-aggressively) do something about it, the novel raises the likelihood that his action was based on a misidentification of Martine’s race.
In other words, things are significantly more complicated for this generation. Racism is still there, even though the existence of shows like Cosby might imply otherwise, but it’s a lot more ambiguous and elusive. Benji’s father likes to talk about “whitey” as a catch-all antagonist, but Benji goes to school with mostly white kids, and he also digs “white” music like the Smiths and Bauhaus along with Run-DMC and Afrika Bambaataa. And when he is the victim of what seems like a racist incident, he can’t even tell for sure if the perpetrator is “white.” Is it too clichéd to say that, for Benji’s generation, things aren’t quite so black and white as they used to be? “That’s some racist shit right there,” NP says after the Incident (115). Or, then again, maybe it’s not. We’re in “deep eye-of-the-beholder terrain” (113), and Benji can’t merely react against racism because he’s not even totally sure racism is what he’s experiencing.
Does the novel indulge in any nostalgia for the older generation? Is there a sense that Benji’s decadent crew represents a dropping off from some more noble community ideal? He’s certainly aware that they might be viewed in this way. Referring to the first generation, he says, “They had fought to make a good life for themselves . . . and they wanted all the spoils of their struggle. A place to go in the summer with their families. To make something new” (65). But then he adds, with audible irony, “If only they could see us now. O Pioneers!” Benji’s teenage narcissism and detachment is epitomized when he follows up the proud origin-myth narrative of Maude Terry with, “Cut to forty years later, to me, more specifically, as I made my way to work and confronted one small hitch. Taking the beach shortcut meant running a gauntlet of forced social interaction” (95). I can imagine the first generation rolling their eyes in exasperation at this ungrateful brat: We fought so hard to establish this place for you, and you can’t even be bothered to make a little small talk on your way to work? To bring us back a pint of Rocky Road?
Benji cites Bobby’s grandfather on how things used to be. To the reader, the picture he evokes probably doesn’t sound half bad: “[E]veryone was welcome when you threw a party. Maybe you didn’t know each other personally, but you all had the same story, right, when it came down to it: after a long journey you had found safety on this shore. . . . If you saw the lights or heard the music . . . you walked on up and pushed in the screen door, whether you knew the person or not. And once you walked in, you were blood brothers” (97-98). This image of a small, close-knit community formed along bonds of common interest and experience—a refuge from a racist society where a little music can be played, drinks shared, chicken grilled—doesn’t resonate at all with Benji. “That sounded crazy, frankly. The custom of a better time. Half the fun of having a party, it seemed . . . was in excluding people, especially your neighbors, who would be forced to listen to the music and laughter” (98).
I don’t know whether Ben, the adult narrator of the novel, is criticizing or defending his generation’s decadence and narcissism. He often sounds bemused by the image of his younger self—the things they did and said, the ways they acted, the stuff they ate (the thought of which now literally sickens him). He refers to “the other boy” when he contemplates Benji with the BB in his eye. I think he’s just saying that this is the way it was, and this is the way they were.
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