Just Read
“I feel the wings of everyone who’s ever dreamed bigger than what life allowed.”
- James W. Jennings, Wings of Red
I just finished reading Wings of Red by James W. Jennings.
It is the story—or better yet, the testimony—of a young man named June Papers, a homeless substitute teacher living in an slightly alternate-universe New York City called New City. He hustles to keep as much money in his pockets as possible because in addition to surviving, he has to help care for his family, particularly his maternal grandmother, Nana, who lives in a less affluent part of Martha’s Vineyard called the Highlands.
Jennings—a Hartford, Connecticut native and artist/educator who received his BA in English from Emory University and MFA from Brooklyn College—makes a strong case for eschewing genre as Wings is part fiction, part nonfiction, part memoir, part journal entry—and even has a little song and perhaps some poetry in its cadences. They call books like Wings auto-fiction, but that somehow feels like an inadequate description. Broken down in, first, sections, and then chapters, some of which are barely a page long, the book mimics the immediacy of life as almost nothing in it is neatly tied up. Debates between friends go unsettled. Homelessness goes unresolved. Romance never takes flight. Money remains a problem. And the only way June can survive the deep uncertainty of his living is by writing it all down.
For June, this manifests first as a self-published novel that exists both in the book and in the real world, United Strays of America—which he hands out to anyone he comes across (including a cop who pulls him over speeding), but also uses it as a doorstop. There’s a quiet desperation around June’s relationship to his art, an “artist or bust” approach that is frighteningly familiar: “If you’re not careful out here, you can walk right into a regular nine-to-five, which is more like death than you know.”
This is one of the grandest sacrifices required of the artist: Because most people think that what artists do is “easy,” “frivolous,” or “nothing”—or they feel like they should have access to an artist’s work for free; because societies don’t prioritize the arts and are afraid of the truth, most practitioners can barely afford to feed, house, and clothe themselves unless they take on two or three other jobs, which, in turn, interferes with the amount of time they have to hone their artistic skills and produce quality art. Some artists don’t survive this brutal hazing; life can kill dreams. For the artists who continue in spite of—who give up sleep and peace of mind in favor of exhaustion and guilt—there’s still no guarantee that the Universe will ever meet you half way. You might die and never know that your work is going to be unearthed by someone in some far-off century, lauded and considered a masterpiece by people who never knew you. Meanwhile, many of the people who do know you don’t understand, don’t have time, or shit on your toil because somebody shitted on theirs and the world taught them to pass that cowardice on. Ask Zora Neale Hurston or Wallace Thurman.
“People’ve been plotting for years on how to properly eat your lunch under the cover of night. If you think they’ll simultaneously be tending to your spark too, you might as well toss Wings out of the window and watch to see if it catches fire and flies away like a phoenix.”
There’s much talk about death in Wings of Red, as though June realizes how close any Black man in America is to it. “Every time you could have died,” June says as he recalls being shot at the age of 14 by a woman playing with a gun, “you kind of do.” And while walking across a bridge: “Look at water. Another scribe will tell you how beautiful it is. I see the depth. I feel the power and the draw. I understand why people jump.”
But there is also a tender fascination with life. “Did you know the earth accumulates tons of stardust from asteroids and whatnot every day? Did you know that our dead skin cells, which is stardust, is mostly what we call dust today?” and “Change, Nana once said, is the closest you get to being alive.”
“Life is bugged out. Most people would rather cling to their pain-fueled memories than reconcile with positive change. Most would rather hang on to their identity than let love in. I was almost that. I can recognize and feel it still, and I’m so thankful I’m not. Writing out of the heart of it, I come to see I’ve done a lot of spiteful things and had senseless warring with whatever, just begging for attention and/or recognition. I see other things too, but the spitefulness stands out.”
Jennings’s voice is so singular: witty, dapper, amusing, authentic, self-referential, and self-denigrating. His sentences are often drawn in a clipped, memory-like manner; staccato sometimes. Moments of vulnerability appear, but they are brief; hidden, usually, between the lines or behind a shame of some sort—which, in a patriarchal society, is the closest most men are allowed to come to their own humanity.
There’s a scene, for example, where June, who has asthma, is having a near-fatal allergic reaction to cat hair/dander. He’s on the subway, struggling to breathe, chest closing up on him, passing in and out of consciousness, thinking he might die, and rather than prioritizing his need for medical attention, he’s feeling disgraceful as he accepts the looks of disgust from fellow passengers because he didn’t give his seat up to an elderly woman.
This is coupled with other regrets he has, including not paying closer attention to his relationship with his paternal grandmother, Grandma Billings, and not having a closer relationship with his father, who calls him “One.” June is composed of tightly wound fears and anxieties masked beneath an outward calm that could be mistaken for recklessness (see the hilarious scene of him joyriding in some low-key racist’s Lamborghini). Whatever pressure the world has heaped upon him, it is no match for that which he places upon himself.
I’m worried about making mistakes and making the same mistake twice. I’m worried I may be misunderstood and trying at every turn to be clear. I’m worried I’ll be labeled this or that and worrying about karma. It’s so much. It’s ridiculous. I’m a substitute teacher.
There are parts of Wings that, no pun intended, soar. In particular, these moments come when June is in conversation with his students. This is where he is most gentle and thoughtful, and most alive. It’s as though he carries the great weight of knowing that the academic outcomes of Black boys in particular are the bleakest of any demographic and he wants to change that by showing them, with his own self, that better options are attainable. He isn’t being deceptive in his instruction, though. Hope and reality are conjoined in the narrative. He tells one young student:
“Michael, you’re either going to be very successful in life or a starving artist like me…As a substitute teacher, in New City, I make one hundred and fifty bucks per day minus taxes, And it goes down the more days I work, so if I clock a full week I get paid about five hundred dollars not the even hundred and fifty you might imagine.”
In another section, June is having a conversation with a student in the gym who questions the need for homework. After initially scoffing at her, she explains:
“Take someone such as myself. Teacher don’t know what my home life is like. I could have a little brother to care for or be sharing a room with my aunt or just having people always in and out of the house. I might not ever be able to find a quiet place. Let alone for an hour and a half. How am I supposed to compete with the rest of the kids? You thought I was buggin’, right? And I like school. School should just be more understanding.”
June sees her point of view, adjusts, and gains a clarity that makes him feel a tad giddy; hopeful even.
Wings of Red is a work of valid frankness, of one’s imperfect grappling with oneself, of trying to maintain loving connections and repairing broken ones, of navigating cannibalistic systems, of one’s dipping in and out of one’s own confrontation with the capriciousness of life. It’s propelled not so much by plot as it is by the reader’s own courage to follow June’s journey and be either heartbroken or relieved to learn his ultimate fate.
I see Wings of Red as a rugged kind of conjuring; the survival witchcraft (sometimes called miracles) of anyone whose portion is suffering at the hands of diabolical peoples and structures, and yet, somehow, they’re still here. There’s great wisdom, empathy, and knowing in this book; and anyone who has been to the rock bottom, fell face forward in it, and, therefore, knows the taste, will recognize the flavor. Very fortunately, Wings is not the corporate hostility we often see in books by and marketed to men, ones that insist that turning oneself into a moneymaking machine is “winning.” Wings is something more. In my estimation, it strives to see, if not the beauty, then at least the meaning in every encounter—even the ones it mightily sucks its teeth at.
Buy James W. Jennings’s Wings of Red at your local bookshop.
