" It is a cultural moment that has made white writers look in the mirror and wonder if we have been confusing it with a window. White writers are not used to being objectified in this way. One of our conceits has been to imagine ourselves as neutral, objective, and value-free. Yet this sense of “objectivity” is itself constructed, organized, and enforced...
I was proud of my research, my listening, my delving into plays and novels by black writers to attempt the re-creation that McCullers found with “ease”—the room of black people where no white person is present. This, of course, is the hardest work of a white writer, because that is a room we can never enter. Personally, “Shimmer” is a favorite of my novels, but the illusion of success came crashing down one day, some months after publication, when the novelist Jacqueline Woodson took me aside. She mentioned a section, halfway into the story, set in network-TV conference rooms where scripts for “Amos ‘n’ Andy” are being written. Jackie pointed to a scene where one of the black protagonists, a young woman researching her family’s history, comes to believe that her beloved grandfather, a proponent of “uplift,” was once married to a white woman. Jackie explained that this concern about hidden racial mixing was a white anxiety. She told me that black people know the history of slavery and rape, and don’t carry the same concepts of racial purity as white people. That, in fact, I had committed the error I most feared: putting white consciousness into the mind and mouth of a black character...
It may be that the “ease” with which Carson McCullers was able to inhabit any kind of person, in a manner that was recognizable to a reader as sophisticated as Richard Wright, did not come from empathy. No, perhaps it came from the simple fact of having an identity that history had not yet discovered. And, because she didn’t know who she was, she had no place to stand. So she could stand with others who officially did not exist."
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