“There Is No White Culture in This Country”: An Interview with James Alan Mcpherson

Iwas a freshman in college in 1987, when I did the interview that follows as an assignment. The class was “The Literature of Social Reflection,” taught by Robert Coles. We read George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and other similar books. Less intent on the analysis of literature than on the nurturing of moral sensibilities, Coles left his final assignment open-ended. It was not meant to be a conventional research paper or literary analysis; some students slept on the streets to experience what it was like to be homeless. I interviewed Jim. It was a long, digressive conversation. I had done some research, reread his essays, and came prepared with a list of questions. But Jim lead the conversation. He’d known me since I was twelve, and both my youth and my naive questions may have allowed him to lower his guard. The tone is different from the banter of his published interview with Bob Shacochis in the Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, from 1983. Here, Jim was educating me, telling me how it was. I’d grown up around the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (my mother has worked there since 1974), going to readings and dinners, and I knew plenty of interesting people and good talkers. Jim was like an inverse mirror of the gregarious writers I knew. He was never capable of small talk, and everything he said cut to the heart of the matter. He could be cryptic, wise, subversively funny, or say nothing at all. At Workshop parties, he often sat in a corner, and I would come talk to him. A few things strike me about the interview, rereading it decades later. Iowa seems to have been almost the first place where Jim felt he could trust his neighbors and friends. His political and moral perceptions pervaded everything he said, from his vision of his own history to his view of the present world. His constant preoccupations, which run through both his fiction and essays, were the intersections of race, class, history, politics, and what it is to be an American. Our conversation took place during Reagan’s second term, and Jim’s preoccupations were rooted in that political moment; a number of these have new resonances today. Some of his concerns, which at the time seemed