Western tale by teenage Thurber published for 1st time
‘South Side’ explores American segregation
NEW YORK, April 2, (AP): Before becoming one of the great wits of the 20th century, James Thurber was a teenager hooked on Westerns.
The Columbus, Ohio, native would remember fondly such “nickel novels” as “Jed, the Trapper” and “The Liberty Boys of 76”, and was so caught up in the gun duel of Owen Wister’s “The Virginian,” he became physically ill. Inevitably, Thurber sketched out a couple of tales himself, including “How Law and Order Came to Aramie”, completed when he was around 18 and unpublished for more than a century. It appears in The Strand Magazine’s new issue, which came out Friday.
“You can definitely see this is a young Thurber, who is very talented, spoofing those Westerns”, Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli, who has unearthed writings by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and many others, told The Associated Press during a recent interview.
Thurber was a prominent writer for The New Yorker, known for his drawings and for such stories as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Catbird Seat”, He died in 1961 at age 66.
“Aramie”, its handwritten manu- script found by Gulli in the archives of Ohio State University, tells of a sheriff named “Big” John Oakes, big not in physical stature but “in the quality of his nature”. Sheriff Oakes’ authority has been challenged by the gang of Bud Tevis, leading to a confrontation that ends with Tevis running away, a heroic fantasy the daydreaming Mitty might have imagined for himself.
Sleeping
The story has the kind of vernacular (“It seemed like Bud would bust awaitin’ fer that gun to blow”) Thurber would use unforgettably in his baseball yarn “You Could Look it Up”. It also includes such absurdist touches as a sleeping Sheriff Oakes “grotesquely doubled up on the antique couch”, and shows Thurber’s emerging gifts for description and characterization.
“For some minutes the little sheriff was silent, the tense, hard look on his face unchanging, his gray eyes glinting under their fine, sensitive eyebrows, the muscles of his jaws moving sharply at intervals”, Thurber wrote. “(H)e tore himself from his abstraction with a brief, characteristic gesture, and, without a word, unholstered his gun and examined it carefully. But for the glint in his eyes, like the flash of a polished filing in the sunlight, he seemed to have sunk again into a deep study”.
The tone seems mostly farcical, although at least one Thurber scholar found a darker undertone. In the 1995 book “James Thurber: His Life and Times”, biographer Harrison Kin- ney thought the story “riddled with the cliches of the western pulps”, but noted a common Thurber theme: “manly strength versus the pussycat”. Kinney concluded that “thanks to the self-plagiarizing nature of the arts and the entertainment industry, Thurber’s plot is as old as a hundred years and as fresh as last night’s TV western”.
“The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation” (St
Martin’s Press), by Natalie Y. Moore Journalist Natalie Y. Moore grew up in Chatham on Chicago’s South Side, “a solid black middle-class neighborhood” where her college-educated parents worked as a teacher and a Shell Oil middle manager. In 1986, the family agreed to be interviewed and photographed for a Chicago Suntimes feature story about viewers of “The Cosby Show”.
“In the tradition of being a good, upstanding Negro, my dad wanted to present a positive image in the news media by showing how we lived accordingly in black middle-class-dom,” Moore writes in “The South Side”, her ambitious study of one city’s legacy of segregation.
Mirroring Cosby’s Huxtable family for the media, Moore’s father happily took on the responsibility of representing his race because it fit with “his version of middle-class militancy”, writes Moore. He donned a tie to present a positive image while staying true to his black identity. She shoulders her own huge task: Examining segregation through the lens of her hometown’s shameful record and her vibrant personal story, starting with grandparents who moved North to the city during the Great Migration.
The investigation alternates between history and analysis, journalism and memoir. The chapters “Jim Crow in Chicago” (on the history of segregation) and “A Dream Deferred” (on subsidized housing) are recommended reading for anyone who wants to more fully understand the roots of current Chicago issues from teachers’ strike rumblings to police shootings of black teenagers.
Chicago’s race restrictive covenants and public housing policies created the city’s enduring segregation, which today imposes a downward drag on home equity — in effect, a “black tax”. Beyond housing, Moore writes, segregation also limits choices in food and schools, and leaves predominantly black neighborhoods more vulnerable to crime.
Moore, the South Side bureau reporter for Chicago’s WBEZ, draws on her past journalism to introduce Chicagoans affected by segregation or fighting its harms. Many intriguing figures come and go too fleetingly to make an impression — a resident of the now-demolished Robert Taylor Homes gets less than a page.
Moore’s personal reflections, however, are honest and fascinating, making “The South Side” shine. She relates her hopeful purchase of a condo in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and the loss she took when she sold it. She acknowledges her contradictions, embracing black cultural institutions while hating the economic injustices of imposed racial separation.
This complexity helps “The South Side” make a compelling case for keeping the cultural diversity of American cities’ ethnic enclaves, in contrast to the 1980s sanitized ideal of Huxtable assimilation, while striving to eliminate the high-poverty legacy of government-sanctioned segregation. Moore gives no clear path forward, but convinces readers that there’s value in the search.