San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Gripping memoir centers compassion
The first thing you see when you open “Another Word for Love” is an arresting color photograph of a 7-year-old Carvell Wallace wearing a plaid shirt and sharp vest common among welldressed kids in the 1970s. It is a poignant image to open this vulnerable memoir in which the author proclaims, “We are all children.”
With 35 short essays, Oakland writer Wallace shares stories of his life in loose chronological order. Sometimes the essays stand alone, beginning with “once” and encompassing a singular emotional moment. Other essays propel forward, two or three at a time, building to a dazzling clarity.
In the early years, it is just Wallace and his mother, a woman he admits was “not good at things like keeping a roof over her head or food in the fridge.” His boyhood is marked by episodes of hunger, instability and abuse, experiences that he folds into himself in ways that are both healthy and unhealthy as he matures. Yet Wallace is remarkably compassionate with his mother, his love for her clear and unquestionable. It is the kind of parental grace reminiscent of Ashley C. Ford’s 2021 memoir “Somebody’s Daughter.”
Wallace moves to Los Angeles when he is 13 years old, a move that is fundamentally important to his evolution. Enchanted by the freedom of California’s culture of invention and to escape the reality of his home life, he takes up acting, signing with a Beverly Hills agent while still in high school. He is unable, however, to escape the reality of the times: the 1991 beating of Rodney King and then the acquittal of four police officers involved. On the first day of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Wallace is wrongfully accosted by police behind his apartment building. He is just 17 years old.
It seems impossible to write a contemporary memoir of Black manhood without the specter of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the national protests that ensued. Wallace’s dual perspective as someone who lived in Los Angeles in the aftermath of King’s beating lends him an experiential viewpoint that is as sad as it is knowledgeable. In the moment he fears his own potential demise at the hands of the police, he thinks of his mother, remembering “what it felt like to be held by her in her arms, close to her chest, the warmth of her breath bathing you much in the way the towering redwoods bathe the streams and the rocks and mycelium that run and grow beneath them.” Nearly three decades later, Floyd would also famously call out for his mother moments before his death.
In these pages, Wallace praises experiences of the beautiful because he intimately knows the other, violent and ugly side. This appreciation of beauty gets its moment in the book in ways that are both philosophical and intimate. Touched by the impermanence of everything, Wallace finds inspiration in the persistent blooming of perennials such as the amaryllis and daffodil. And he professes his love of the cherry blossom, despite its banal popularity, as well as the American robin.
Wallace’s aesthetic appreciation of language echoes in poetic sentences that craft metaphor with ease and wrap the reader in an evocative cocoon of powerful witnessing. Yet perhaps he waxes most ecstatically when he admires the beauty of the Black body. It has taken him a long time to appreciate his own body, which he now understands is “to deliver love.”
His appreciation of his own body increases with his rising awareness of his queerness, which is gently revealed in the 27th essay of the book, titled “The Sex.” The publisher describes the book as a memoir about “growing up Black and queer in America,” a description that is apt if we think of Blackness and queerness as just another way of saying it is a book about what it means to be human.
Ultimately, Wallace’s story is more hopeful than plaintive, the references to the title that pepper the text offering up the many ways we can find redemption. As Wallace explores his sexuality and what it means to love, the answer always leads back to compassion. We can find love if we hold ourselves and others with kindness.
Wallace helps us understand all of this not just through his own story, but because of his humility. While he admires the artist Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, who he believes is one of those artists who can see “what exists on the other side of the veil,” a metaphor for the kind of prophetic clarity that Wallace seems to be aching to achieve, Wallace does not acknowledge that he also possesses this gift of sight. This power, he muses, is “exhausting. Overwhelming.”
Hopefully, this captivating memoir is a promise of more work to come. Hopefully, Wallace will be renewed by the telling.