Photo by Naomi Jiang’25
By Olivia Wilson ’24
Staff Writer
“Daddy’s mind left like a dream at dawn, and now the encounter could only take place in my imagination, so that’s where I went,” the author’s note of Daniel Black’s latest novel, “Don’t Cry For Me,” reads.
Black, who won the Distinguished Writer Award from the Mid-Atlantic Writer’s Association in 2014, published his newest work, “Don’t Cry for Me” earlier this month.
On Wednesday, Feb. 9, the Odyssey Bookshop hosted a virtual conversation about Black’s recent novel with the poet Major Jackson as part of a series of author talks throughout February and March. Jackson is a renowned author of five poetry collections. After the introduction by the event’s host, Jesse Hassinger, only the two panelists were visible in the Zoom call to audience members.
Daniel Black and Major Jackson have known each other for many years, and their conversation showed it. Even over Zoom, the rapport between them was electric. It felt more like witnessing a spontaneous conversation between two old friends at the bookstore than a formal event. Jackson, dressed in a suit, joined the Zoom call from in front of a bookshelf, adding to the bookshop-conversation ambiance, while Black phoned in from in front of a blank wall, his shirt a colorful patterned purple.
Black’s book is written in an epistolary style, a narrative technique that takes the form of a letter. It is told from the point of view of Jacob, a dying father who is trying to reconnect with his long-estranged son, Isaac. After Isaac came out as gay, his father treated him poorly due to biases against his sexuality and sexual expression, leading Isaac to cut ties with Jacob. Black drew inspiration from his relationship with his own father and the words that they never got to share. Jacob acts as a stand-in for Black’s father as Black expresses words he didn’t otherwise know how to say.
A common thread throughout the discussion was the theme of entrapment, which crops up within all of the characters, but especially Jacob. Black described Jacob as trapped within his own masculinity, his sexuality, his place in society and his sense of what it means to love. Jacob’s character is meant to highlight a prevalent issue in America: the role Black men are given, the stereotype of manhood with which they are saddled at a young age and the intergenerational trauma that bars older Black men from moving forward in the way younger Black men can. Jacob, in a sense, resents Isaac because of the freedom of self-expression that Isaac gets, opportunities Jacob and his wife were never afforded. This book, and the style it was written in, was Black’s way of giving a voice and an audience to someone who’d never been allowed one.
Jacob’s legacy and the story of Black’s father was a central theme of Black and Jackson’s conversation. Like Jacob, Black’s father grew up in a world that hindered him and made him feel unwanted in his own country, in an era where Black children’s labor was valued over their education, notwithstanding the barriers to livelihood caused by segregation. The trauma of his humanity being ripped away and being treated as a means of production in his own community never healed, leaving him stuck in a sort of limbo.
Jackson spoke to how every aspect of the characters resonated with him, and he considered the novel to be “one of the most important books written today.” His response to the book came from a “level of familiarity with the struggles of all the characters.”
Black finished the hour-long panel with one final reading from his book that talked about love, or the version of it that Jacob and his generation knew, and the version of the generation before them. The issue wasn’t with the elders’ ability to love, but that they were afraid to love. The final line provided an explanation — “ slavery had left them that way.”
An on-demand recording of the talk is available on the Odyssey Bookshop’s Facebook page. A currently unnamed sequel to “Don’t Cry For Me,” written from the perspective of Isaac, Jacob’s son, is currently in the works.