46 pages • 1 hour read
Fire Shut Up in My Bones
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Themes
The Relationship Between Hardship and Achievement
Blow is no stranger to hardship. His memoir opens with the death of his beloved great-grandmother, Mam’ Grace, an event that sends his mother out of the house in gut-wrenching sobs. Later, his grandfather Jeb—the closest thing to a loving father he has—passes away, leaving an emotional void he cannot fill. An older cousin sexually abuses him, exacerbating an already deep despair that he struggles with for most of the book. He is bullied, undervalued, and underestimated, but through it all he accomplishes remarkable things. He becomes captain of the basketball team, class president, valedictorian, president of his fraternity, and an intern at the New York Times followed by an appointment to head the paper’s nascent graphic arts department at only 25.
The juxtaposition of Blow’s early hardships and later successes suggests a connection. Had his early life been a cosseted one, Blow may not have achieved such startling success. Some research supports such a connection. Early struggles during a child’s formative years build and reinforce important skills, like learning to handle conflict, overcoming obstacles, and the importance of resolve and perseverance. The key to this connection seems to be self-reflection, and Blow has the intellectual rigor for it. His early years of introversion created the cognitive space in which he is able to examine his difficulties, understand them, and turn them into productive springboards.
However, that process often takes years, and he stumbles frequently on that path. Blow’s story is also fairly rare. For every Charles M. Blow who grows up poor and suffers emotional trauma and yet succeeds, there are hundreds who don’t, which suggests an even more complex series of factors at work. Without any of these factors—his introspection, his desire to be chosen, his intellect and love of reading, and his preoccupation with proving himself worthy of his mother’s love—Blow may have become just another damaged man festering in his own despair, desperately living his life wondering “what if?” He may have become his father.
The Power of Shared Trauma to Unify Communities
Just as hardship can prime individuals for success, the shared trauma of groups of people, while harmful in many ways, can unite them. Americans often refer to the September 11 terrorist attacks as traumatic but unifying, a time when American citizens looked past their political and cultural differences and held hands in a common cause. Blow’s community, the impoverished west side of Gibsland, is largely Black, the end result of years of institutional racism, segregation, and neglect. Even the local cemetery is segregated, a chain-link fence dividing the white people and the Black people. Yet, despite the compound hardships of poverty and segregation, the community is tight-knit. Neighbors watch out for neighbors, sharing conversation and laughs under a shade tree, dispensing hugs, and instilling moral guidance to the neighborhood children. These truths are more than anecdotal and are borne out by psychological studies:
The research suggests that, despite its unpleasantness, pain may actually have positive social consequences, acting as a sort of ‘social glue’ that fosters cohesion and solidarity within groups (“Shared Pain Brings People Together.” Association for Psychological Science, 9 September 2014).
This “solidarity” takes both personal and institutional forms: individuals care for other individuals while institutions like churches create a physical and emotional space for that cohesion to solidify. The church plays a prominent role in Blow’s quest to confront and overcome his personal trauma. He depicts his local church as a place where individuals become one with their aspirations, both for themselves and for other members of the community. When Blow is baptized, the ritual is significant to him, his family, and to the entire church community. Even his farcical flailing in the baptismal pool evokes a collective laugh from the congregation.
Humans seek out other humans with common interests—or, in Blow’s case, common hardship. Having similar obstacles against which to exert oneself forces disparate individuals to work together in pursuit of a common goal. Even the hazing of the fraternity brothers works as a social glue, binding the pledges together in common cause. For Blow, that community—while sometimes disparaging in its own right—provides the sort of collective support he needs in the absence of a father or basic institutional services.
The Corrosive Effects of Racism on Personal Dignity
Blow grows up in the 1970s, a century after the abolition of slavery and a decade after the end of Jim Crow, but the toxic legacy of slavery and racism persists. As a child in his somewhat insular community, Blow is relatively isolated from outward expressions of racism. He concedes that, in Gibsland at least, Black and white individuals share a delicate truce that has existed unbroken for decades. As he grows, however, he sees the subtler manifestations of racism. These include the way his Uncle Paul grows nervous around white men in authority; how grown, proud Black men avert their eyes in conversation with white individuals, careful not upset the delicate balance. Only later does someone diverge from the tacit agreement when a white boy shouts a racial epithet at Blow as he walks down the street. As he ventures out into the world, Blow begins to see more overt expressions of hate, most prominently when a white police officer pulls him and a classmate over, forces them out of the car at gunpoint, and nonchalantly informs them that he could kill them and no one would do anything about it. In Gibsland, the racial dynamics are akin to a mutually agreed drama in which all the actors know their parts intimately. As long as no one improvises or deviates from the script, peace is maintained. Unfortunately, the role of Black men often requires deference to white people, eroding the soul and replacing the spark of life with a bitter darkness that grows into anger. This anger is then often turned inward on oneself or one’s family.
In Gibsland, Blow understands the rules, unfair though they may be, but outside of his hometown, all bets are off. Racist police officers and degrading graffiti all confront him on his journey outside his small world. It angers him, but it also instills in him a hard-bitten sense of reality of how the world operates. To his credit, Blow is able to contextualize this reality. While he understands that racism is institutional in so many ways, woven into the fabric of American society from the beginning, he is also able to see points of light in the darkness. These small moments of peaceful coexistence give him hope and recharge his batteries for the ongoing fight.
The Stigma of Overly Rigid Gender Norms
One event which Blow carries with him for years is when, as a young boy, he is at a basketball game with his mother, and he runs across the court to her, seeking an embrace. Unbeknownst to him, the crowd finds his run out of the ordinary, laughing and referring to this display as “effete.” While Blow doesn’t understand that he is the butt of the joke, the look on his mother’s face—shame—tells him all he needs to know. Blow exhibits behavior outside the boundaries of cultural acceptance, and for that, he is mocked. Awareness of fluid gender identities and terms like “non-binary” have not yet entered the public discourse, and as a result, Blow is considered odd. He is seen as a mama’s boy and someone to keep an eye on.
The masculine imperative is a powerful cultural force, particularly among young Black men. Blow acknowledges this truth, and he expends a great deal of mental and physical energy trying to conform to this imperative. Even today, despite advances in the public awareness of transgender discrimination and the rapid adoption of collective pronouns, resistance persists. Human beings prefer things easily categorized, whether they be political ideologies or gender identification, and those who defy those categories—Blow’s cousin Lawrence, for example—often pay a steep price. Even years after the basketball court incident, Blow still suffers the stigma of an unconventional gait. At Grambling, one of the brothers observes him walking across campus and angrily threatens, “If I ever catch you walking like that again, I’m gonna fuck you up!” (171). Blow cannot let his guard down for a moment lest his innate difference show itself to the world. This kind of constant self-monitoring and behavior regulation is exhausting and should be completely unnecessary, but in a world which insists on strict definitions with no room for deviation, they remain vital tools for survival.
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