The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion met over Zoom on Saturday June 2, 2022. There were ten of us on the call and we discussed Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math: Notes on an American Family. The book is a collection of essays about the author’s life in Portland, Oregon, interspersed with “Survivor Files,” which are second person point of view answers to the question, “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” The book cover features 16 photos of Jackson’s male relatives (photos he took himself with a Polaroid.) There’s no indication which relative’s picture matches which “survivor file,” nor are there any names attached. One survivor was that close to shooting someone when his sister says, “No don’t! That’s my brother!” Inside, the would-be shooter is so relieved. Later he sees the guy he was going to shoot parked next to him and he has his daughter in the car. He covers his daughter’s body with his; he’s so convinced the guy is going to shoot him. Another survivor was accused of trying to steal someone’s bikes, is grabbed, escapes, and goes to a friend’s house who comes back and shoots up the whole front of the house. ” Not a single newscast reports the shooting, and neither do you hear word of anybody being shot or killed in the hood that night, and those silences are the extent of your investigation into possible harm.” The Survivor Files are interspersed throughout the book. Jackson’s essays are extremely elastic. They start out focusing on some part of his family’s story then stretch way out to include something from history, industry, science, even psychiatry. The section called Exodus begins with Jackson being caught by the cops at his friend’s apartment but then widens out to the Hebrews leaving Egypt, then shrinks back in to his family’s move from Alabama to the Northwest. In the section called Matrimony, the author calls his mother’s addiction a marriage. He says he was nine or ten the night his mother “eloped” in a bathroom at a motel. Later his mom says she took her first hit in a house on Alberta Street. Perhaps the motel bathroom memory was the first time he saw his mother use drugs. At any rate, he compared her faithfulness to drug use as a type of marriage. The author then gives a broad explanation about the first recorded marriage in Mesopotamia circa 5000 BCE and a short history of marriage through the ages. The author then turns to science: “Yes, oh yes, I wish I could’ve objected to Mom’s union with Science…If I could return to the night of her nuptials, I would caution her about that fugitive joy, the plunge, and the ultimate damage the substance that was her groom would do to her orbital frontal cortex. Robin began our discussion pointing out that she also lived in Portland in the 1980s. She called our attention to the video of an interview the author gave back in 2019. In it, he explained that his book is not a memoir, it’s a collection of essays.
I must admit that I was ambivalent about bringing this book to the group because of it’s pretty raw. I started the book discussion by saying, “Did you love it or did you hate it?” Which of course, is a question without nuance. I think that what I meant was “Did you get it? Did you understand what the author was trying to do?” My problem with the text was that the author kept widening out the lens. For example, in the essay about his mom, he started out talking about his mother’s addiction, then widened the lens out historically to the first man who ever sold cocaine.
The other thing I thought was odd was that he was on his way to Grad school, but he never talked about his undergraduate experience at all. It seems that in the middle of selling weed or whatever, he would have said, “I was out making this money and I knew that I needed to study for my exam or I knew a ten page paper was due,” or something. He deliberately chose to share the violent and chaotic things going on in his family and his community but shared nothing that may have been just regular.
Meghan shared with us that she had a really visceral feeling reading this book, it was triggering. She felt that the author himself was a pretty predatory character and like Robin said, “Just because you’re smart don’t mean you get to explain it all away.”
Nancy added, “I kept having to look up words. The breadth and depth of his knowledge was impressive. I thought he was an incredibally good writer but a lot of the writing was really self-indulgent. When he gave his former girlfriends a chance to write from their point of view, one of them said, ’Why are you still writing about this?’ I’ve been mulling over the book since I finished reading it and must admit that I’m liking it more. Jackson received a Pulitzer Prize for his essay about Ahmaud Arberry in the Nov. 24, 2021 issue of Runners World."
Eileen said the writer’s mind is like a runaway wagon, she was impressed by the flowing of all that information he must have researched like the Blood Donation Industry he discussed in the chapter called American Blood.
Robin added, “I remember passing places in Portland and seeing the long Plasma Donation lines, it seems like there were a lot of African Americans in those lines.
Laura shared with us that she liked the Survivor Files the best. She told us she had seen him on a television interview where he said he didn’t write the Survivor Files verbatim, but he was sure to capture the essence of the person speaking.
Debbie said she read the book really quickly in three days and the thing that struck her was how precarious any minute could be. She mentioned the Survivor File in which the high school kid’s father had told him to always come out swinging when he was offended. This was terrible advice, it ruined the kid’s chances.
Sunasha told us she neither loved the book or hated it but she did respect it and understand it. She disagreed with me that I thought it was odd that he left out any of his undergrad experiences, because the book is about Survival. She said, “I think we’re all selective about what we choose to share and why.”
Eileen said that the book was brutally honest. “In spite of his uncles’ troubles they did give him support. He gained from them some goodness, the honesty I thought was very admirable.”
Laura thought the chapter called Composite Pops was really good. This chapter describes how all the men in his life, his step-father, his grandfather, uncles, coaches and even his biological father all contributed some good to his upbringing, as a group becoming a composite father. This essay also appeared in The Fire This Time; an anthology edited by Jesmym Ward.
Barb: I felt like he spoke to me. I wondered who he wrote for. Sometimes I just wanted to say thank you and other times I wanted to say “Enough!” but it was very powerful for me.
Shelara shared with us that she thought that he was a very good writer and that she’d be interested in reading his novel. “I wanted to go back to the idea that he expanded too much. One of things he’s trying to do is place his community into the story of America. He may have missed the mark because he himself is too enamored with western white nationalist culture. But I also think he is placing the culture in his community within the context of this idea of America: that’s where all the hustling comes from, the stealing. It is surprising that he doesn’t mention Reagan, or Iran-Contra. I think he’s definitely writing for a white middle class audience; After all, he does inhabit the academic sphere. He’s trying to make the argument that his family is living according to the American way: stealing, etc. He’s also saying ‘We are human beings and we can be just as horrible or just as great as other human beings.’”
The author’s novel, written earlier, is called The Residue Years and it was semiautobiographical. The author said in his interview that he was so angry about the reviews he received for his novel and that’s what prompted him to write Survival Math. It took him seven years to write and revise the work. He was careful to say that it was anger that got him started but anger wouldn’t have sustained him for seven years. It was the love of the writing that pushed him. He compared his love of structuring sentences to his love of playing basketball when he was younger.
Laura loved his saying that he would tell his children not to be too attached to former selves. “That struck me because at the end he showed the process of revision. It gave me a fuller view of life for people of color. The title struck me so much. It just gave me a sense of totality of life day to day life of people of color in this society. It’s a different world for people living under oppression in the United States.’
Shelara: “I’m not okay with the things he did or the choices that some of his family members made, but I understand that those things are very American. It is very American to steal, to pimp, to hustle, to lie, to commit crimes. We’ve been taught that’s what the other people do. The truth is that this author offers a view from a funhouse mirror reflection of America.”
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