7.15.07 Ace of Spades
When David Matthews’s mother abandoned him as an infant, she left him with white skin and the rumor that he might be half Jewish. For the next twenty years, he would be torn between his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined world of white privilege. While his father, a black activist who counted Malcolm X among his friends, worked long hours as managing editor at the Baltimore Afro-American, David spent his early years escaping wicked-stepmother types and nursing an eleven-hour-a-day TV habit alongside his grandmother in her old-folks-home apartment. In Reagan-era America, there was no box marked “Other,” no multiculturalism or self-serving political correctness, only a young boy’s need to make it in a clearly segregated world where white meant “have” and black meant “have not.” Without particular allegiance to either, David careened in and out of community college, dead-end jobs, his father’s life, and girls’ pants. A bracing yet hilarious reinvention of the American story of passing, Ace of Spades marks the debut of an irresistible and fiercely original new voice.
“This is a loving portrait of a close relationship between a father and son, one slightly delayed by the fog of race.”—Booklist
About the Author: David Matthews is a writer living in New York. He has appeared on The Tavis Smiley Show and the CBS Sunday Morning Show, and in People magazine.
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Hi Felicia!
Here are my questions for David Matthews:
1) In writing this novel, were you influenced by any other novels of “passing,” specifically works such as Black Like Me?
2) Have you noticed a distinction in the way that the topic of “passing” is treated in New York as opposed to Baltimore?
3) Which cutlure do you feel that you more strongly identify with now? Did writing this book lead to any particular realization?
Alison
It’s doubtful there are two ethnicities who’ve historically experienced more oppression and yet, without being able to fully identify or find acceptance within either, it had to have been the worst of all possible worlds. Living in a black community, you had plenty of exposure to what you were being excluded from. Did you ever have a desire to explore your Jewish heritage, or was the rejection from your mother’s family too complete to pique much curiosity? Do you relate to that part of your DNA enough to feel anti-Semitism on any kind of personal level? Clearly in the 60s and 70s things were quite different for you than they are today. Do you identify yourself as simply American now, or as something more specific?
Question from Me:
1) What box is checked now that there are options.
2) What advice, specific or general, would you have to offer parents raising children of different nationalities or ethnicities, taking into account the (minor and major) differences in the past twenty years? Are those differences, themselves, big enough that parents should expect an easy road for their children or should they be concentrating on specific areas to help their children through the racism and hatred that still exists?
That said, this book has me intrigued!