Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Disarming Humor in ‘Heads of the Colored People’

From the opening sentences of the opening story in Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ debut collection, “Heads of the Colored People,” we’re in a world of humor, provocation and deep reflection about cultural signifiers: “Riley wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair — which he worked with gel and a blow-dryer and a flatiron some mornings into Sonic the Hedgehog spikes so stiff you could prick your finger on them, and sometimes into a wispy side-swooped bob with long bangs — and he was black. But this wasn’t any kind of self-hatred thing.” Thompson-Spires was inspired by James McCune Smith, a 19th-century abolitionist and doctor whose brief stories about various characters were published under the title “Heads of the Colored People, Done With a Whitewash Brush.” In an author’s note, Thompson-Spires writes that, like the work of Smith and some of his contemporaries, including William J. Wilson and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, her stories are interested in “black U.S. citizenship, the black middle class and the future of black American life during pivotal sociopolitical moments.” Here, she discusses her surprise at the tone that has developed in her work, the way she was inspired by stand-up comedians in the 1990s and more.

A: There was a line that kept coming to my head: “wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair.” I kept trying to flesh out that character. Once I realized that I wanted to be in conversation with James McCune Smith, I realized the theme that could tie together the collection, and I wrote to the theme. I wanted to update McCune Smith’s sketches, but that became too restrictive, so I ended up thinking about heads in general: phrenology, psychology, mental illness and leadership; there’s a literal head injury in one of the stories.

This was the very end of 2015. I was writing stories that were potentially going to be sent out as individual submissions, but never thought I’d write a collection. My MFA thesis was a novel. I wrote maybe five or six new stories once I realized I wanted to write a collection.

A: My sense of humor is a lot darker than I thought it was. I like to see myself as a goofy but pleasant-ish person with a melancholy tinge. But some of the stories are really dark. There’s police brutality, infanticide, weird stuff with fetishization of a disabled man. I kind of surprised myself that that was in me.

Some of it is related to the times. I certainly felt I needed to address state-sanctioned violence and all these horrible things that are going on. I read something about a funeral singer in Chicago who’s exhausted, and that’s where I got the idea for “Wash Clean the Bones.” But the others, I’m not sure where they came from.

I tend to use humor to disarm people and work through difficult material. I don’t tend to approach things head-on with a serious take. The ways it’s easiest for me to deal with things is through satire and parody. It’s kind of a coping mechanism, and it’s a coping mechanism for the characters too.

A: I love Toni Morrison’s work; I respect everything she does, she’s skillful and brilliant. But those stories are deeply, deeply disturbing. And I didn’t think I would ever write things like infanticide, which you see in Morrison’s novels. I thought I was writing away from that to something lighter-hearted, but I kept getting pulled back.

Originally I was thinking about writers like Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson. I hadn’t read Kiese Laymon’s novel “Long Division” yet, but once I read it, I thought, this is exactly the kind of book I want to do. Ishmael Reed had a huge influence on me, and George Schuyler before that. Those are the people I thought I was in conversation with.

A: It’s not one person. I was really inspired by very PG and PG-13 stand-up comedians; people like Sinbad and Dave Coulier, who played Uncle Joey on “Full House.” I wasn’t allowed to watch people like Richard Pryor and George Carlin. I was staying up late to watch Arsenio Hall — my parents didn’t realize I was behind them; their backs were to me on the couch.

I wanted to be a stand-up comedian for a long time. I would take my really pitiful jokes to school and fail. I would stand in front of a little group of my fifth-grade classmates and try to tell them jokes. I even tried to be the class clown and brought in slapstick stuff, like whoopee cushions and gum that tasted like fish. The desire to deal with humor has always been in me.

A: If you are a black nerd, or a blerd — or love or care about black nerds — this book is for you. And even if you don’t, then you probably need to read this book so you can develop some empathy for those characters.

—

‘Heads of the Colored People: Stories’

By Nafissa Thompson-Spires

209 pages. 37Ink/Atria. $23.