BASS 2021: Bryan Washington, “Palaver” from McSweeney’s #62

I’m always taken by stories within stories, and I’d wanted to write a narrative between this mother and her son for years. I’ve thought about these two characters for a while, along with the literal and imaginative distances between them. But I couldn’t land the narrative’s voice for anything. It always felt a little too distant. So it was only after I allowed the story’s structure to relax, given it breathing room and flexibility for both characters to reveal themselves, that the writing began to feel less like an impossible thing than something I could maybe navigate.

Bryan Washington, Contributor Note

I’ve often read what a horrible thing it is to include dictionary definitions in any kind of nonfiction writing. It’s overused; it shows a lack of imagination; it comes across as a stall for time. The thing is, when a story has a title like “Palaver” and I realize I don’t really know what the word means – something about talking – so I look it up, if I find the definition interesting in relation to the story, I’m going to include it.

Turns out, “palaver” has a range of meanings. At one end, it’s something like inane babble. At the other end, it was at one time used to describe communication between sailors and the peoples they encountered in distant ports, so came to mean a cross-cultural meeting. The conversations Washington brings to us between a mother and her son fit both definitions.

He made his mother a deal: for every story he told, she’d give him one of her own.
That’s hardly fair, she said.
Bullshit, he said.
It was the first time he’d used the word with her. And she let it slide, the first of many firsts between them.

That opening paragraph prepares us for the style of the story, but we still don’t know why they’re trading stories. It turns out she’s from Texas and he’s in Japan teaching English. He had another job but lost it when a client complained. “Because you’re Black,” says mom; he denies it, and we’re not sure whether he’s trying to forget about it, or if it was something else entirely. Because there is something else. He shares his first story with his mother: “Once upon a time, said the son, I fell in love with a married man.”

Apparently she wasn’t expecting that. Neither the married part, nor the man part.

We get some hint of backstory – no details, but a vague idea – via what his mother doesn’t say, an approach that works quite nicely.

Once upon a time, the mother didn’t tell her son, I thought I’d take you back to Toronto. Wed live with my sister. The two of us would leave Texas, in the middle of the night. We wouldn’t say a word to your father and we’d never come back.
Once upon a time, the mother didn’t tell her son, I thought I’d become an opera singer.
Once upon a time, the mother didn’t tell her son, I wrote poetry. I scribbled words in a notebook and hid it in the guest room. But one day – you wouldn’t remember this – I found you crying underneath the bed, and the pages were spread open, right at your feet. I think you were nine. I never wrote a poem again.

We see glimpses of their lives this way, through his actions – he goes out, comes home the next morning – and her lack of words. His relationship with the married man troubles him. Her relationship with his father has been troubling for a long time.  While mom is able to see his actions, he can’t hear the words she doesn’t say. He might have found comfort if he had. Or he might have been surprised.

There’s a change in the final exchange, however. Instead of going to a gay bar or his apartment, they picnic in a park, amidst people having fun. There’s a sense of lightening. And a sense that, while she refused to play the game, she’s coming to a different kind of agreement.

The teens in front of them slowed their dancing, falling all over one another. It was enough for the mother to grin despite herself. The world was bigger than anyone could ever know. Maybe that was hardly a bad thing.

Her final words seal the deal: “Tell me something else.” It’s almost like moving through the stages of grief, and now, she’s come to acceptance. And yes, there’s been plenty of the inane chatter as they’ve avoided what’s central to either of them. But now the last thing we hear from this cross-cultural meeting between mother and son is a note of hope.

Ward includes this story in her “problematic characters” group. Neither mother nor son are unlikeable, not at all. But also in that group she describes characters who are “more opaque, less open” and that certainly applies. I don’t get the sense that either of them wishes to withhold from the other, but rather they don’t want to hurt each other or expose themselves to criticism across the cultural divide between them. That they seem to be finding their way to communicating without those risks makes this a happy-ending story, or, at least, the happiest ending either could hope for given the circumstances.

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Jake Weber does a great job analysing the communications in this story.