The Booksmith

Summary

“Blessed Deliverance” is a story about a black teenager on the cusp of adulthood in Brooklyn, New York, whose friend group is slowly fracturing as they pair off and begin to confront the adult world in front of them. The group of five—our unnamed narrator, Roni, Cherise, Antonio, and Walidah—meet up with each other a handful of times across a few months in front of a rabbit rescue in Bed-Stuy, leased by a white man named Cyan and two white women who remained unnamed. 

When the teens first go into the rescue, they are surprised by the appearance of Headass, a homeless man who lives in their neighborhood. Cyan has named Headass Reginald, which the teens agree “could not under any circumstances be his government name”, and Headass helps take care of the fifty-odd rabbits in the store. Two weeks after the initial encounter, Headass is dressed in a monstrous rabbit costume in front of the rescue, ostensibly to drum up business. A week later, Cyan has made Headass a “persona non grata” because he caught Headass sleeping in the rescue after hours. On the narrator’s birthday, his father tells him that the rescue used to be a church with glorious singing, and the narrator reflects on a moment when he tried to comfort Antonio whose mother is ill and dying. The narrator kissed his friend and the friend, unwilling to deal with this, ignores that it happened. In the final scene, Headass releases the rabbits and draws a crowd of Bed-Stuy residents as he bangs a pot and spoon together while they shout words of caution and encouragement. When the crowd disperses, Headass gives the narrator a rabbit to hold and tells him the rabbit’s true name and his own. The narrator reciprocates.  

Analysis

One of the themes of this story is the breakdown of human connection brought on by our country’s racist and capitalist brutalism, as well as the redemptive power of recognition. The narrator’s perception of Headass undergoes a powerful change that ends the story with the incredibly hopeful message that we can all save each other a little some of the time. 

In Headass, the mentally ill, homeless man at the center of much of the action in the story, we have our most powerful example of isolation and disconnection carried to its tragic consequence. The narrator says, “Our little crew had become accustomed long ago to his foolishness…We were bored with him, he was dull, the five of us paid him no mind. He might as well have been a fire hydrant.” In five successive phrases, the narrator establishes an “us vs. him” paradigm. They are together on one side–“we”, “our little crew”–and Headass operates in isolation–unwashed, strange, and indecent. They are bored, he is boring, they will not give him their valuable attention.

Brinkley opens the narrative by emphasizing the teenagers’ learned indifference to Headass. The narrator says Headass “had ceased to affect us” with the clear suggestion that he once had affected them, and we are left to wonder if there was a time when the teens gave Headass the attention he craves. In the next sentence, the narrator adds that Headass’s behavior was not amusing  “by the time we started high school.” High school here functions as a kind of maturation checkpoint. The teens have learned enough to matriculate into a new phase of education, and at the same time, have gained the ability not to be phased by the neighborhood crazy. To affect means, among other things, “to be emotionally moved by” or “to be changed by”. The irony of the narrator’s observation that Headass’s shenanigans have ceased to affect them is that the teenagers are changed by Headass anyway. They are made apathetic so that they do not have to be continually dismayed, disgusted, or devastated by Headass’s mental illness or poverty. 

The opening paragraph juxtaposes the teens’ hardening response to Headass with Headass’s own desires. His behavior is described as imbecilic and nonsensical, but also as “look-at-me antics”, and while the narrator gives little grace to Headass, we the readers are necessarily devastated by the picture we have of this man. He walks around the neighborhood, “no longer worth the breath” of the teens’ ridicule. Even the food that Headass digs from the trash—”scraps of pizza and the half-eaten remains of fried-hard chicken wings”–informs our understanding of Headass’s earnest search for connection. While both foods are agnostically popular (in the United States), pizza is a New York cultural object and fried chicken a black American one. Headass is digging for the tossed out remains of the signifiers of these communities to which he belongs but from which he derives no benefit—no care, no attention, no basic human necessities like food and shelter.  

In the second paragraph, the broader context of homelessness and poverty and the inevitable disconnection these economic realities engender is explored. The narrator admits that Headass hasn’t been around in a while and the rumors are that he is in jail, he’s left the city, or he’s dead. These three options are all forms of disconnection. Jail is the literal bodily displacement from one’s home where all future connection is mediated by the mercurial and cruel state through bars and glass. Death is also a form of disconnection and in the case of Headass’s hypothetical death, it is doubly (at least) sad because it is not just death, but an anonymous and unmourned death–the inherent sadness of a person gone away from life is made sadder by a life that was absent community. Even the rumor that Headass has gone to be with family is treated not as the best of all options but incredibly skeptically. The text reads,  “Others said he’d been tracked down by a very distant relative, and was living in Louisiana among his people, if it’s possible for near-strangers to be your people” [emphasis mine]. At first read, this rumor reads like a fairy tale, a thing that happens in a cheesy romance novel where a down-on-her-luck girl inherits from a relative and gets not only money but a new, kooky family out of the deal. Tucked in between rumors of jail or death, the distant family rescuers seems the loveliest and least likely option. And yet, the narrator doesn’t weigh this outcome as much better than the others. Despite a lack of overt sympathy for Headass, the narrator recognizes implicitly that Bed-Stuy is Headass’s home and that “very distant relative[s]” from Louisiana are not necessarily his people by virtue of shared blood. It is a removal without reconciliation. The rumors about where Headass have gone are rooted in poor, black experience. What is every black mother’s fear for her black son? That he will end up in jail or dead. Headass, mentally ill, unhoused, and lacking any support system or safety net, has a better chance than average of exactly these outcomes. The teens learn later that Headass went temporarily missing from the community because the police raided the abandoned building where Headass was squatting for no better reason than “the cruelties of the law.” 

When the teens next see Headass, Cyan has rechristened him Reginald, a name the teens are falling over themselves laughing at. The name Reginald means “king” or “ruler” and yet even without knowing the definition or just how heinous Cyan is, I couldn’t help thinking of the common practice in the antebellum south for slaveowners to name enslaved people after Greek and Roman deities and heroes. Historians have theorized that these names (Cato, Caesar, Venus, Diana) were meant to show off the owners’ education, but might also have been meant sarcastically, “highlighting the contrast between the enslaved and their vaunted namesakes.” I immediately thought of this mocking practice– the name Headass, which while cruel, does denote knowledge of Headass’s eccentricty as bestowed by his community (and is in keeping with black diasporic nicknaming conventions, whichly regular walk the line between cruel and affectionate) contrasted with Reginald, a lofty name that has no real ties to Headass at all. 

The teens, when they leave the rescue laughing at Headass’s new name, are also reminded of naming in slavery and they “all at the same time, it seemed…invoked Toby (for Kunta Kinte)”. There is something immediately racialized about Cyan giving Headass a new name that the teens connect not only to slavery, as I had done, but to the gentrification happening in the city–“SoHa (for lower Harlem), DoBro (for downtown Brooklyn)”.  When the teens leave the rescue, laughing about what has just happened and mocking white people for naming things that aren’t theirs to name, they “did not acknowledge the fact that we, too, had named him” because “it was a different thing entirely to speak of what we…decided to name ourselves.” We, here, being black people, Brooklynites, Bed-Stuyians, family, Headass’s (sometimes) people. The narrator says, “we avoided the complication of…the idea that Headass was also, sometimes, in a peculiar way, a part of us”. This small concession, with its several distancing adverbs and phrases, is the teens’, or at least the narrator’s first real moment of recognizing Headass’s humanity. As with Kunta Kinte, naming has power, sometimes violent power and it is in witnessing this absurd violence against Headass that our narrator begins to become sensitive to him. Structural inequity, mental illness, and homelessness, all embodied in Headass might be easy to learn to ignore, but our brains are specifically wired to notice change–the change of the church storefront to a rescue for rabbits, the change of the tenor of the neighborhood, the change in the teens’ relationships with one another which so agonizes and frightens the narrator, the change of Headass’s name by a white man from outside the community. 

This first scene in the rescue does double work, however, not only highlighting the perniciousness of gentrification but also showing Headass have his first real connection and it’s with the rescue’s rabbits. He sits “gleefully” in the rabbit’s shit covered pen, holding them in his arms. He feeds them “with evident pleasure” and imitates the rabbits when they eat “as though he were eating, too”. When we learn that the white people are not paying Headass, nor even feeding him or allowing him to stay on the property to be housed, Headass’s imitation of eating is heartbreaking. While he gladly gives to the rabbits, he is given nothing and has only the imitation of eating, in which he finds pleasure. One of the white women says, “It appears that Reginald and dear Chicory [one of the rabbits] have made a love connection.” Note that it is the rabbit who is dear to the white woman, but she’s not wrong. The rabbits “reacted surprisingly well to him”, providing the first evidence of affection toward Headass in the story. 

Later when the teens come back, Headass moans at the teenagers and invites them to join him. “One by one, we came to understand. What started with incredulous stares of the other four became, gradually…our unanimous choral response. He moaned and we moaned–Antonio so loudly you could feel the vibrations of chest..until finally all six of our voices coalesced.” Call and response–even moaning call and response–is a rich tradition in black music–gospel and blues come immediately to mind. The church mother moans or groans, overwhelmed with the ecstasy of God or the pain of living–and someone takes up her moan, answers it back to her. It can move up all the way into a recognizable song or it can pull a recognizable song down into its raw emotion. Outside the rescue that used to be a church with “singing that…would bring you to your knees”, Headass invites the teenagers into a black tradition of putting pain to music. Consider that Antonio, whose mother is dying, moans the loudest. The church is one of the few remaining group activities we have in America, where the decline of social and civic groups has contributed to the epidemic of loneliness.  The church’s history for black Americans has been talked about at length and as a former black believer, it is a history incredibly fraught for me personally. But there is something undoubtedly meaningful when Headass recreates this church intimacy, this group sharing in and of pain through sound. The rescue has taken over the church storefront and offers nothing to the community, but Headass is able to tap into the history of the place to become a part of “us”: “finally all six of our voices coalesced” [emphasis mine]. 

By the end of the story, when Headass and our narrator share their true names with each other, the narrator has said of his friend group “we-the-five weren’t a thing anymore”. Friendship drift is one of those seemingly inevitable cruelties of growing up. We must also grow apart. And yet, the story ends in hope. The narrator has a name. So does the mentally ill man who has been made a persona non grata for so many years. They are in community–in communion with one another. 

And returning to the start of the story, isn’t there something in the fact that the black community speculated why Headass was no longer around? Especially when you contrast it with Cyan’s response to “Where is he now?” – “Who knows! And more importantly, who cares?” Even when the teens’ have learned not to be affected by Headass, they notice when he is missing and they wonder why.