Black Is My Favorite Color (1963). Content and Description

First published in the Reporter in 1963 and collected in Idiots First, in the same year, “Black Is My Favorite Color” is the first story in which Malamud used a first-person narrator. Nat Lime is a 44-year-old bachelor who owns a liquor store in Harlem; the story is largely about his relations with African Americans. Nat has a good heart, and his declarations of humanistic tolerance are not dishonest, but he is not terribly perceptive, and his understanding of the conditions blacks live under is a shallow one. In some ways he is reminiscent of the narrator of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” another bachelor who is unaware of life’s complexities and darknesses and whose kindness is always mixed with condescension.

The first-person technique is combined with an artful framing. The story begins with Nat’s speaking in present tense about Charity Quietness, his once-a- week cleaning woman. Nat, lonely “after Ornita left” (Stories 74)—a detail that becomes more important later on—has asked Charity to sit down with him to eat her lunch, but after a failed attempt she has taken to eating her lunch in the toilet. He reflects, “It’s my fate with colored people” (75), and this triggers a retrospective of his experiences. The first is a baffling rejection, in childhood, by a black neighbor he had tried to befriend. The second is the frustration of his attempt at an interracial love affair with Ornita.

Nat has grown up poor, but even as a child he realized that the African Americans living in his neighborhood were much worse off than his family. He describes a complex feeling of attraction to their lives—because of the vitality, the parties and music and good times—mixed with dread, both of an indefinite darkness and of genuine fights he has witnessed, in one of which Buster’s father stabbed a man with a chisel and was beaten and arrested. Something of the same complicated mixture of friendliness and condescension accompanies his overtures to Buster.

Though he says “source questions are piddling” (Stern 53), Malamud has given one autobiographical comment that helps illuminate “Black Is My Favorite Color.” He told the interviewer Daniel Stern in 1975, when asked about the sources of his stories and novel about blacks:

I lived on the edge of a black neighborhood in Brooklyn when I was a boy. I played with blacks in the Flatbush Boys Club. I had a friend—Buster; we used to go to his house every so often. I swiped dimes so we could go to the movies together on a couple of Saturday afternoons. (61)

Nat Lime also had a black childhood friend called Buster; he stole money from his mother’s pocketbook and took Buster to the movies, but, though Buster went, he walked home by himself. His “friendship” ends with a painful confrontation:

One day when I wasn’t expecting it he hit me in the teeth. I felt like crying but not because of the pain. I spit blood and said, “What did you hit me for? What did I do to you?”

“Because you a Jew bastard. Take your Jew movies and your Jew candy and shove them up your Jew ass.”
And he ran away.
I thought to myself how was I to know he didn’t like the movies. When I was a man I thought, you can’t force it. (77)

His primary black-Jewish interaction as a man is with Mrs. Ornita Harris. He makes her acquaintance first by picking up a glove she has dropped, though she reacts with irritation. Later he gives her a discount at the liquor store, and over months a relationship develops, leading eventually to going out on dates. Nat is pleased to reflect that the passersby notice “how pretty she was for a man my type” (79).

Despite Ornita’s hesitation, they become lovers. As if in some sort of complex counterweight to the advance he has made, Nat is robbed the same week by two black men with revolvers and hospitalized when one of them pistol-whips him. Meanwhile Nat’s mother has died, leaving him free to propose marriage to Ornita, but, despite vacillations, she is unwilling.

The story climaxes with another anti-Semitic assault on Nat by black men, who confront the couple as Nat, because of a taxi strike, has taken Ornita to Harlem on the subway and is walking her to her house. Three men accost them, insult Ornita, accuse Nat of being a Jew slumlord, and, when Nat tries to defend Ornita from one who has slapped her, beat him and leave him in the gutter. This ends their affair, though Nat wishes to continue.

Though this is obviously the most important background to Nat’s invitation to Charity, which is renewed as the story ends, there is a small coda, another memory of an effort to help “a blind man” on Eighth Avenue, rejected by the man, who can tell Nat is white, and by a black woman who shoves him aside into a fire hydrant. “That’s how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth” (84).

The explorations of black-Jewish relations in this short story are subtle. There is a historical context: The early 1960s was a time when the traditional consensus that progressive Jews and blacks were natural allies had begun to be questioned. The question of where blacks fit into the big picture of anti-Semitism is raised when Nat remembers his mother’s saying, “If you ever forget you are a Jew a guy will remind you” (80). Similarly, even the muggers indicate the economic motive for some resentment of Jews, the accusation that they financially exploit blacks, and even Nat’s defense—he is no landlord; he runs a liquor store in Harlem—is hardly exculpatory.

In an early comment, reflecting on Charity’s choice to eat her hard-boiled eggs by herself in his bathroom, Nat says, “That’s how it goes, only don’t get the idea of ghettoes. If there’s a ghetto I’m the one that’s in it” (73), a comment that not only connects blacks and Jews through the experience of the ghetto but points to a psychological ghettoization that Nat, not without some reason, feels as his generous but clumsy outreach fails again.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. While Nat finds himself attracted to African Americans, he wonders why he is not close to blacks, seeking sources to blame other than himself for the difficulties he encounters in relating.

2. In having Nat tell his own story, Malamud makes a deliberate choice. Regardless of what he intends, he causes the reader to confront many uncomfortable issues surrounding interracial relationships. This is especially true for Mala- mud’s readership at the time this work was written, a time marked by racial tension and social inequality. Has this work become a “period piece,” documenting social anxieties during the civil rights era, or does the insight Malamud’s story provides have value in our attempts to make meaning?

To form community? To understand others? If indeed Malamud implicates the reader as much as Nat, what implications does this have for us and the world in which we live? Do the questions Malamud raises remain unanswered today? Write a well-developed essay that addresses these questions, providing real-world examples, citing civil rights documents such as those that can be found online at http://www. loc.gov/rr/program/bib/civilrights/home. html, and quoting from the story.

2. How would this story read differently if told from the point of view of Ornita Harris? What would the reader like to know about her that Nat cannot tell us?

3. With Malamud’s exploration of black-white relations in the 1960s in mind, read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, and Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Taken in tandem, what do these works of literature tell us about race relations in 1950s and 1960s America? Additionally, consider the value of using white protagonists to consider these issue versus using black characters. What fundamental differences or similarities can you find: How do these differences and similarities inform us about American culture?

4. Melville’s narrator in “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a rather superficial bachelor, who, before his frustrating encounters with Bartleby, “had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness” but finds his deeper emotions involved. Do you think the comparison with Nat Lime is justified by Nat’s realizations?