Ethics of Storytelling

Thoughts on Andrea Lee's "Anthropology"

I’ve written a couple of times lately about how to approach short stories that might not make sense at first glance. Underlying that advice is that good stories are worth reading even if they aren’t instantly entertaining.

But why are they worth reading? What is the function of a good story?

Most stories I write about start with an element of entertainment — felicitous language, an intriguing character, a compelling situation. But they also offer some general impressions about what it means to be human. A subset of what it means to be human is that we face ethical dilemmas with no definitive answer.

Andrea Lee’s short story “Anthropology” offers a study in ethics for writers. Namely, what do we owe the people we write about, even as we explore our own place in the world?

Before diving into this story, one bit of context. It was included in the 2002 New Stories from the South anthology, and in an author’s blurb about the story, Lee explained how she wrote an essay for The New Yorker called “Quilts” about her family in rural North Carolina (published in 1983).

She said the piece “didn’t actually hurt any feelings, but it had in its execution a kind of dashing carelessness — I wrote it in my early twenties — and an eagerness to relegate real people to picturesque types that bordered on callousness and nowadays makes me cringe.”

Lee goes on to explain she wrote “Anthropology” as a fictional conversation with a cousin about her piece, “a fleshing out of one of those fantasies of expiation we all have.”

Overview of “Anthropology”

With that context out of the way, the story is about a narrator, who is an author much like Lee herself, in dialogue with her cousin. Both of them are from rural North Carolina but are living lives of sophisticated exile, the cousin as a scholar in the West Village in New York City and the narrator a writer in Italy.

She is visiting his apartment, and while he smokes fancy cigarettes, they discuss her article. Her cousin takes her to task for making their relatives sound “backward like a mixture of Amos ’n’ Andy and The Beverly Hillbillies.” He also says she “mortally offended” them by calling them “black.”

Much of the story is an investigation into what she should have called their relatives, who are of mixed-race heritage, being descendants of a white woman and a half-black, half-Native American man in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the family’s racial identity is wrapped up in social class. As the narrator explains,

In Ball County, everyone knows everyone’s place. There, the white-white people, the white-black people like Aunt Noah, and the black-black people all keep to their own niches, even though they may rub shoulders every day and even though they may share the same last names and the same ancestors.

The racial lines create class lines, and the narrator’s article, arguably, has insulted the family not for describing their pigment but for demeaning their social standing. As a mixed-race family, they occupy a special class, referred to as “the fabled White Negroes of Ball County” and “Tidewater Free Negroes.”

The cousin explains:

It was the most demeaning thing you could have done. They’re old. They’ve survived, defining themselves in a certain way. We children and grandchildren can call ourselves Afro-American or African-American or black or whatever the week’s fashion happens to be.

The narrator, trying to explain herself, says she was “afraid” when she returned to Ball County. Once there, instead of a hard-hitting exploration of her “roots,” she lets her older relatives spoil her, and she enjoys her visit while researching the article.

Although her cousin has spent the story castigating her, she is able to come back with one point: Her aunt told her, “Oh, honey, some of the folks around here got worked up about what you wrote, but they calmed right down when the TV truck came around and put them on the evening news.”

This shuts her cousin up for a moment. The story ends with her asking what he would have called them, to which he says it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

Who Owns a Story?

This story is a bit surreal to read 20 years down the line, as discussions about race have only gotten more complicated. The cousin’s line about “the week’s fashion” jumped out at me because most media organizations now capitalize “Black” or use “BIPOC” as an all-encompassing word for “not white,” so I’m not sure how this story even could be written post-2020.

But in 2002, the author was able to explore who gets to decide how a community is branded. When the narrator argues their relatives are black, her cousin says,

They don’t choose to define themselves that way, and if anybody knows that, you do … Anyway, in ten years Aunt Noah and all those people you visited will be dead. What use was it to upset them by forcing your definitions on them? It’s not your place to tell them who they are.

So, whose place is it? Does the family get to decide? An editor at The New Yorker? The Associated Press style book? An audacious 20-something who has “escaped” and may not have the clearest vision about where she came from?

This question is broader than race. Who owns a story? Who gets to define a community’s story at large? Surely a writer has the right to define her own story, but what happens if there’s collateral damage?

I once argued all stories are lies because, by definition, a story requires a frame and a frame creates a bias. This is not an original or even controversial idea. Ron Rash’s poem “The Famous Photographer Visits Eureka” is about a photograph of South Carolina cotton mill workers:

That yankee photographer would stop
each time a smile or laugh slipped out.
“Be serious,” he said. “This means
much more than you can understand.”
I’d climb back on the stool to reach
the frame, to work more “seriously,”
while he hid behind the camera,
reduced my life to grays and blacks.

Decades later I realized why
he’d cropped the child out of that scene,
read how his photographs had changed
the labor laws across the South,
and knew no one should ever care
he denied me my humanity.

Is it right to tell a lie if the lie has noble ends? Kant would say no, and I’m inclined to agree with him, but so much of our world is built up by stories that lie. Which is better: to write about a place even though you’re bound to get something wrong (because stories are inherently biased), or to let the place (and its people) vanish without a record?

I have no answers here, but I applaud the way “Anthropology” raises the question.

---