Having planted a vineyard, Noah “drank of the wine, and was drunken.” Ham came upon his naked father and reported the sight back to his two brothers, Shem and Japheth. The Bible says they managed to cover up the father without looking at him. “Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him,” says Genesis 9:24. But what sin had Ham committed? No matter, the ill-tempered Noah put a curse on Ham’s son Canaan, condemning him to serve his uncles. That is, to be a slave.
Flavius Josephus, a first-century historian, concluded that Ham’s descendants went on to populate the African continent. By the time of the European colonizations, the Biblical tale of Noah and Ham was interpreted by Christians as a prediction and justification of the enslavement of black peoples.
Ham is the name of the main character of Chantal James’ debut novel None But The Righteous – a wayward young man named Hamilton. Thus, both mythical and American to the core. His parents gone, Ham finds adoptive shelter with the benevolent Miss Pearl in New Orleans. Maturing, he works in a fast food restaurant. Then comes Hurricane Katrina and the ruination of his neighborhood. He encounters Deborah, as disoriented and anxious as he; the two of them travel to her family in Morrisville, Alabama, and conceive a child. But Ham departs for Atlanta to find Mayfly, an older acquaintance from NOLA. As the novel opens, Ham is about to return to Alabama.
James installs the voice of a 17th-century Dominican cleric as the tale’s narrator — Martin de Porres, notable as the first black saint of the Americas. Dismembered after his death, he is present here as a bone fragment fixed in a pendant, a talisman on a pewter chain given to Ham by Miss Pearl as a hex to keep him on track. St. Martin says, “It is what I have been fated to do: fill vacancies the living have left within themselves, seize them, and love them. They call me, though they don’t all realize it. Some do. But others are calling simply, blindly, for love.”
But St. Martin isn’t a magician. The moment of the novel is a time of precarity and struggle for its characters. Mayfly “was the child of immigrants to the upper middle class” in “the only family of color in town,” and she emerged from adolescence with a feeling “deep in her that she would belong nowhere.” Deborah, now pregnant but partner-less, lives with her 58-year old father Bo and two brothers, Ellis and Reed. Bo and Reed both served in the Middle East. Ham had lived in New Orleans “with a feeling of impending doom for at least three years before he was forced from his hometown.” Among Deborah’s family, “he tries to deflect their judgments of him … He knows at these times, all throughout his being, that he is despised and unwanted, at best tolerated, in all the ways that count and not loved in any of the ways that matter.”
None But The Righteous displays the traits of an essential great novel, both of its time and timeless in its embrace of humanity. The story is structured on a time/space continuum, past and present moments cast in a swirl that relieves us of strict linear determinations and conclusions. This is a novel about who we are and what we are like, all of us. At its heart, the narrative pulses with heedful care and curiosity about freedom versus control, contentment versus adversity – some of these forces are societal, some familial or strictly personal or idiosyncratic. In this novel’s world, we are at the mercy of our own impulses – and also the violence in our world, whether in the form of Katrina or the racist murders recalled by Bo or the fears in Ham that keep him wandering. Are we capable of examining and reckoning with those impulses?
Ultimately, it is the often wry, candid, empathic and frustrated voice of St. Martin that animates this world. Clearly, he is nudging Ham toward something – but how much influence does he actually exert? His sense of responsibility, and his desire for embodiment, comprise his powers. Are we any different? He is also completely devoted to what is actual in the world, and so his descriptions of episodes are crisp, his phrasing often surprising, as if we’re hearing ordinary perceptions for the first time.
Ham is a mythical character, recognizable as the eternal hero with certain deficits. His trek from NOLA to Alabama to Atlanta and back is a modern Odyssey, and as in the travails of Odysseus, what he may find when he arrives “home” is always looming before us. Ham is a fully-drawn human of his time and era; James will not permit him, or any of her characters, to exist on a higher moral plane than the rest of us. They are desirous, sometimes groping, sometimes necessarily guarded. Ham transports all of these qualities with him back to Deborah – the name of the only female judge in the Bible.
We have our hooks in each other: do we bristle or relent? St. Martin says, “I asked it of my creator, the beloved: how do you have your hooks in me? It is only because I know something Mayfly doesn’t that I can occasionally be satisfied with no answer. I know that we do not belong only to ourselves, that what loves us also seizes us.”
[Published by Counterpoint Press on January 11, 2022, 240 pages, $26.00 hardcover]