I cannot imagine being a student of the infamous Percival Everett, an author that has written various works that have confused for months. My mind cannot even begin to grasp that he is a professor, standing at a podium and teaching students at the University of Southern California. If I were his student I wonder if he would answer my many, burning questions, or would he confuse me even more? Would I leave every one of his classes crying? Can I let you in on a secret? Sometimes, when I read his works, specifically I Am Not Sidney Poitier, I feel like Percival Everett and I are two extremely different people. Two different people that would not get along in everyday life. What I have learned though, is that it is one thing to read his various works, but it is another to think about the person writing behind the pen, Percival Everett.
Who is Percival Everett and what inspires him to write the things that he does? What is he like as a person- is he kind or is he cold? Was he an excellent scholar in school or did he struggle? What was his childhood like, does he have a family that he is close to? To me, Percival Everett exists as a big giant mystery. His works are unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Each piece is so extremely different, but at the same time, they are all the same. My questions about him are kind of like the questions I find myself asking when I read his writing, questions that are frequent and fail to have a one specific answer.
I was so intrigued by this man that I even typed “Percival Everett Interviews” into the youtube search bar. This is because I wanted to see Percival Everett, existing and talking like an ordinary person, a person like me. The outcome of this search surprised my expectations. For some reason I thought I’d find Everett speaking like a posh robot who thinks he is better than other people. Instead, I found a regular man. Not only that, but I found a man that has been through many challenges and hardships throughout his life. These difficulties were often brought about through his race. The interview I chose to watch is entitled “Percival Everett and The Mystery Of Race”. Everett discussed the prominent pressure he has experienced within the writing industry. As an author, he was always pushed to use his race to his advantage and to write about black people. His editor actually asked him about his piece called Frenzy stating, “What does a novel about Dionysus have to do about African Americans?”. Ironically I just learned about race as a social construct in my Cultural Anthropology class. We learned about how race was created by society to establish hierarchy, but it does not actually exist at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5RDfcoMZEs
Seeing Percival Everett as a real living human reminded me the importance of how terrible it is to assume things about people. Yes, his works do make me frustrated sometimes, and yes I wonder about his thought process and what propels him to write the things that he does. But no, I cannot assume he exists on a whole different planet than the one that I live on, or that he is different from me because of this. Essentially, this man is a genius. He writes in a way that makes people think, and think, and think, without ever finding a true definite answer. I can tell you that if one day I write a book, the overall story and meaning will be very different from those of Percival Everett’s. Yet, I cannot tell you that I will not use some of things this author has taught me. I hope to one day move audiences in the ways that he does, and reveal to them new discoveries about society: the good, the bad, and the ugly.