The Wig
By Charles Wright 

     The media today presents polar-opposite pictures of African-Americans: the 40th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech on the one hand and Kobe Bryant on the other. Sadly, since Charles Wright's jarring, angry-candy The Wig debuted in 1966, as fresh and provocative today as yesterday, African-American culture has latched on to the Kobe Bryant/Mike Tyson self-destruction personified by Wright's hero Lester Jefferson. We see the roots of Michael Jackson, the ultimate self-loather, transforming into a white mannequin in Lester Jefferson believing that all he has to do to rise out of a dead end life is transmute his Afro into burnished blond curls.

     There's no talk of reparations for slavery in this novel. Wright's homeboys use drugs, sleep around but reject genuine love that might save them, pander to the white man's expectations (Lester Jefferson crawls on his hands and knees in a chicken suit crying the fast-food mantra, "Eat me. Eat now. All over town."), cling to past fame (Little Jimmie Wishbone makes Gary Coleman's run for California governor look dignified), and refuse to believe they deserve better. In short, as surely as gangsta rappers sing about "bitches and hos," Wright seems to be saying that African-Americans keep themselves enslaved, that their women and the world deserve no better than the rat-pelt coat Lester gives to the snooty woman known as The Deb. After his gift, when he receives The Deb's assurance that she loves the wig, Lester, "being an average young man, living in a terrible age, cuffed by ambition, and now in love," can only clutch at The Deb and call it "a small triumph, a midget step past the gates of pain."

     The giddiness exemplified by the drag queen Miss Sandra Hanover goes hand in glove with the desperation Lester Jefferson feels. Like the high induced by the Malacca pipes of pot the pusher called the Duke feeds Lester, the prose of The Wig is hallucinogenic one minute, suicide-sharp the next. The electroshock through the genitals white Mr. Fishback gives Lester is not the panacea but the downfall of African-Americans, and of Dr. King's dream.