At my last doctor’s appointment my physician warned me about the perils of having high blood pressure. When I said I’ve just been stressed out at work, she expressed concerns about the nature of my job. Asked to elaborate, I explained that it’s difficult to trust people at face value, that I find myself having to constantly re-evaluate conversations I’ve had with colleagues and supervisors, that I have to brace myself ahead of time before work events and meetings, that I have to calculate the various outcomes any interaction may have and whether it will prove beneficial or detrimental to my career path. My physician asked what is it I do.
Reader, I’m a teacher. But the exact nature of my job has nothing to do with the high stakes environment of my workplace. My being a black woman at a primarily white institution (or a “PWI”) very much does. When Marie Mitchell—the central character of Lauren Wilkinson’s debut novel American Spy—describes meeting a powerful CIA agent for the first time it almost reads like any given day existing while black: “The first few moments after you meet someone are precious, because the data on them in plentiful and your own subjectivity has yet to interfere.[…] The officer gave me some deliberately direct eye contact, his face wide open, his eyebrows up as he smiled slightly. When I first approached a target, I did so with this very same look on my face. It was a basic step, one of many I used to suggest to my targets that I was trustworthy. I imitated his expression; right from the start we were working each other” (80).
Marie’s voice here reminds me of the unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man particularly when he comments on how much he must watch and watch those watching him in order to survive. Indeed, Wilkinson pays homage with her novel’s opening epitaph from Ellison’s work: “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all of my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”
Wilkinson takes this charge and gives us Marie Mitchell: a black woman Federal agent in the late 1980s. Marie takes a typical black experience and makes it into a career—that is, to regularly and constantly interrogate her surroundings and those individuals she has to work and live with. Marie and her older sister, Helene, grow up with their father in Queens, New York in the late sixties. Their mother soon leaves the picture to return to Martinique. Her abandonment sets both sisters on paths where relationships, vulnerability, and the manipulation of trust are at the center of their respective choices.
Marie’s voice and character also ring similar to that of Lila Mae Watson in Colson Whitehead’s speculative novel The Intuitionist—a brilliant story about a black woman in spaces she doesn’t belong, literally, she’s an elevator engineer. Both women and both novels carry a theme of containment – of women who know they are always on display and, perhaps therefore, are always watching. Such awareness begs containment and Marie admits to her sons that she has to exist with her rage at bay at all times: “The only anger I ever expose to the world is through implication, by suggesting that I’m on the brink of no longer being able to contain my fury. That is what a woman’s strength looks like when it’s palatable: like she is containing herself” (267).
In a delicious development, a little over fifty pages into the novel, that completely won me over as a fan of Wilkinson’s, we get to witness her sister Helene’s obsession with becoming a spy. The incident takes only about a page, but if you’ve been paying attention to Wilkinson’s deeply set and complex characters (such as their retired Fed father who cannot help but call his daughter by ringing the phone then hanging up so that she will call him back), then you’ll have seen the moment coming, and it does not disappoint. Marie gets bullied by a local girl and her sister ends up becoming close best friends with her for the following year. During one group outing Marie blinks and sees her sister brutally punching this best friend. Afterwards, when shocked Marie asks what happened her Helene simply says: “Nothing recently. She tried to drown you though” (63). Marie learns betrayal through one of the deepest bonds one can have, from her sister. Both sisters (one unknowingly) spent a year learning the art of intimacy, bonding and betrayal in order to communicate a larger point. This is what Marie will take with her as an adult.
Marie discovers her best self through her love of her sister who—spoiler alert but not really—dies in a car accident not long after skipping college and enlisting in the Army. Before Helene’s death Marie is ambivalent about her sister’s choices, but afterwards we learn that Marie goes to college and joins the Feds. Marie finds her best path through the love of her sister and a desire to honor her sister’s life, which was cut too short. Again, this is a storyline that subtly nods to traditions in black communities.
In Wilkinson’s novel we aren’t just told what it’s like to become a spy—we learn it and feel it in real time, organically, the way Marie does. After she kills an intruder who was sent to kill her Marie grabs her twin boys and goes to Martinique to hide out in her mother’s home while she figures out her next move. We meet Marie as she watches her sons sleep and writes them a series of letters for them to read in the future. Though I personally resent the trope of motherhood as a means to tell a woman’s story Marie’s voice is strong enough that it’s not too much of a distraction. Through her letters we learn of how she came up in the FBI and what led to her family having to escape under false identities. When she gets the opportunity to go undercover and be a real spy she’s hesitant once she learns she’s really only desired for her physical and sexual potential with the target. But once she learns that a key player in the assignment is someone important from her sister’s past, Daniel, she takes it.
While trying to do her best on her assignment Marie keeps facing more untruths from Daniel – who is a disturbing but, disappointingly, not fully fleshed out character. Wilkinson does an excellent job of weaving the theme of black identity and betrayal. Once Marie discovers yet another manipulation on the part of her bosses she comes to second guess herself and returns to meeting that important CIA agent: “When I first met him, he knew immediately to flatter my intelligence, which blinded me to some of the ways he was manipulating me. I’ll never be certain about the extent to which he managed to do it…. had I just misinterpreted what I’d seen?… I realize it’s only my own intellect that I’ve caught. My own capacity to overthink things” (245). I absolutely love how specific this character and story and yet how much Marie and her narrative resonate with being black in hostile spaces well into the 21st-century.
Marie leaves her sons in her mother’s care in order to pursue her killer(s) and, in doing so, infiltrate a possible underground American imperialism scheme. The foundation has been set for an excellent and provocative series if Wilkinson chooses to do so.
I hope she does.