Breaking the Boundaries of Race : Susan Straight’s stories about black life capture everyday details of pain and triumph. So why the heated debate over her novels? Although she writes about a world she knows, Susan Straight is white.

The wind’s up. The hot air feels dry enough to snap--as brittle as a twig.

Signs most Southern Californians know how to read all too well. Time to scan the skies, the scrubby hills gone blond. Water the roof instead of the lawn.

The opening pages of Susan Straight’s latest novel, “Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights” (Hyperion, 1994), pause on the last anxious hours of Southern California’s fire season and protagonist Darnell Tucker’s jumble of worries.

Torn between the drama and danger of the flames, and the even more keyed-up suspense of just what awaits him at home, Darnell daydreams: “(Brenda) was going to show big soon--her stomach swelling. The mass of fear grew hard in his stomach again. Different from fire-scared. . . . But this panic, that yesterday’s fire was the last, that he’d be home in Rio Seco for good.”

For Darnell, this notion is more terrifying than stepping into a wildfire. “Midnights” follows Darnell’s journey toward manhood, watching his friends fall out of step around him--victims of the street, the police, of their own poor decisions. Living day-to-day, making something out of nothing, presents a far more formidable challenge for a black man in this corner of California. Being a young man with dreams and being a young black man with dreams are two very different things, Darnell understands--especially when it comes to realizing them.

Like the slow pan of an eloquent camera, Susan Straight illustrates, with seen-it-all precision, the minute details and minor triumphs within Darnell’s world: a young black man, determined, with a dream. The loneliest of loners, a nature boy--”not normal for a brotha,” chide his partners--Darnell wants to make his own way, on his own terms.

*

Darnell is the door through which we discover Susan Straight. She refuses to be put in a box, with the same quiet vehemence her fictional creation does.

Anyone perusing Straight’s work in a bookstore, then flipping to her photo on the flyleaf, might ask: Just how can Susan Straight presume to know the inner world of a young black man? Seeing as she’s a woman. More audaciously, seeing as she is white.

This is not a benign proposition.

“Every time I go (to read) I’m scared,” she says without a trace of fear. “I have to be. ‘Cause look at me! And this time, you know, I was reading about a guy. So I had to stand up there and read this section about Darnell . . . and I thought: ‘If you’re not supposed to cross any line, I just crossed two of them.’ ”

The author of two other books chronicling black life--the story collection “Aquaboogie” (Milkweed Editions, 1990) and the novel “I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots” (Hyperion, 1992)--Straight would prefer to linger in the background. She relishes the chance to talk about Darnell’s world--the fictional Inland Empire town of Rio Seco.

“Then,” she cracks in her soft voice, a smile starting at the corners of her mouth, but not quite materializing, “we never have to talk about me, right?”

In stone-washed denim shorts, matching sleeveless shirt and sandals, Straight, 34, settles down in her sunny breakfast room in the Riverside home she shares with her high-school sweetheart and husband of 10 years, Dwayne Simms, and their two daughters, Gaila, 5, and Delphine, 3.

A Riverside native, Straight’s roots are sunk deep here. Her mother, Gail Watson, a hard-working Swiss immigrant “of peasant stock,” raised Straight and her two brothers single-handedly. The neighborhood in which she came of age offered one of those classic, however difficult to maintain, Southern California backdrops where children of various races coexist with little fanfare or incident. Not to sugarcoat nor melodramatize, Straight simply fell in, made friends--many of whom were black, including her future husband. Nowadays, despite the daily nettling concerns of her extended family--which largely inform her work--the life around her flourisher, a culturally lush garden.

“Everyone tells stories, almost legends, about people and cars and events,” she writes in “Aquaboogie’s” author’s note. “I’ve heard them for so many years that I wanted my stories to be on paper instead of only in the air.”

Straight, who is an assistant professor of English at UC Riverside and periodically leads writing workshops at the California Youth Authority, considers herself a full-time mother. The writing, although spiritually all-encompassing, takes a back seat to her family, household chores, major and minor disturbances around the home. Straight waits for the silent hours at the end of the day to lean over her typewriter and stretch out inside her world.

“I used to be able to stay up till 2 or 3 in the morning and get up at 6 or 7. Now somebody wakes up and they’re sick. And then somebody drunk goes by on the sidewalk maybe around 3. . . . It’s hard to be on a straight line forward and marshal your thoughts and say, ‘Well, this is what I’m going to do tonight,’ cause somebody’s coughing in there.”

It may not be the quintessential writer’s life. But, Straight allows, it will do.

In person, she appears much younger, shyer than the glamour-shot author photos--her freckled face scrubbed clean, pale blue eyes slightly obscured behind glasses. The thoughtful high-school daydreamer profile. She’s not quite the face one might immediately put to the persona behind these intense and intensive narrative works.

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From early composition classes to graduate-school fiction workshops, aspirants are often strongly advised: Write what you know.

Straight has done just that. An animus inhabits the machinery of Rio Seco--from the lilt of the speech and the scent of hair-grease right down to “brothamans” and the “hellafines”--without a trace of outsiderness or being forced. More essential, she has conveyed the often difficult-to-articulate feelings, the slow-simmer, the subtle though daily last-straw moments:

“He didn’t even see that red Chevy truck who was going first at the stop sign, and braked the El Camino hard. A white guy with reddish-blond eyebrows leaned out the open window and said, Damn nigger! Before he jerked his wheel and sped around the El Camino . . . Darnell’s eye, his forehead, rang with anger. . . . Why I gotta be a nigger. Why can’t I be an asshole, or blind. A new daddy? A jerk?”

But even though it is Straight’s world, her writing about it has been much to the confusion and consternation of many she has encountered.

The most frequent question, often lodged rhetorically, is whether or not Straight “can do that.” To some--black, white or other--it smacks of cultural appropriation. For years people of color have felt the sting of having their stories half-told, mis-told or told for the profit of others, if told at all.

The late Daniel James, who was white, assumed the fictional persona Danny Santiago to “authenticate” his 1983 novel of an East L.A. Chicano youth, “Famous All Over Town.” James shocked friends and enraged critics when he revealed his deception a year later. The book won a literary award but created a brouhaha that still echoes--just who is qualified to write about whom?

For Straight, the circumstances are starkly different. “I’m not going to walk around pretending I’m black. You can’t be who you’re not. I know that people try on each other’s cultures, but to truly know someone is not to walk around and pretend you are Ice Cube.”

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Quietly living it and publicly writing about it, however, are two very different endeavors. At USC, after being a sportswriter for the Daily Trojan, Straight came to fiction in creative writing class. At first, “I tried to write like everybody else,” she recalls, but eventually her Riverside influences began to seep into the prose.

The “acceptability” of her subject matter, which had barely lifted an eyebrow in college, in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was fervently debated. “There were no black students . . . no black faculty.”

Once there, Straight made a beeline to Prof. Jay Neugeboren, whose novel “Big Man” framed a black basketball player as its protagonist.

“I gave him (my story) ‘Safe Hooptie.’ There was other work on the back. He looked at it and said: ‘What are you, poor? You can’t afford paper?’ And I said: ‘Yeah, you got a problem with that?’ ”

Sparks aside, Neugeboren became Straight’s champion, teaching her how to prune and tuck--to sharpen the focus.

She happened into other glimmers of inspiration: thought-shapers such as James Baldwin and Julius Lester. But in the writing workshop, the atmosphere starkly differed. When she wasn’t fed up, Straight found herself amused by the assumptions: “Oh, she’s blond, she’s from California. She’s going to be dumb and she’s going to write about surfers.”

Her stories threw them for quite a different loop. “I turned in my Darnell stories. And they would say: ‘What are you doing writing about this?’ ”

Cinderella success certainly didn’t lay in wait outside the classroom either. “Those stories (in ‘Aquaboogie’) were really hard to sell. I would send them out and people would say: ‘This is fascinating stuff, but I’m afraid it’s a little rough for us.’ ”

Back in Riverside, with Dwayne juggling job and school, the Simms family got by the best they could.

“I was teaching at Job Corps full-time. Teaching refugees (English as a Second Language) in the evening,” says Straight as Gaila wanders in and scrambles onto her mother’s knees. “Dwayne and I were doing clean-up jobs, hauling everything to the dump.”

At some point the writing ceased. No crevice of time to compose thoughts. No encouragement in the mail. But in 1988, on a wager from Neugeboren, Straight reluctantly sent a couple of stories out to literary magazines, including TriQuarterly--which snatched two of them up almost immediately.

The Milkweed National Fiction Prize and publication of the collection moved Straight out of the shadows. Hyperion Editor Pat Mulcahy quickly signed her to a two-book deal.

“I thought it had tremendous emotional power as well as literary quality,” Mulcahy says. “Many young writers today don’t have a community of people to write about. And Susan is following an American tradition that isn’t as prevalent as when Faulkner was writing.”

Her reviews have been solid, but Mulcahy was surprised by the sometimes-hostile reaction Straight has received in an occasional think piece or at readings.

“I supposed that I was a little naive about it. I thought it was especially interesting that she’s white, that she can write within the culture. I just thought other people would accept it.”

When the debate heats up, the Straight-as-curio scenario rears its head most often. The fact that she is white (and in this context an exotic), the wary of varying races speculate, places her work at the top of the pile in editors’ offices, maybe on a film producer’s desk.

“Most black people come at it with a natural suspicion. ‘How does she know? Is she someone who can tell our story?’

“Overall . . . black people give her a chance more than white liberals,” Mulcahy says. “Once they read the work, and get to know a little more about Susan as a person, they know she’s not a tourist. She’s no lightning rod, she’s just Susan.”

*

No matter. Race is its own conductor. And Straight finds herself at the center of a storm that still furiously works its will.

Debates over appropriation and accountability rage. “White adults in literature and the arts have demonstrated an . . . anthropological-like interest in affairs of black folks,” wrote Quinn Eli in “White Authors Cash In on Black Themes” last year in Emerge magazine. Eli takes to task such writers as Richard Price (“Clockers”) and Mary Ann Rogan (“A Heartbeat Away”) for insensitive portrayals and “arrogant” defense (in the case of Rogan) of their endeavors. Although Eli recognizes Straight’s formidable powers as a storyteller, and as a soul who too bears witness, “Nevertheless, her book is no less privileged a book than (Price’s and Rogan’s). This one . . . received widespread attention from reviewers and literary pundits that equally compelling books by black writers are rarely afforded. . . . This means that although she’s a writer of phenomenal talent, it is only incidental to her success.”

Although it smarts, Straight understands the impulse.

“Hey, I know this looks funny,” she says, earnestly, arms outstretched, in her straight-from-the-hip manner. “It looks funny to me, you know? And the hardest part is that if I keep writing about the same things, and I keep looking the same way . . . (I) have to keep answering the questions.”

She shares bookstore vignettes like war stories: “The funniest was in Philadelphia. This white woman stood up and said: ‘How can you write about a black woman and you have blond hair?’ Then a black woman stood up said: “I love the book, she did a great job, and I think you should sit down.’ So I was going like whoa, can we just move on? I don’t wanna go there.”

But James Fugate, co-owner of Inglewood’s Eso Won Books, says although he thought it might happen, his customers haven’t taken issue with Straight’s race. “I think people knew her from (‘Sorrow’s Kitchen’) and didn’t care at all. She’s a more serious literature writer than some of the work available. That’s always good. Especially in the black community, we get inundated with trash. I would like to see more serious novels published about our experience. And I think she is dealing with some serious themes.”

One theme Straight finds more intriguing is the manner in which cultures don’t blend in Southern California. “They really do mix as far as fashion and music . . . and yet it’s one of the most segregated places in the world.”

That sort of segregation only enforces stereotypes--rigidly defined boxes. “I have lots of friends who would like to do things, and people would say, ‘Man, you can’t do that kind of stuff, you’re a brother.’ And it’s so hard to only have this big a box that you’re supposed to fit in. I think that is always what I am looking at. Always writing about what people’s box is.”

It’s evident she’ll always be turning hers inside out. Or messily spilling out of its confines. Despite the pressure and consequences from without, she has little reason nor inspiration to shift gears. Nor to write about her place within these worlds.

Her next book will chronicle the story of a family from the Tulsa riots in 1921 to L.A.’s urban upheaval in 1992.

“When I went on the trip for Darnell’s book,” Straight says, “at black bookstores people said they were tired of reading about pathologies. They were tired of everything having to be so violent, so criminal to be a black story. They said what they like about Darnell was that it was about what they called a ‘normal brother.’ The guys who are going to work, and coming home and doing an ordinary thing.

“Nobody pays attention to the fathers who stick around. It’s always: the lost black father. I think nobody pays attention to the ordinary black father, whether he’s 50, or 70 or 20.”

It’s far from exotic, Straight maintains. “We all sit in Dwayne’s father’s driveway, 50 or 60 of us at a time, at a party or something, and we all laugh. ‘Cause you would never read about somebody like us. Not about what we eat, or what we talk about, or what we do or anything like that,” says Straight, peering out the window, past the garden, at the light retreating.

“Everybody has worked hard today, or done what they had to do. And everybody sits around and talks. They talk about politics, and they talk about beer, and they talk about the weather. And it’s ordinary. And to me, that’s the good life.”