Black with a new read
The history of two "black" occasions and the stories that grow from them
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has been an American phenomenon for decades now. I had long understood that it is the day in which businesses can get out “of the red” (meaning financial deficits) and “into the black” (showing a profit).
However, according to a recent slideshow post by the Wall Street Journal, its primary meaning came from people calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving.
A History.net essay further explains that in the 1950s Philadelphia was subject to a peculiar form of chaos in advance of the traditional November Army-Navy football game, held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
As the city streets filled with raucous tailgaters the day before the game, local police were subject to extra-long shifts and area merchants suffered a spate of shoplifting amidst the influx of strangers and partiers. Thus, it became known as “Black Friday.”
Over the years, the negative connotation was morphed, with some effort on the part of retailers wanting to shed the negative connotations, into the less troubling one we observe today.
I just started listening to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer and though he does not mention the term “Black April” in his opening passage, I recognized it right away:
The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its limbs, as is the way of wars. It was a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world. It was a month that was both an end of a war and the beginning of ... well, "peace" is not the right word . . .
The pall cast on that disheartening event is much larger than a day of ill-mannered shoppers in an American city in the middle of the last century.
And yet, like the morphing of that circumstance into a more palatable story, I’ve found some references that shift the focus of Black April slightly.
In a 2021 commemoration of Black April in Orange County, California, Reverend Tuyen Van Nguyen of Blessed Sacrament Church, Westminster, CA, speaks about the hardships of his childhood in the wartorn Vietnam of the early 1970s.
“I remember the pain and agony as if it was yesterday,” he said, describing the chaos of the day, the families trying to find their way among the rumble of tanks and artillery. He was just 20 years old and it would be another six years before he was able to flee the communist regime.
Still, he concludes his remarks by saying “I am in awe of how my life has turned out because of April 30, 1975 . . . grateful for the opportunity to be in America, a place of hope . . .”
The black of this Friday after Thanksgiving morphed from scenes of chaos in a Pennsylvania city street to a boisterous holiday shopping event, the blackness of a month in which a country saw its final days gives rise to gratitude for an abundant life in a new land.
Both these instances depict the way humans invariably engage with circumstance by ascribing stories and assigning meaning. At its best it is the process of separating the wheat from the chaff, at its worst it could be called delusional thinking.
How do we tell the difference? In a July Solstice MFA 2017 lecture, fiction writer Dennis Lehane, described his Irish family’s regular storytelling:
Every Friday and Saturday all the relatives got together—they all lived in the Dorchester area—and they would tell stories.
And I started to notice something.
Every six weeks the same story came into rotation and it was tweaked. It got bigger and it got bolder.
Essentially they were lying but no one called the storyteller a liar. They were all engaging in the lie. And what I figured out was this:
They’d left the place they love. They could never reconcile the fact that they did that. Ireland was frozen in time—the immigrants calcified their past.
What they were really after was an underlying truth, they were after understanding. So how did they get back to that?
They were telling these stories, these lies to get to a truth.
[Photo: Me play acting a silly story with author Dennis Lehane. He was kind enough to play along even though he had no idea what the “Hat Hand-off” skit was all about.]
So here’s to a safe and non-looting Black Friday, a new understanding of Black April, and, perhaps, a deepening of the stories we make meaning with, may they be a step closer to a healthy underlying truth.
“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth . . . I want you to feel what I felt.
I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
~ Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried as quoted in For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.
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"I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
This is so true, Kat, and thank you for the important reminder.
What did they do during "Black April?"