Book Review: ‘I Just Keep Talking,’ by Nell Irvin Painter

I JUST KEEP TALKING: A Life in Essays, by Nell Irvin Painter

As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has learned over the course of her eight decades on this earth, inspiration can come from some unlikely places.

In 2000, she happened across a news photograph of Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which had been bombed into rubble during the long stretch of devastating wars between Russia and the Caucasus. The photo prompted Painter to wonder how “Caucasian” became a term for white people; that in turn led her to an 18th-century German naturalist who picked out five skulls to embody the five “varieties” of mankind. What he deemed “the really most beautiful form of skull” belonged to a young Georgian woman and would therefore represent Caucasians, whom he called “the most beautiful and best formed of men.”

From a photograph of bombed-out Grozny to the absurd methodology of a German naturalist: Painter’s research for the best-selling “The History of White People” (2010) was born.

“It was as though I lost my head, you boiled off all the flesh and the brains and eyeballs out of it, and you called it ‘New Jersey Variety of Mankind,’” she writes about the Georgian’s skull in “I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of her essays and artwork that includes a number of such characteristically irreverent asides. Painter was a historian at Princeton before enrolling in art school at the age of 64. In 2018, she recalled the experience in a freewheeling memoir. “I Just Keep Talking” presents Painter in full, gathering personal reflections, scholarly essays and images spanning several decades to convey the range of her interests and ambition.

“So much in me,” Painter writes, “was suited for disregard.” She recalls a happy upbringing in Oakland by parents who “were never poor, though never rich.” The family would drive around California in their Kaiser automobile, with Nell and her dog, Christopher Robin, stretched out on the back seat. She can see her class privilege for what it was, but it also made her feel as if she wasn’t easily apprehensible by others: “There’s not much there in my life to match what my country likes to recognize as a Black narrative of hurt.”

Painter went on to study that hurt in depth, writing about slavery’s persistent legacy of violence. But she has also emphasized the historical importance of Black resourcefulness and creativity. One of her books traced the Exoduster migration of formerly enslaved people to Kansas in 1879; another told the life story of the antislavery activist Sojourner Truth. Born enslaved, the charismatic Truth knew she had to be canny when it came to her self-presentation. One photograph she circulated included her statement: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”

This discrepancy between one’s sense of self and how that self is received and remembered has long fascinated Painter. One essay in “I Just Keep Talking” explains why the line most associated with Truth — “Ar’n’t I a woman?” — is something that Truth almost certainly did not say; it was more probably the fabrication of a white antislavery writer, who added the phrase in her account in order to portray Truth as a “colorful force of nature” and amp up the drama. Painter doesn’t deny that the theatricality was effective, dovetailing with Truth’s own deployment of a “naïve persona,” but it also flattened her into a caricature, obscuring the quiddity of the woman she actually was.

“My academic research as a Black woman frequently loses out to a slogan that my sister citizens want Truth to have said, and to the national hunger for simplifying history,” Painter writes. Elsewhere, she explores how the 18th-century abolitionist and pan-Africanist Martin R. Delany was claimed by Black nationalists in the 1960s who ignored his adamant elitism. Delany favored the immigration of Black Americans to Liberia, where they would “assist to elevate” the local population, which he described as “degraded brethren.” As Painter points out, this was the attitude of someone who embraced “the settler ideal.” Delany “could not conceive of policies that would benefit one group of Blacks but not others.”

The essays in “I Just Keep Talking” show her repeatedly drawing attention to a plurality of Black American experiences. An incisive 1989 review of the historian Eric Foner’s “Reconstruction” criticizes him for paying insufficient attention to “women as autonomous actors” whose preferences did not always correspond to the demands of “their husbands or the market economy.” A 1992 essay on the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, who accused him of sexual harassment in congressional hearings before his appointment, is scathing on Thomas’s disparagement of his own sister, whom he publicly derided as lazy and “dependent” on welfare.

“He seemed not to have appreciated that he was the favored boy-child, protected and sent to private schools, and that she was the girl who stayed behind, married early and cared for an ailing relative,” Painter writes, going on to parse how Thomas “appropriated the figure of the lynch victim.” Hill, by contrast, was a “highly educated, ambitious Black female Republican” who “had no comparable tradition of a stereotype that had been recognized, analyzed and subverted to draw upon,” Painter says. “As a result, she seemed to disappear.”

The notion of disappearance is a preoccupation for Painter, who has spent enough time combing through the archives to see how easily entire lives get consigned to oblivion. She is candid about her frustrations with “stupid” reviews of her books and prize committees that she feels have “totally overlooked” her historical work. But seeking validation from elite institutions is too often a mug’s game. Painter says that her practice as an artist allows her to explore a world that isn’t tethered to “archival truth” or “clear meaning.” During Donald Trump’s presidency, her drawings and collages seemed to become looser and freer, gesturing at tragedy but also inflected by her sly sense of humor.

“I Just Keep Talking” is full of surprises, and it ends with something I haven’t seen in a while: gratitude for social media. Facebook and Instagram felt like an “abundance” to her, especially during the isolation of the pandemic. “I no longer feel as though I’m talking to just myself,” Painter writes. “Social media brought me lots of people to talk to who talked back.”

I JUST KEEP TALKING: A Life in Essays | By Nell Irvin Painter | Doubleday | 418 pp. | $35