Davon Loeb’s The In-Betweens: An American Reflecting Pool
West Virginia University Press
Publication: February 2023
280 pp
PB 978-1-952271-74-8
Review by Jonah Peretz
Within the waters of Davon Loeb’s The In-Betweens: A Lyrical Memoir, Loeb illuminates what it was like for him to grow up with a split identity. In doing so, he paints a picture of what it might be like for anyone to grow up with such split identities – for a country to exist with such a fractured sense of self. While one side of his family might agree with Langston Hughes’s Let America Be America Again that “America never was America to me,” the other side might not. For bearing this internal conflict, both sides regard him as an outsider – a misfit. The In-Betweens is a testament to perseverance in the face of such divides. Throughout this collection of essays, the heartbreak of rejection comes not only from without, but from within, yet so too does the conquering of such rifts. Through incisive prose and candid reflection, Loeb shows that no one is ever truly alone in their struggle, however bleak it may seem.
In the essay Alabama Fire Ants, Loeb’s many cousins, all staying at his Nana’s house in Alabama during sweltering summers, tease him relentlessly: “I was the white boy in a family of Black boys and Black girls…White Boy can’t jump. White Boy can’t play. White Boy go back inside.” Paradoxically, in the essay The Best Dancer, this same ‘white boy’ is celebrated as an exemplar of Blackness in his small New Jersey town. Loeb finds himself aspiring to be the Black kid his peers expect him to be: “The Black Kid Who Danced.” His very existence seeming “…a collage of a single Black narrative. I wore FUBU, Timberland boots, and baggy pants. My hair was in cornrows. My Walkman CD player housed mixes of my favorite rappers.” To win the superlative of Best Dancer, he had to prove himself against the other contender – a boy named AJ, one of the only other black kids around. Yet Loeb relates: “…in reality, I was more like…those white kids, flattening what it means to perform Blackness, to be Black.” In battling AJ as the school craved, “It wasn’t just about who was the better dancer, but who the cooler and Blacker Black guy was.”
Growing up, Loeb idolized his white father, Harry, and his half-brother, Alex. They were writers and artists, just like him. Their hair was the same consistency, their skin tones more alike than that of his mother’s family. But his reverence was not to last, as their physical absence, emotional distance, and mental health struggles began to make themselves known. Hearing Alex screaming and shouting to himself in the shower in the essay For My Brother, Loeb begs his mother to be picked up, never to return. His mother then tells him he is predisposed to such afflictions, that it’s in his genetics.
The adolescent Loeb is caught between the love he once had and the fear he now feels for his father’s side, and thus for himself. Loeb’s stepdad is the opposite – great around the house, physically fit; a proper Black man, according to a young Loeb. His brother by his mother’s side, Troy, is similar – ‘Blackness’ seems to come easily to them. In the essay Thoughts on Hair, Loeb sought to replicate Troy’s cornrows, only to feel as though he’s “appropriating the part of Black culture that [he] wanted too.” Despite knowing his ancestry, and living primarily among his Black family, he doesn’t feel at home. He is all too aware that to an uninformed onlooker, he could be one of many races, torn between worlds by the world.
In The In-Betweens, Loeb stands as witness to the many ways his family, friends, and country have tried to inform him of which box he and others belong in. He deftly illustrates the ways these circumstances forced him to plant his feet and declare that while he may not fit into tidy categories he is still, despite or because of that, Davon Loeb; that his reflection can still be seen within these dark waters, for within his own body lies the source of light.
“The In-Betweens“ is available now, from West Virginia University Press.
About the reviewer:
Jonah Peretz is a senior writing major at Ithaca College, having initially enrolled as a physics major hoping to study astronomy. He remains passionate about astronomy and science to this day, and recently discovered a predilection for editing and proofreading. When not in class, you might find him expanding his musical horizons, playing D&D, or studying the ancient tomes (Wikipedia).