Death on the Nile: Film and Novel

The latest film version of Death on the Nile, directed by Kenneth Branagh, was so atmospheric that I wanted to stay in its world, so I read Agatha Christie's novel the same weekend. Now, I admire even more how Branagh and his screenwriter Michael Green treat Dame Agatha's work with the seriousness she intended even as they make major changes.

The core of Christie's novel is intact in the film. Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey) introduces her adoring fiancé Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer) to her close friend, the fabulously rich and beautiful Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot). Six months later, it's Simon and Linnet who are honeymooning in Egypt with friends and family, and Jacqueline who crashes the party. Linnet engages the sympathy of detective Hercule Poirot (Branagh). Besides being rattled by her stalker, she confesses that she fears that everyone in the party hates her.

Though Christie's whodunnits have been criticized for being formulaic and shallow, I've found that she brings psychological and theological depth to her work. Poirot reminds Linnet of the Old Testament parable of the rich man who steals the poor man's ewe. Unlike King David, Linnet refuses to see herself in the story. But Poirot takes her fury at Jacqueline to be a sign that, deep down, Linnet knows that justice is on the side of her ex-friend. Then, confronting Jacqueline, Poirot urges her to use the power she has in this situation, to forgive. If not, he warns, the evil that you're allowing to grow will take you over. To both women, who each claim that they have no choice but to act as they do, Poirot says, "you do have a choice."

Branagh and Greene lop off parts of Christie's plot to focus on those relationships. Gone from the film are subplots that involve a secret agent, an alcoholic, a kleptomaniac, a jewel smuggler, a brutish engineer with a grudge, and three different romances that Poirot helps along as matchmaker.

What Branagh and Greene add is Poirot's backstory in a battle episode during the Great War. An explosion puts him in the hospital. Visited there by his fiancée Katherine, he tells her that he failed to save a close friend and that he is afraid to show her his own disfigurement. She delivers an intense sermonette on what love means that resonates throughout the movie, especially when the character Rosalie Otterbourne (Letitia Wright) accuses Poirot of self-absorption, arrogance, and inhuman coldness. Annette Bening's character Euphemia mocks the famous passage on love from 1 Corinthians 13, evidently from bitter experience with an ex-husband: "Love is NOT patient and kind...."

Branagh and Greene also alter Christie's original characters, combining some, reimagining others. The most inspired of these changes is to turn the character Salome Otterbourne from a dotty white English writer with a disapproving daughter to a canny black Blues singer with a disapproving daughter. A sexy dance between Jacqueline and Simon at Salome's jazz club sets the baseline for everything else that happens.

The film startles us more than once with shots of breathtaking beauty from the banks of the Nile, on it, and under it.

After I read the novel, I still wanted more and viewed Branagh's earlier Christie adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. I've been a lifelong fan of the 1974 version, so I approached it with some skepticism; it won me over.

[See my blogpost of 10/2014 about Christ in Christie. I compare Orient Express, Finney's film version, Suchet's TV film version, and the novel. In this article, I apologize for underappreciating the richness of Christie's work. See also my page Crime fiction.]

"The Heron's Cry" by Ann Cleeves: #2 in the Two Rivers Series

It's a great moment in any crime novel when the detective realizes, "Oh, I've been looking at this all wrong." There's a sudden burst of energy, maybe a laugh, like when you suddenly notice the little detail that makes a cartoon funny.    

Before that moment blows us away in The Heron's Cry (New York: Minotaur Books, 2021), Ann Cleeves diverts us with characters we mostly like, pursuing suspects we mostly don't.

One significance of the title is how her chief detective Matthew Venn makes his husband think of a heron "just willing to wait. Entirely focused on their prey [and] silent. I'm never quite sure what you're thinking" (236). We do know what he's thinking, how he questions himself silently even while he's questioning a witness or directing his team.

Ditto, the team, detectives named Jen and Ross. Cleeves alternates chapters among these three detectives as they investigate the murder of a wealthy do-gooder. They have complementary strengths -- Jen's intuition and emotional sensitivity, Matthew's cerebral doggedness, and Ross's ready - for - action - and - then - can - we - go - home - please impatience. Already, two books into the series, they are influencing each other.

(BTW - My strongest emotional memories from other books by Cleeves involve the lead detectives' seconds: a young police detective who realizes suddenly that his daughter is in danger, and a diffident country cop who overcomes self-doubt on a mission to London and does just the right thing.)

Our interest in the detectives is one feature that keeps us reading; interest in the cohort around the victim is another. The victim is a benefactor of the arts. We meet a pair of artists dependent on his generosity, and his daughter, whose glass sculptures are weaponized in his murder and another. There's a curious couple who are sort of tenants, sort of live-in servants.

Many of the characters relate to suicides that happened long before this story starts. The murder victim was involved in suicide prevention counseling. The detectives uncover a web-based community that encourages dark ideations.

As this second novel in the Two Rivers series explores issues around suicide, the first one explored questions surrounding adults with intellectual disabilities, their safety and independence. In both novels, the themes emerge naturally from the situations. While there's no authorial preaching, we do develop empathy for people with different perspectives. Such themes give resonance to a genre that can be just an exercise in puzzles and procedures.

I'm looking for more stories to happen in Venn's town of North Devon, between two rivers.

Cork O'Connor Mysteries: Suspense and Joy in Books 2 and 3

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Detectives' personal lives often become a drag as their series wear on. So it's a twist that, three novels into the Cork O'Connor mystery series by William Kent Krueger, the detective has grown more physically fit, more connected to his family, and more confident that crime-fighting is something he loves and does well. 

Perhaps other authors confuse complication and darkness with authenticity, but at least so far into the series, Krueger finds authentic joy in his created world:

Sunlight dripping down the houses on Gooseberry Lane like butter melting down pancakes. The streets empty and clean. The surface of Iron Lake on such a still morning looking solid as polished steel.
God, [Cork] loved this place. (PR ch.1).

Fresh air and clean living help. Cork (short for "Corcoran") lives in Aurora, Minnesota among mountains, lakes, forests, and members of the Ojibwe tribe. He has cut back on cigarettes and alcohol. He stays in touch with his spiritual roots in the tribe and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic church.

Krueger takes the crime genre out of dank bedrooms and arid offices into the beautiful but dangerous realm of wilderness adventure stories. In novels Boundary Waters (1999) and Purgatory Ridge (2001), Cork's work involves rowing, hiking, swimming in icy waters, and running a long distance.

Cork's quarries do strenuous outdoor activities, too. When Cork joins a search party for a celebrity singer gone missing in Boundary Waters, we follow her steps and know her thoughts. In Purgatory Ridge, it's a kidnapper with a score to settle for the death of his beloved kid brother. Because Krueger engenders sympathy for both hunter and hunted, our suspense builds as we wonder, "Will Cork figure out what's really going on and catch up before it's too late?"

Cork's wife Jo is a lawyer who often represents the Ojibwe tribe in court, so her work complements her husband's. She grows into the role of being a co-hero, a great development in these early books of the series.

Their children include two competent teenaged girls and a much younger boy Stevie who has some special needs, a family reminiscent of Krueger's stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace (see my post More than a Mystery (07/2019)). With an especially vulnerable child in jeopardy, emotional stakes are high for readers as well as for characters. When such a child steps up to do something remarkable for others, it's a joy, as happens in Purgatory Ridge and also in Boundary Waters when the young son of an ex-convict guides his dad and law enforcement on their grueling expedition. Krueger captures the complicated feeling when he writes that Cork feels "the sweet weight of his son's trust" (PR, ch. 12).

With many more books in the series ready for me to read, I'm hoping that Krueger's Cork stays buoyant.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

←← | ← || → Use arrows to follow the entire series in sequence.

Walter Mosley's "Charcoal Joe": Comic Relief

Opening up Walter Mosley's Charcoal Joe (New York: Doubleday, 2016), you may feel a shock at the sheer number of colorful characters, their schemes and scams. Soon, though, you realize it's an L.A.-wide block party with crooks and cops, saps and sirens, black and white and brown. Our affable good-hearted host is detective Easy Rawlins.

[photo of Mosley by Ann Weathersby]

To be sure, Mosley doesn't stint on action. From a comfy cell in a resort-style prison, crime boss "Charcoal Joe" hires Easy to exonerate a young black professor charged with murder of two white men. Following leads, Easy gets in fist fights, battles armed home invaders, and hunts a killer in the killer's own house. In his time off, Easy helps his partners to trap a vile sexual predator.

But this novel brings out Mosley's playful side. When the novel starts, Easy's having a great day. Friends everywhere, each one a character. Lovers, too -- it's a running gag that every woman he encounters want to have his child. Then Mosley makes a kind of game - how many ways can Easy handle whites, cops and proprietors, who mean "You don't belong here" when they say, "Can I help you?"

Mosley plays meta-tricks, too. When Easy names his detective firm with his partners' initials, is it coincidence that WRENS-L rhymes with "Denzel," the actor who played Easy in The Devil in a Blue Dress? Easy makes an important choice on the basis of a slight detail he noticed several chapters before, a virtuoso bit of observation and deduction that might be a respectful nod to Sherlock Holmes.

I found a fun photo of Mosley by Ann Weathersby with an article "Free Radical" by Logan Hill in New York Magazine (Sept. 15, 2005). Hill makes an apt comparison to the plays of August Wilson. Like Mosley, Wilson explored black experience in America across decades through stories set in one city.

I had put Mosley's series aside for awhile, ground down a bit by the weight Easy had to carry. Then I picked up Charcoal Joe and it picked me up.

My Blog Posts of Related Interest I read the first several books pre-blog.

• Mosley's Cinnamon Kiss is part of my essay "Guilty Pleasure in Crime Fiction" (05/2006).
• In "Black, White, and Noire" (04/2009) I consider Mosley's Blonde Faith alongside The Ivory Grin ,written by Ross MacDonald in 1952.  This essay begins, "In one of the throw-away lines that make Walter Mosley's novels so rich, detective Easy Rawlins reflects that he is no more a private eye than . . . any soul sitting in that [black dive, ca. 1966]. Each and every one of us was examining and evaluating clues all the time, day and night (98)."
• "One Plot, Two Thrillers" (07/2013) finds one-to-one correspondence between two successful thrillers that are otherwise entirely different, Mosley's Little Green and Dean Koontz's Odd Hours.  This article quotes Mosley's striking insights on race in America and on 1967.
• August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (12/2020) was filmed, with Denzel Washington the producer. Wilson was influenced by the art of Romare Beardon. See Something Over Something Else
(01/2020).

See a curated list of links to my reflections on many other crime fiction authors.

Treasuring "The Giver Quartet"

During my last seven years in the classroom, The Giver by Lois Lowry was the novel I saved for May, as dessert. Seventh graders didn't need my help to become fascinated by the novel's community where everything -- family life, climate, gene pool -- is regulated to ensure comfort, to minimize stressful choices, and to moderate feelings with meds and therapy. Lowry's young protagonist Jonas is satisfied with this setup until, at age 12, he enters the library of "The Receiver of Memories" where he vicariously experiences snow, sunshine, love, loss -- highs and lows of personal life and world history that his community has purposefully forgotten. Jonas resolves to remind them.

In journals this year, my students wrote how they couldn't wait to read the next chapter and how this was the first book to make them weep. But after they read The Giver's ambiguous ending, they all wanted more. Now, with Son, the story begun in The Giver comes full-circle.

Between The Giver (published 1993) and Son (2020), Lowry widened that circle considerably with Gathering Blue (2000) and Messenger (2004). These novels comprising The Giver Quartet introduce young characters with compelling challenges in communities "elsewhere," far from the one in The Giver. Different as the communities are, they complement each other in significant ways.

The GiverI reflected on What The Giver Gives Us (05/2014) after I taught the book for the first time.

Gathering Blue The mother's death on the first page of Gathering Blue leaves the daughter Kira with few options. A world away from the gray antiseptic community of Jonas with all its regulations, Kira lives in squalor among hunter-gatherers whose only rules seem to be survival of the fittest and beware the beasts in the forest who killed her father. Lame from birth and orphaned now, Kira can expect no sympathy from her community. Scavengers take over her home and threaten her life.

But rising above the quasi-medieval village is a municipal building that survives from a cataclysm ages before. There, the ruling tribunal takes interest in Kira's gift for weaving. She admits that she doesn't understand how she makes designs that her mother never taught her; her fingers seem to move on their own accord. The tribunal commissions her to repair a ceremonial robe to be worn at the community's annual "gathering." The copious robe's elaborate woven designs depict a cycle of war and renewal that includes an episode of skyscrapers toppled by flame from the sky. (I immediately checked the date: Gathering Blue precedes 9/11 by a year).

With servants, electricity, hot baths, and Thomas the wood-carver for a friend, Kira lives like a princess, but not happily ever after. Lowry raises questions that keep us reading with increasing dread. Who in the palace is singing and sobbing in the night? When the repairs are done, what do the elders expect Kira to make from a large portion of the robe that remains blank? About the old woman in the forest who teaches Kira to make every color of dye -- lacking only blue -- how can the crone say there are no beasts? At the gathering, when the community's revered Singer wears that robe and chants the long history of the people, what is the scraping metallic sound that Kira hears? Of all the questions, that's the one that drove me crazy with wonder, especially when I read at the end of chapter twenty, "Suddenly, Kira realized with horror what the sound was." But Lowry keeps us in suspense.

Kira's guide through the forest is a filthy but chipper young boy named Matty, accompanied always by his crooked-tail dog Branch, devoted to the boy who rescued him. When Matty goes to a distant village for the blue dye that Kira needs, he brings back a surprise that turns Kira's story upside-down. Then, like Jonas, she knows that she must act to bring about change in her community.

Messenger

Orphaned at the end of Gathering Blue, Matty is adopted by a blind man in that distant village, a community that welcomes newcomers who have been rejected elsewhere for their differences or disabilities. But there's discontent among a growing number of villagers, customers of an outsider they call Trademaster. Some of them have put forth a proposal for a referendum on closing the community. Matty's formerly kind-hearted neighbors rise to say

We need all the fish for ourselves.
Our school is not big enough to teach their children, too; only our own.
They can't even speak right. We can't understand them. (72)

Before long, they're building a wall. Matty now has an urgent mission to bring Kira from the village of his birth to his adoptive village before they close it off. But the forest is no longer the welcoming place he has traversed many times before: the forest has "thickened," becoming a manifestation of the malevolence that has taken over the village.

Like Jonas and Kira, Matty also has a gift, but I can't say more without spoiling surprises that sometimes hurt, sometimes delight. Of the latter kind, there's a new dog named "Frolic" and a frog whose re-appearance gives hope during an intensely grim scene.

Son Son tells of Claire, a mother who will stop at nothing to reunite with a son taken from her at birth. At the start, she's only fourteen, living among the cloistered teenaged "birth mothers" in the community of Jonas where the series began. Like mares on a stud farm, they're surgically inseminated and kept happy and healthy while they carry babies to term. When Claire's baby has to be cut out of her womb, she's judged defective and unceremoniously expelled. Assigned to a menial position in a factory where she doesn't fit in, she develops an obsession about the little "product" removed from her that she never held or even saw, having been restrained and blindfolded.

For its first part, Son is a kind of detective story as Claire follows leads to find out the sex of the baby, then his location, then his name. By stealth, she bonds with her son during a time when the family of Jonas is fostering the toddler. When Jonas runs away with the little boy Gabe, as described in the final chapters of The Giver, Claire sets off in pursuit.

In the second part, we're in a different kind of novel, a sort of medieval romance for damaged people. Her quest takes her by boat to a remote sea-side village at the foot of an immense cliff. She settles awhile, helper to an elder woman. Amnesia is involved. When Claire recovers, she resolves to climb the rock face of that looming cliff, her best way to find Gabe. With no "gift" of the kinds that help Jonas, Kira, and Matty to their goals, Claire succeeds by grit and muscle, trained by Einar, a young man deeply scarred by his father's abuse and maimed by his own climb up the mountain face -- or, rather, by what happened after he successfully reached his goal.

Einar has trouble giving love or receiving it, but he's the heart of an anti-romance at the core of this book. One cold night, frustrated by how he has trained her "relentlessly," Claire realizes "his gaze was also that of someone who loved her" (176). Thinking of a young couple in the village, Claire "thought sadly of Einar, alone in his hillside hut, and knew that a part of life was passing both of them by." Einar puts years of effort into preparing Claire for the ordeal of her climb and for leaving him. Claire, like Einar, pays a terrible price for success, ensuring that she will see Gabe, but only from afar.

Gabe, all this while, has longed for the mother he dimly remembers. In the final portion of the novel, he confronts a malevolent entity for the life of Claire. Again, there are meaningful surprises that I must not spoil.

The Quartet I've written about the characters I love in the series because I want to remember them. Jonas, Kira, Matty, Claire, Einar, and Gabe all reach a point when they realize that their view of their world is incomplete. They also find strength within themselves to bring their communities to wholeness.

So the communities of these novels are characters too, each one in denial of a part of themselves. We can imagine that each separate community has made its own defensive response to the all-but-forgotten cataclysm that fractured the world. So Jonas's community elevated reason, forgot the stories of the past with all their passions and violence, but suppressed the feelings that make life worth living. Kira's community elevates strength and relegates artists to a golden cage. Matty's village, where empathy and respect are on full display, is blind-sided when jealousy, lust, greed, and resentment, long suppressed, rise to the surface. Gabe faces the embodiment of those feelings in the final chapters of Son.

I feel resonance between these stories and my experience. Like Jonas and Claire in their village, I miss depth between internet and errands and diversions. Like Matty, I was blind-sided by January 6, though we've seen that side of us growing at least since the Oklahoma City Bombing. The recent flap over what we teach in history class has exposed just how little history we've learned in schools for generations.

In the years since the first book in 1993, Lowry has leaned more and more into a kind of mystical vision. The Giver transfers memory to Jonas through touch. Kira's fingers weave scenes from far away, as if she's clairvoyant. Matty's hands bring healing. Gabe has a gift he calls "veering," suddenly inhabiting another's consciousness. While these all appear magical, they can also be seen as speeded-up versions of literacy, imagination, care, and empathy, traits all within the grasp of the reader.

There's even a real-world framework for examples of the magic we see in the Quartet in the theories of 20th century psychologist Karl Jung. He posits a "collective unconscious" of memories, accounting for the recurrence of stories and symbols in mythologies and even in personal dreams across the globe, across history. One of those universal stories is a journey that requires a hero's pain and sacrifice to attain what's missing. In this collective unconscious, there is a drive towards a reconciliation of our selves -- communities as well as individuals -- with the shadow sides that we suppress.

Lowry's characters could be seen as tapping into that collective unconscious on their own heroes' journeys to bring wholeness to their communities. The final confrontation in Son comes close to being an allegorical struggle with the community's collective shadow side. While Lowry may not have had Jung in mind, his vision is compatible with hers.

Always on the lookout for religion, I was struck by how little it matters in these books. In Gathering Blue, villagers bow to an ancient cross without any knowledge of what it might have once meant. In Son, an ancient book fascinates Gabe with many images of a mother and infant son, i.e. Mary and Jesus. "The Trademaster" trades what the villagers desire for what they most prize about themselves, i.e., surrendering their souls. In Christian tradition, Jesus trades his own life to redeem humanity from captivity to "the master of this world," i.e., Satan. Something like that happens in these books, but the link to Christian tradition is not explicit, and, as Jung would point out, the pattern is found in the myths of other cultures.

I lay The Giver Quartet aside, knowing that, now retired, I won't be revisiting Jonas and his world again anytime soon, if ever. Few novels have ever taken me to such "unspeakably sad" moments as these, nor rewarded me with more hopeful visions of what's possible with courage and imagination.

How to Launch a Detective: "The Long Call"

In a foreword to The Long Call (New York: Minotaur Books, 2019), author Ann Cleeves is nervous to start a new series with a new detective, "almost like a teenager bringing a new girlfriend or boyfriend home for the first time." She has concluded her series about detective Jimmy Perez on the remote Shetland Islands; her Vera Stanhope series set in Northumberland is still a going concern. The debut story for Detective Matthew Venn succeeds in keeping us off-balance and engaged. For this reader, it's also fun and instructive to see how an experienced author goes about setting up for future installments.

First, Cleeves sets the place, its geography and its social strata. Her foreword tells us that this novel started when she re-visited her childhood town North Devon [see photo collage]. As this novel progresses, we get to know the windswept beach, the two rivers that converge, the seaside tourist district, and the steep street where the victim lived. "I'd forgotten quite how beautiful the place is," she writes, adding ominously, "but sometimes beauty is skin deep." Exploring the contrasts will give her material for stories to come.

In the same way, she builds contrast into her detective and his associates. He's Matthew Venn, diffident but professional, no longer religious but reared to be a leader in an evangelical sect called "The Brethren," strait-laced but not straight. Venn's husband Jon is sunny, outgoing, confident and competent. Venn's team comprises Jen Rafferty, whose house is a mess, her teenagers resigned to their mother's absence, her psychological wounds from an abusive marriage still sore; and Ross May, cocky and impatient, eager to finish work to get back to his wife, little kids, and rugby team.

The particulars of this story concern a body found near Venn's own home on the beach. The victim is identified as Simon Walden, a short-order cook, sometimes depressed, sometimes addicted, formerly homeless but boarding with two young women. Following leads, the detectives find that he has much more to him than they at first believed. He also worked at "the Woodyard," a community center where, as Venn gradually comes to realize, all the suspects and witnesses are connected, including its founding director, Venn's Jonathan.  Venn feels that's "too close to home" and he's losing grip on the investigation: "Too many people circling around each other, without quite touching."

What's no fun for him is fun for the reader.

Cleeves writes in third person, alternating her chapters among different characters, including sometimes the suspects and witnesses. This way, we know a clue from one character when the next character has no clue, and that's a wicked little pleasure. She writes with sympathy for these people, even those who are pretty unlikable to each other.

In this novel, Cleeves also writes with sympathy and respect about adults with Down's Syndrome and their families. A program for adults with Downs Syndrome, also housed at the Woodyard, emerges as important to the crime. Why did Walden ride the bus to share candy and chat with one of the women during her ride home each day, being as he lived the other direction? Why did he board the bus a block away from the center, out of sight of the people there? Before these suggestive questions can be answered, another woman from the center disappears, hiking a sense of urgency that got this reader's heart racing.

Cleeves also textures her writing with interwoven themes of guilt and faith. Many of the characters have an albatross around their necks. In the opening pages, Venn himself watches his father's funeral from afar. His mother won't speak to him, blaming the father's decline on his son's apostasy and sexuality. The philanthropist who supports the Woodyard's counseling center blames himself for not recognizing the seriousness of his wife's depression before her suicide. Having killed a young girl in a car crash, Walden had an albatross tattooed literally around his neck.

Sign me up for the next installment.

[See my curated list of blogposts about works by Ann Cleeves and other crime writers on my Crime Fiction page.]

"The Prophets" by Robert Jones: History and Prophecy

Calling his novel The Prophets and drawing on the Bible for names of characters and titles of chapters, Robert Jones, Jr. invites us to place this historical fiction in dialogue with Christian tradition.

Creation, Sin, Redemption The setting for the story is a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, years before the Civil War. Except for a couple of excursions by members of the slave owner's family, we never leave that plantation. The enslaved characters call the plantation "Empty." They have only a vague sense of what lies beyond its boundaries.

Yet the goodness of creation transcends the brutality of the circumstances. During an ordeal of humiliation and physical pain, the enslaved young men Samuel and Isaiah are still aware how birds, insects, the natural world go on with their lives amid the beauty of field and forest. Forced since childhood to work and sleep among the farm animals, Samuel "the strong one" and Isaiah "the sensitive one" have turned to each other for love and understanding. Their embrace of each other is described rapturously, and their relationship is known and honored throughout the community, at first.

Their world is also suffused with the voices of the ancestors, beneficent spirits who talk to us, speak through elders in the story, and who appear fleetingly to characters, giving encouragement and magically healing. The ancestors laugh at our limited perceptions: "You thought you were the living and we were the dead? Haha" (2). In chapters interspersed throughout the novel, we follow a parallel story of ancestors in a previous century who call a woman "King" and who celebrate the marriage of two young men who are privileged to be appointed "guardians" (187).

The different chapters bring us the voices of different characters, some of them tangential to the story of Samuel and Isaiah. Some of these particular narrators were obscure to me, or just not so interesting. Happily, I remembered a famous author's advice (Virginia? Flannery? I forget) that there's no rule that you have to read every chapter.

What brought me back to the novel time and again was this underlying confidence and joy, suggesting to me that Hebrew phrase from Genesis tov mahov: creation is very good. Love of and between "the two of them" is Edenic in the setting of a stable where the stars shine through a skylight, and the maturing of that love under duress is gripping to experience. The ancestors and the elder women among the community who channel them recall the Bible's "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12.1) and the ministering of angels.

But everything good is twisted by the state of slavery. Under the slave owner Paul, love is reduced to what happens at a clearing known as the "F---ing Place," where he commands couplings with and between his slaves, to rear a new generation of slaves to increase his wealth. Black mothers have borne his light-skinned sons, and his wife Ruth also tries to fulfill her desires with black men.

Paul weaponizes the Gospel. A self-righteous man, sure that his ownership of these people is a sign of God's approval (250), he charges his black disciple Amos to preach the Gospel to the workers with stress on obedience. Paul is appalled when he learns that his young workers Samuel and Isaiah love each other, not just because of passages in Leviticus and Romans that forbid sex between men: Paul had planned for the young men, brought to "the peak state of brawn" by their work in the stable, to sire hardy workers for use and for sale (259). When they don't respond to the women he sends to them, Paul charges Amos to push the community to shun the young men. In the parallel story of the ancestors, it's a cross-brandishing Portuguese captain who introduces the notion that the marriage of the two guardians is unnatural and detestable; the tribe laughs at him.

Under the distortion of slavery, the comfort that the Gospel offers is that of excluding "the two of them" (76). During the sadistic ordeal imposed on Samuel and Isaiah, members of the community jeer, finding "some kind of happiness... in seeing someone else being humiliated for once" (143).

Paul's son Timothy, an artist described as "not a man man," pushes the story to a crisis. We see how he found freedom to express his homosexuality at Harvard and imbibed Yankees' ideas about the wrongs of slavery (202). At home, taken by the beauty of Isaiah and Samuel, he commands them to pose for portraits. He imagines that Samuel and Isaiah will both be flattered and enriched by his attention. He considers that he's doing them a favor when he invites each to his bedroom. Instead, he causes jealousy, hurt, and fury.

"Redemption" in this situation isn't going to be the same thing as a happy ending. There comes with pain a deepening of love (215 ff). Without any spoilers, I can attest that the feeling at the end is of a kind of restoration of wholeness in the embrace of the ancestors. There's also an unforgettable and comforting vision of a man who dissolves into a thousand swirling fireflies (238).

The arc of the story, from creation through sin to redemption, is one that repeats throughout the Bible, and, I believe, in our lives.

Guessing Game

Jones, with his Biblical connections, challenges us to a guessing game: How do the titles fit? The first chapter in the voice of the ancestors he calls "Judges," as in, judges of the story. A chapter that depicts the playful banter between Samuel and Isaiah, that ends with them lying side by side, that deepens into their sharing painful memories, Jones calls "Psalms." Being the songs of David, "Psalms" perhaps recalls the intense love of the youthful David for Jonathan, or the lyrical expressions of joy and pain in the Psalms, or both. The chapter chronicling the ordeal imposed on the young men is called "Babel," perhaps because of the babbling mockery of the crowd; the chapter that follows in which the women heal them is appropriately called "Balm in Gilead." Some of the titles are playful, as when the throwback chapter of two guardians in Africa is called "II Kings."

Likewise Jones's choices of names for his characters. The eponymous prophets would be Samuel, instrumental in ending King Saul's reign, and Isaiah, harbinger of Israel's restoration through the trials of a suffering servant. If we remember that the apostle Paul was also known as Saul, then Samuel's readiness to fight the plantation owner makes the name a good fit. Seeing Isaiah as harbinger of a restoration is harder to do in a literal way. But in his gentleness, unwilling even to make a fist (145), and in his suffering, he may fit the theme of suffering servant.

The other prophet among the characters' names is Amos, known for his call to justice, and that seems ill-applied to the servile character hand-picked to preach. But when we see into Paul's mind, we read how he envies the black man's spiritual visions, causing the slave owner to concede that black people "have souls" (258) and to doubt the rightness his life's work. He finds comfort in Christ's dictum, "Render unto Caesar" and St. Paul's admonition that slaves are to be obedient.

From first to last, however, Jones gives another name paramount importance. Isaiah knows that his mother and father gave him an African name and yearns to know what that is. We already do: the second chapter of the book, called "Proverbs," is a pro- (forward) verb (word) sent out from Isaiah's mother to the son taken from her, whom she calls Kayode. By this name, and the emphasis on Judeo-Christian names, Jones suggests that the spiritual world of the African ancestors is a reality behind and through the one codified in Scripture. I don't take that as a denial of Scripture, but a denial of how the slave owner adapts scripture to his own weaknesses and desires. By extension, Jones indicts the whole white supremacy project.

Social Resonances

In an interview on Atlanta's NPR station WABE, the author said, as if it were common knowledge, that African tribes were far from "binary" in their view of gender. That's news to me, but a cursory look through sources on the internet confirmed what he said, mostly in the context of refuting African regimes that justify brutal persecution of gay men as patriotic push-back against sin brought to their continent by decadent Europeans.

Jones also writes a couple of passages, apt for the time of the story, that encapsulate the mindset and method of white supremacists. When Isaiah sighs, "I get tired. But I wanna live," (301), Samuel thinks:

That was the way of the world as remade by toubab [whites], and Samuel's list of grievances was long: They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage.

In a parallel passage some pages later, Paul's overseer James, resentful to be dressed in raggedy clothes (319) and beholden to his cousin, considers the black people he oversees:

They were of raggedy dress (his anger was fueled by the similarity of their attire and his) and little intelligence. They lived on top of one another, packed into dwellings by their own will as much as Paul's. They were belligerent and smelled of a toil that couldn't be washed away. They ate refuse and their skin bore the curse of wild. It was easier to think of them as animals, not so different from cows and horses, apes of great mimicry that managed to speak the language of humans.

Yet in this same chapter, he recalls his desire for a black woman who resisted him fiercely. How can he reconcile his desire for her with his belief that she was an "animal?" He rationalizes:

The fact of the matter was that they could pass for human and, therefore, trick the loins, if not always the mind. (321)

Prophecy The ancient prophets of Jewish tradition aren't properly thought of as fortune-tellers but poetic truth-tellers. Like pundits and poets who raise their voices today, they tell the powerful the perspective of the marginalized; they foretell where things will go if the listeners don't listen.

Jones, building on Christian and African tradition, telling in a poetic way his story from a different century, is also speaking to our times, and to the future.

In that passage of Samuel's thoughts about his white masters, Jones writes

They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed "CHAOS!" and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.(321)

Probably writing that well before the summer of 2020, Jones could have been looking back on George Floyd's death, the rising up that followed, and the continuing reaction of Trump and his ilk. It also describes the racist attacks in Chicago in the summer of 1919 (see my post about a poet's book 1919 (08/2020).

With the beautiful and heartbreaking story of love and a community, The Prophets also tells of racial injustice and exploitation of all kinds, a story that was and is. How can we ensure that story is not still to be?

Punching the Air: Teen Poet Imprisoned

Writer Ibi Zoboi and poet-activist Dr. Yusef Salaam collaborated on a young adult novel in poetry, Punching the Air, drawing on Salaam's experience. In 1989, he was one of the five black males in their early teens arrested for the rape and near-fatal beating of "the Central Park Jogger." I remember reading with incredulity -- not enough! -- that bands of feral black boys roamed the city nights looking for white people to assault; "wilding," they supposedly called it. "Wilding" turns out to have been just a reporter's extrapolation from a misunderstanding of one remark by one boy.

Recent movies - a documentary and a drama - tell the story how police jumped to conclusions, how prosecutors bullied the boys into confessions, how the press hyped the crime. During the trial, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad to call for a public lynching. But after more than ten years in prison, all the young men were exonerated and the true culprit, a white man, was imprisoned.

Zoboi and Salaam have refracted the first part of that story, updating it, universalizing it. The protagonist named Amal ("hope" in Arabic) is well-loved, well-read, an artist, but guilty of fighting back when white teens attack him and his friends. A white teenaged boy lies in a coma, and Amal lands in prison. The story is how Amal learns to fight back against the external walls of the prison system and the internal walls of doubt that suffocate his spirit.

Each chapter is a poem with enough in it to reward re-readings, but you don't have to read Punching the Air twice to get the story and the feelings. Sometimes you feel angry, sometimes you ache, sometimes you smile at the sweetness. Often a word in one poem becomes the topic for the next, drawing you from page to page with no pause to look back. But as you read, you'll pick up many strands that tie disparate chapters together. To read Punching the Air a second time is like stepping back to appreciate a mural like the one that Amal wants to paint (130).

I paint with words, too Amal tells us, relating his poetry to his drawings. Many of the poems are titled after works he studied in AP Art History class -- The Thinker, The Watch, The Scream-- though he angered his art teacher by asking whether anyone outside of Europe made art, a fair question. He imagines a Black Mona Lisa and a remix of his favorite painting Guernica to be about him and his friends, with "distorted faces and bodies / in war in war in war", but, like dust in Maya Angelou's poem, "we rise we rise we rise" (353).

The rising of dust is one motif that we see in several poems. Some poems develop the analogy of Amal's prior life with friends and family as "Africa," the court process as "the Middle Passage," and his arrival at prison as the stolen African ancestors' arrival at America (61, elsewhere). He takes hope from the "butterfly effect," i.e., the theory that waves created by a butterfly's wings can have outsized influence on destiny. He longs for super-powers to withstand the bullying and intimidation he experiences in prison. The real walls around him also are a symbol. His few allies in the prison become "walls" to him, and he also makes himself a wall. So drawing his art on walls becomes more than just a pasttime; it's an image for what he can make of his life. In one short poem, one in a series titled "Brotherhood" the metaphor of a wall helps to express a development in his friendship with his "four corners":

Brotherhood VI

And maybe
there are small
cracks in our walls
and we start to see
a sliver of light
shine through

in each other.

(338)

I have a personal reason to be especially affected by another theme in the poems -- how others see him. In our school's upper division, a young black man told the Senior class advisor that only one teacher in all his years at the school had ever "seen" him; I was not that teacher. I looked back on my time with him in Middle School, how I managed his oppositional behavior, how I encouraged his talents, how I made corrections with respect -- I wondered, what does "seeing" mean? Then I heard the poet Zoboi read "Clone" from Punching the Air, about how his teachers in fifth grade "watched" him "so hard, so close" after a playground fight "that I thought I was trying to break out of prison." The poem continues

Every dumb s--- I did
they thought it was because of

trouble at home
an absent father
a tired mother
not enough books
not enough vegetables
not enough sleep

They believed those lies about me

and made themselves
a whole other boy
in their minds
and replaced me with him

(56)

Echoing what I read in those newspaper accounts at the time of Dr. Salaam's arrest, Amal develops the idea of how the media sees him and the boy in the coma: "I am ink / He is paper...I am man / He is boy... I am criminal / He is victim...I am black / He is white" (20).

In a later poem, imagining himself on the slave ship, he addresses his tormentors: What do you see when you see me? / The enemy? The inner me? (91). Truly, I don't know -- yet --what I could have done or thought differently regarding that student in my class, but I recognize myself in those teachers, and him in this character.

In Amal's story, there's the art teacher, important for what she taught him, but who also laughed when he said that he wanted to do a whole mural instead of a paper portfolio (130). "I failed the class, and she failed me" (133). But a black woman who teaches creative writing and a guest professor in African garb capture Amal's imagination.

Reading the poems weeks after George Floyd suffocated with a policeman's knee on his neck, I was chagrined to read these two lines repeatedly throughout the book: "There's a stone in my throat / and a brick on my chest" (11, 410, passim).

For all the darkness, there's light here, too. Loving family, friendship in prison, inspiration for art, and a letter from Zenobia, the cute girl he was too timid to talk to in school. He sends her his portrait of her "to let her know that / I saw her / I see her / I remember her" (176). If "time moves you away from me," he writes to her, "I will always remember / you remembering me" (177).

That acrostic poem, each line starting with a letter from Zenobia's name, inspired my kids to write acrostics of their own. Punching the Air is a beautiful book for readers of any age, of any race.

Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam. Punching the Air. New York: Balzer and Bray, 2020.

Midnight Atlanta: Layers You Didn't Know Existed

Murder, cops, feds, an investigative reporter, stake-outs, fist fights (baseball bats included) and shoot-outs: Thomas Mullen gives us all those elements for Midnight Atlanta, latest novel in his Darktown series. But the emotional through-line is a love story, as cops black and white in Atlanta, 1956, learn to appreciate and trust each other.

The murder of Arthur Bishop, editor of Atlanta's black-owned newspaper, sets off an investigation that involves many of the high-profile tensions that roiled the country in the mid-1950s. The editor Bishop had traveled to Montgomery. Was he involved with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the bus boycott going on then? Bishop had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, as many black leaders had done. At a time of intense Red Scare, was he a blackmailer, or blackmailee? Atlanta's modernization meant destruction of black neighborhoods but also opportunities for the black middle class. Had Bishop fallen afoul of one side or the other in that conflict? Just two years after the notorious acquittal of Emmett Till's killers, has Bishop outraged white supremacists by uncovering love letters from a white woman to the black man she accuses of rape?

Mullen maintains a third-person narrative voice but follows several different characters who are following different threads of the investigation. These are appealing people whose personal development is at least as interesting as the crime story.

Readers of the series will know and love Tommy Smith, the reporter who discovers Bishop's murder. A veteran of World War II and one of Atlanta's first black cops, he hung up his uniform at the end of the previous story, and now he's wondering why. He thinks of his own father home from World War I lynched for wearing his uniform, "an event [Smith] had no memory of, yet it was the defining moment of his life," still "haunting" him (344). He's also having second thoughts about Patrice, a restauranteur who gives him grief when he seems to be seeking a second-night stand. He's getting serious about her at a time that her white clientele are boycotting her for openly supporting desegregation.

Smith's ex-partner Lucius Boggs, upright and uptight, seems to be softening his self-righteousness and hardening his ambitions. Tiny powerhouse Dewey Edwards makes a good new partner for him. When they team up for a potentially dangerous visit to a white private detective in the boonies, Dewey slaps Boggs's shoulder and says, "Oh boy. This gonna be fun" (210). It is!

But Smith's ex-boss Sergeant Joe McInnis has most to learn about his relationships -- to Smith, to the black men he commands, to his family. In the earlier books, we learn that his command of the new black police force was punishment for his uncovering corruption on the all-white police force some years before. Though unhappy with the job, McInnis has been tough but fair. In Midnight Atlanta, he's offered a new position, and, to his own surprise, he asks for time to think about it. The rest of the novel, he's studying his own relationships and beliefs.

We first see him with his teenaged son, trying to explain whether his command of the black force makes him a "n----r-lover." McGinnis responds, "I work with them. We solve problems together"(40). He adds, "They're just folks." In the course of the investigation, McInnis reads Atlanta's black newspaper and reflects

It was like reading dispatches from a different reality.... McInnis had been operating in this other realm for the past seven-plus years, yet to read their perspective on stories he'd heard differenty elsewhere -- or, in most cases, hadn't heard at all -- was a reminder how separate from them he remained. (146)

Meeting people on his beat by lunching at black-owned restaurants, he becomes aware of the "layers" that black people deal with "that he didn't even know existed" (219).

This case puts McInnis on the side of his men against other police and the FBI. When Smith is hospitalized, McInnis brings gruff sympathy and a proposal to work together. He asks Smith to trust him, and is genuinely offended to be doubted (287). Smith points out that McInnis risks retaliation from the department if not from the FBI: "Why bother?"

"For the same reason you're nearly getting yourself killed trying to find out the truth."

Smith wondered if that could be true. Hoped so. Wasn't sure.

[McInnis said], "First the Bureau jerked me around and then they beat up one of my former officers."

Smith doesn't say, "I didn't know you cared," but that's the feeling.

Mullen doesn't make it easy to oppose racism in Atlanta 1956. McInnis's son gets beaten up. A character, Cassie Rakestraw, who has been sympathetic in previous novels, now leads opposition to racial desegregation. McInnis and his wife are ostracized by the PTA. When you fear for the safety of your children, when the value of your dream home plummets if a single black family moves nearby -- can you afford to do what you know is right?

Some other crime novel series have nearly choked on personal miseries and flaws that the authors pile on with the goal of character development. Henning Mankell's Wallander, Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta, Ann Cleeves's Perez all became morose, angry, unbearable to read about; sometimes I skipped over Sue Grafton's chapters about Kinsey Millhone's personal life. At least so far, Mullen's characters are developing in ways that make them more appealing and more tightly bonded -- to each other, and to us.

More about Thomas Mullen's Darktown series.

• The first novel in the series had special resonance in the weeks after George Floyd's murder: "It seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction...good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). See "Darktown: Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Race in Atlanta, 1948" (06/2020)
• "Lightning Men: Dark but not Bleak" (07/2020). The book's title refers to American fascists who adopted Hitler's lightning insignia in the 1930s. After the war, they're back to intimidate communists, foreigners, and any blacks who dare to buy homes in white neighborhoods.

A Boy Who Sees Everything: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

The 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time sometimes daydreams of a global pandemic. He is Christopher Boone, 15 years old, aware that he does not read feelings from facial expressions, understand figures of speech, and laugh at jokes as others do. His dream illness spreads like a computer virus with code transmitted by words or facial expressions, even through TV. Soon, the world is left only to people like Christopher, and he's happy to have the streets and candy shops to himself, no one to touch him or to confuse him with emotional demands.

Christopher tells us his dream in one of the chapters that take him away from his own story at moments when he has feelings too strong to handle. Charming, funny, informative, these intersticial chapters concern his interests in math, language, science, and what he has learned about his own mind from his teacher at a school for kids with special needs. Christopher also digresses to tell us about Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes matters because this is Christopher's own detective story. It begins with Christopher's discovery of the neighbor's dog stabbed to death with a pitchfork. The apt title alludes to a famous line of Holmes from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Christopher shares with Holmes "the power of detaching his mind at will"(73).

Christopher emphatically does not admire Holmes's creator Arthur Conan Doyle because the author, yearning to contact his dead son, swallowed the lies of spiritualism (88). Christopher himself rejects afterlife as something made up by people who can't handle death -- although he likes to think of molecules in smoke from his mother's cremation now float in clouds over Africa or Antarctica (33). When Christopher's investigation uncovers lies he has been told, the detective story morphs into an odyssey through the underworld of the London Underground -- a harrowing journey except for a delightful moment when, seeing an escalator for the first time, he laughs.

Christopher shares another trait with Holmes: "I see everything" (140). But this putative super-power is also a liability, the reason why Christopher can't bear new places. He explains

If I am in a place I know, like home, at school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. [For example, one day] someone had graffitied CROW APTOK to lamppost 437 in our street, which is the one outside number 35.

But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bouncing off something and carrying on almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball.

In this passage, we see direct declarative sentences, schoolboy-perfect punctuation, and precise recollection of numbers, elements of the voice that Mark Haddon has created for his narrator.

Haddon's narrative voice is the glory of this novel, for Christopher's emotional detachment is funny and heart-breaking. While the boy cannot always identify his own feelings, we feel for him. He's so vulnerable, sometimes groaning to muffle his own overwhelming perceptions or gripping the Swiss army knife in his pocket when he feels Stranger Danger. Like his hapless father, we want to hold the boy safe. When Christopher's father arrives at the police station to take the boy home, Christopher describes how his father

held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means he loves me. (16)

The boy can work complex math problems in his head, and he can recall everything he sees, but he's clueless in ways that he doesn't understand. We want to shield him from neighbors, cops, and shopkeepers who presume that he's mocking them.

But he's also wise. Seeing an ad urging tourism to "see new things," Christopher opines, "You can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of a solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles." He could think years about the things in just one house, he tells us. "And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new" (178).

Mark Haddon's book, making us think about our world through Christopher's mind, makes us see the world as new. According to Wikipedia, Haddon is "a hard-line atheist." But to an Episcopalian like me, his story draws attention to the wonder of creation, the insidious consequences of sin (of which the death of a dog is just the first sign), the aching need for redemption, and a tearful joy when redemption comes.

[The image is my collage of photos and designs from various productions of the dramatization by Simon Stephens, first produced at England's National Theatre in 2012. They all share the motif of a three-dimensional matrix, an image of Christopher's mind.]

A Dickens Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving may be too early for Scrooge but is certainly a good time for Charles Dickens, especially if you have the chance to see The Personal History of David Copperfield. Director Armando Iannucci,who shares with Simon Blackwell the credit for screenplay, has said that he made David Copperfield's expression of thanksgiving for the characters in his life to be also the director's expression of thanksgiving for Dickens himself.

[Pictured, L to R: Hugh Laurie, kindly demented Mr. Dick, saved by words; Ben Whishaw, despicable Uriah Heep; Dev Patel, title role; Peter Capaldi, chipper con artist Mr. Micawber; Tilda Swinton, high-strung Betsy Trotwood, and, not pictured, Rosalind Eleazar as luminous Agnes.]

Dickens expressed special affection for the story of his eponymous alter-ego, with whom he shares initials, some elements of biography, and a love of words. Though I've not yet read Copperfield, I recognized favorite plot elements and themes from other novels by Dickens that I do know well (Twist, Two Cities, Expectations, Christmas Carol): naive boy, tyrant guardian, a struggle against poverty, time in a brutal work house, memorably despicable villains, and eccentrics galore.

Iannucci makes light work of the numerous twists in the plot, skipping ahead whenever the situation gets too dire. Whatever happens, we see Copperfield writing favorite phrases and descriptions of characters on scraps of paper that he treasures throughout his life, and these words ultimately save him, save a demented friend, and, through the books that he writes, bring him a fortune that he can share in gratitude for the characters who supported and inspired him.

This morning of Thanksgiving Day, I find the whole movie summed up in "The General Thanksgiving" (Episcopal Book of Common Prayer p. 836), which begins "Accept, O Lord, our thanks...":

...for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side.

We thank your for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us.

We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

I'll add only one very personal note of thanksgiving for Charles Dickens. When I was somewhere around age 8, for no reason I can think of, Mom told me of a paper she'd had to write in high school about humor in Dickens. Repelled by the poverty and casual cruelty in his stories, she complained to her steady boyfriend that the assignment made no sense. The young man, later my father, helped her to see in Dickens the deliciously snarky descriptions and the playfully apt names. The insight that you can find and enjoy humor even in dark places has leavened my life and my love of literature ever since.

Photo: I'm including this photo just because I'm thankful for this very happy dog Brandy. I took the selfie at the top of the stairs when I returned home from a two-day sojourn in Mississippi for my annual Thanksgiving bicycle ride with friend Jason.

"Lightning Men" Dark but not Bleak

With the second book of the Darktown series by Thomas Mullen, Atlanta's first black policemen are caught at the intersection of gang war, police corruption, and a real estate dilemma: what is a fair-minded white homeowner to do when nice black families move onto his street and his dream home's value instantly plummets?

The book's title Lightning Men refers to American fascists who adopted Hitler's lightning insignia in the 1930s. After the war, they're back to intimidate communists, foreigners, and any blacks who dare to buy homes in white neighborhoods. 

 
Mullen writes in third person, but focuses different chapters through different characters. Black officers Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith hold the center of the story, along with their reluctant white ally Officer Dennis "Rake" Rakestraw. But Mullen gives us other characters' points of view: Julie, fiancee to Lucius; Sgt. McGinnis, the ramrod straight white officer fighting on behalf of the black men in his charge; Rake's wife Cassie; and two other characters who steal the show.

First, we meet the young black man Jeremiah as he walks out of prison, hoping to start a new life in Atlanta. He wants to go straight, but, without support, he's soon back in the drug trade that killed his older brother. He's also stymied in his effort to re-connect with his young son and the boy's mother Julie -- because she's engaged to Officer Boggs. When Boggs and Jeremiah meet face-to-face in a diner, Mullen heightens the tension by alternating their points of view. Jeremiah finds a weakness in Lucius. He keeps his thoughts to himself as Lucius talks: "I know what you fear. You fear sin. You are surrounded by it, and you have invited it into your family, so let's see how you like realizing that"(325). 

 
Then, there's Dale, who thinks he can earn respect by donning a ridiculous pointy white hood of the Ku Klux Klan, but he can't even see through the eye holes. When he gets in too deep, which is immediately, he runs for help to his brother-in-law on the force, Officer Rakestraw. Rake compromises himself to help. 

 
As Mullen plays Jeremiah off of Lucius, and Dale off of Rake, he also matches volatile Officer Tommy Smith with his brother-in-law Malcolm, whose secret Tommy feels bound to protect. 

 
Besides chapters where characters vie for dominance with intense, witty dialogue, Mullen writes some that stand out for action and suspense. There's an epic fist fight between Officer Dewey Edwards, the strongest, smallest cop on the force, and Thunder Malloy, biggest baddest drug dealer in town. There's a vigil past midnight by Tommy and his brother-in-law in a darkened house as they watch two, then four, then two or three dozen white neighbors gathering across the street: What will the white people do to keep their neighborhood from "transitioning?" For emotion, and dread, and sympathy, there's a scene in Atlanta's old train terminal where a black family from up north refuses to sit in the fouled "colored" waiting room; Rake tries to respect the family's dignity while an angry white mob forms around him. 

 
Set seventy years ago, the issues in Lightning Men are as up-to-date as our President's recent tweet to housewives about how "they" want to move in next door and destroy the suburbs with sinking property value. In one scene, the fictional Reverend Boggs sits at a table with the real Reverend William Borders (his grandson my classmate in the 1970s) to make a deal with white developers to re-draw the red lines that kept generations of black families from building wealth. The eponymous fascists peddle their version of today's "white genocide" narrative propagated by the young men in Virginia who chanted "Jews will not replace us." 

 
The novel is dark, but not bleak. I've already ordered the latest book in the series.
See my response to the first book, Darktown (06/2020)
.

"Darktown": Good Cops, Bad Cops, and Race in Atlanta, 1948

Darktown, a crime novel by Thomas Mullen, takes off from a real event. In 1948, Atlanta hired its first eight black cops to police "Darktown," the derisive name for black neighborhoods. Black cops were not permitted to drive or arrest a white person. For their own protection -- as a quarter of Atlanta's cops belonged to the KKK -- they could not wear their uniforms to and from work, could not patrol without a partner, and could not enter the police station. Their HQ was the basement of the YMCA.

[Photo collage: Atlanta 1948, Darktown, and the real-life cops who inspired the novel.]

In the novel, Officer Lucius Boggs is one of the eight. A college-educated son of a preacher, he still lives with his parents on Auburn Avenue, the actual neighborhood of Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., "a private world" of wealth, culture, and fine homes cultivated after a white rampage through Atlanta's black neighborhoods in 1904 to be "a protective bubble keeping them safe from the rest of the city, the South, America" (216). To his uncle, Boggs claims to have built up antibodies to racism around him. His uncle grips him by the shoulders and pleads, "Bleed those antibodies from your veins!" Boggs opens his heart to be more vulnerable, and more angry, during the course of this story.

His partner Tommy Smith comes from darker places but has a lighter touch. When we first meet him, he's limping from "acrobatics," i.e., his jump from a third-story window to escape his girl friend's boyfriend (2). Boggs shrinks back when Tommy uses his fists and baton to shut down a petty criminal. In one of Mullen's great scenes, full of atmosphere, tension, and humor, Smith lays a loaded gun on a barroom table within reach of his adversary, daring the crook to shoot him while a blues band plays on. In this scene, we learn that Smith has direct experience of lynchings, which are just family lore for Boggs (155).

Both men are motivated to clean up their neighborhood. In the first chapters of the novel, they investigate gambling and liquor violations. They've set their sights on Mama Dove's brothel. But Boggs is feeling the pull to do something more. In his father's church during the funeral of a black man gunned down by white officers, neighbors confront Boggs: "I thought you were supposed to stop this!" (86)

Stepping out of his protective bubble, Boggs investigates with his partner the death of a young black woman. In the first incident of the novel, ticketing a drunk white man for driving into a light pole, they see her in the passenger seat in a light yellow dress, her face bruised. Days after, they find her corpse in a dump, recognizable only by the dress. When the driver turns out to have been an ex-cop whose name has been expunged from their report, the two cops look for justice off-hours. Their investigation takes them south of Auburn Avenue to Mama Dove's brothel, into the forbidden police station, way out to a farm terrorized by a sheriff and his posse, and the white neighborhood of a Senator.

They find an ally in Officer Dennis Rakestraw, who runs a parallel investigation of his own. Grandson of a German immigrant, he served with American troops at Dachau Concentration Camp, where he gave tours to townspeople who protested they never knew what was going on there (72). Sensitive to pervasive racism, he grows sick of the casual brutality and corruption of his partner Lionel Dunlow. With the discovery of something going on between Dunlow and the ex-cop who crashed the car, Rake goes into partnership with Boggs and Smith. The excitement builds from there.

The writer Thomas Mullen creates sympathetic characters. The more we learn about the victim, Lilly Ellsworth, the more we appreciate her courage and faithfulness to her family back on the farm. The Ellsworth father maintains his dignity facing unrestrained racist cops; the teenage brother is crushed by the weight of responsibility and sadness, and his stoic mother rebuffs the cops with suppressed rage (ca. 285). Mama Dove handles the cops with ruthless sarcasm (186). Even deplorable Dunlow, drunkenly spilling his story to Rake in a baking hot toolshed, reveals a side to his story that makes him understandable, though not forgivable (Ch. 31). We glimpse this other side early on, following a raid on the family of a black jailbreaker, where Rake, afraid for his life, has splashed scalding grits into the sister's face: Dunlow hugs his shaken partner (33). Dunlow feels some kind of sympathy for Rake, though we don't yet understand why.

Atlanta radio host Lois Reitzes opined during an interview with Mullen that Atlanta's weather is another character in the novel (City Lights, WABE FM). Mullen, who lives here, agreed. He conjures the morning light, relentless heat, sweat, the sounds and atmosphere of steamy nights.

Since May, it seems that we white people have felt like the heroes of noir detective fiction, described by Lucius's Uncle Percy as "good men who discover their environments are far darker than they realized" (216). Disturbed by videos of whites confident that the law will stand by them when they claim to have felt threatened by an unarmed black man - Ahmad Arberry, Chris Cook, and George Floyd -- we are coming to perceive the dark truth behind the glib phrases we've come a long way, post-racial America, and a few bad apples.

Those sayings have been our antibodies, enabling us to deny what black people still experience everywhere they go. For white readers, entering into the vividly realized world of Darktown may help to bleed those antibodies from our veins.

Related links
• I respond to the second book in Mullen's Darktown series, Lightning Men.
  
• See my Crime Fiction page for a curated guide to other fiction in the genre.
• My reflection on the movies Chinatown and LA Confidential (07/2016) specifically focuses on "noir" crime fiction. It ends with links to other reflections that explore the noir approach to storytelling, including the series by wonderful Walter Mosley about Easy Rawlins, a black man pursuing justice in LA after the Second World War.
• In an interview with NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates, Mullen tells her that he'd already started the novel in 2014 when the police killing of Michael Brown made headlines. When Bates asks if a white author Thomas Mullen can write a fair account of the black experience, he tells how the manuscript was sent around without his name or any mention of his previous historical novels, so that the story was accepted on its own merits. Hear the interview with Mullen and his publisher, 9/23/2016
• The image of Atlanta, ca. 1948, is from a blogger's review of the hardback edition at Jolene Grace Books

"Ashes": Seeds of America Trilogy Concludes

In the conclusion to Laurie Halse Anderson's The Seeds for America Trilogy, the narrator Isabel at last can attempt to rescue younger sister Ruth from enslavement years after Madame Lockton split the siblings. At the same time, General Washington and his French allies are closing in on the British Army at Yorktown. Isabel resents that her old friend Curzon seems more interested in that action than in helping her. As the title Ashes and the first chapter's epigraph suggest, this will be a novel of "blood and ashes." We see an odious slave overseer, stomach-churning disease, and gruesome carnage.

Yet the overarching question of the novel gives it the energy and delight of a romantic comedy: Will Isabel and Curzon ever realize that they love each other?

My friend Susan started reading this third book while I was still enjoying Forge, which is narrated by the young man Curzon (see "Friendship and Fire," 06/2020). I expressed my hope that Curzon's affable narrative voice might continue in the final book, or at least alternate chapters with Isabel's more intense voice. Susan made an interesting comment: "The narrator has to be Isabel, because she has more to learn."

I agree. When Curzon wants to re-enlist with the Continental Army, Isabel tries to dissuade him:

"I am my own army," I said. "My feet and legs, my hands, arms, and back, those are my soldiers. My general lives up here" -- I tapped my forehead -- "watching for the enemy and commanding the field of battle.... Neither redcoats nor rebels fight for me. I see no reason to support them." (126)

Curzon asks, "What do you fight for, then?" She answers that she wants only to get away from fighting. But, weeks later, she comes to understand an essential difference in their approaches to life:

He favored the larger stage, the grand scale at which folks sought to improve the world. I had chosen to focus on the smaller stage, concentrating myself only with my sister's circumstances.... I realized that Curzon did not care more for his army than me, or even feel that there was a choice to be made. His heart was so large, it could love multitudes. And it did. (242)

Isabel learns from Curzon. She speaks to both the larger and smaller "stage" when, following victory, Virginians re-enslave blacks in the camp and in the ranks. When Curzon expresses bitterness, she pours seeds into Curzon's hand, the ones from her late mother's garden that Isabel and Curzon have preserved through all their years together. A garden has to begin with something, she explains. As the seeds sprout and bloom, you can tend and shape the garden. Echoing the very first words of the series, a quote from Thomas Paine, Isabel says, "Seems to me this is the seed time for America" (271).

We know that one of the seeds is oppression of dark skinned Americans. But we're still free to make of the garden what we will.

There's so much else I want to remember from this book. There's a boy named Aberdeen who's "sweet" on Ruth; a donkey that Ruth names "Thomas Boon" in a scene both light-hearted and heart-warming; the re-appearance of Curzon's old friend Ebenezer; an emotional reconciliation (174); and, of course, the answer to that question, Will they ever realize they love each other?

Laurie Halse Anderson. Ashes. Conclusion to The Seeds for America Trilogy. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2016.

"Forge": Friendship and Fire

Ten minutes into Laurie Halse Anderson's YA novel Forge, I'd laughed out loud four times, gasped and cried. Those reactions mix in about that same proportion throughout the novel, along with "awwws" and some outrage. Comparing this to Chains, its predecessor in Anderson's trilogy Seeds of America, I find the same skillful manipulation of her story to fit with events of the War for Independence, with more playfulness and a whole lot more fart jokes.

[Image:   Laurie Halse Anderson. Forge. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2010.]

The jokes are a guy thing, natural to Anderson's narrator Curzon. In Chains, the intense story of Isabel, a girl enslaved, Curzon was comic relief, with his ridiculous floppy red hat, an earring, military garb too big, and a mouth on him. Even at the end of that story, sick and starving in a military prison, he's making jokes. Now he's "almost 16," meaning 11 months short of his birthday, enrolled in the Continental Army, longing to reunite with Isabel.

Friendship leavens Curzon's suffering from the elements, privations, and hostility from a few of the other teenaged boys in his company. Foremost among his allies is Ebenezer "Eben" Woodruff, the young soldier that Curzon saves early in the novel. Eben's gratitude is as boundless as his chatter, expressed often with arm-numbing punches to Curzon's shoulder.

A gulf opens between the two friends in a passage that anticipates how the "seeds of America" in 1777 will grow through Civil War to Civil Rights to those today who pit "law and order" against "systemic racism." When Eben argues that runaway slaves break the law, Curzon counters, "Bad laws deserve to be broken," just as the King's decrees are being rebuffed by the colonies. Eben asserts that "running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England." Curzon falls silent a moment.

I almost told him then; told him that I and my parents and my grandparents had all been born into bondage, that my great-grandparents had been kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery while his great-grandparents decided which crops to plant and what to name their new cow. (66)

If they'd had the phrase "white privilege," Eben still wouldn't understand. When Eben counters that bondage is "God's will," Curzon walks away: "You're not my friend." The ugly and painful chapters that follow make the friendship, when it returns, all the more deep and sweet.

To fit the arc of Curzon's story to a day-by-day account of events in 1777-1778, Anderson paces her chapters to make the personal coincide with the historical so that jaw-dropping surprises don't feel random. Instead, for example, we think, "It makes sense they would be there!" Anderson shows off in a playful way, meting out highpoints to fall on significant dates. There's peace-making and good will on Christmas, very bad luck on Friday the 13th, something having to do with the heart -- no spoilers, here -- on February 14th, and, for May 1st, more than one reason to think that our narrator has Maypoles on his mind. The way Anderson plays with her material to hit these marks adds another pleasure to the novel.

Anderson plays with the title, too. When my seventh graders read Chains, there's always a bubbling up of energy as the kids realize how many ways the title appears in the text, relating to story and themes. That game continues, as Chains are made at a Forge. Much of the novel takes place at Valley Forge. Curzon, who once worked for a blacksmith, makes himself a black "Smith" when he enlists with an alias. The hardships of military life are a "forge," says a fellow soldier, to be "a test of our mettle" (121). Lead antagonist James Bellingham has forged a metal collar for his slave. By training during the spring, ragtag soldiers are "forged" into an army. Then, forged notes are part of Curzon's escape plans.

Of course, there are no forges, no chains, without fire, and a singular passage about fire and chains confirms the strength of the fire that burns in Curzon.  He tells of hearing a story from Benny, the runt of the company whom Curzon admires for courage. It's little Benny who shames a bully to tears for shirking (140).  Curzon bites his tongue to keep from laughing when Benny, trying to fit in with the big boys, cusses "like a granny," Oh, foul, poxy Devil! (95).  Curzon, who cannot read, listens intently when Benny tells stories to his mates. 
The story of the Titan Prometheus, chained to a rock for sharing fire with the needy, comes to Curzon's mind at a moment of intense hopelessness.  Bellingham has outmaneuvered him: since Curzon is inured to pain, Bellingham threatens to punish Isabel for any misstep by Curzon.  Moments later, Curzon stares into a fireplace and recalls the story, though not the name, of a "fellow ... chained to a rock where an eagle ate out his liver, which grew back every night, and so on through eternity."  Curzon reflects,

When Benny finished his story... I did not know what I would have done if somebody shackled me to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat my insides, day after day after day.

Now I knew.  I would fight the eagle and the chains and that mountain as long as I had breath. (199)

This inner fire is important to Laurie Halse Anderson's trilogy.  In education forums and in public discussion of novels and movies, people this year have questioned whether white authors should be writing about the experiences of people of color.  Anderson, a white woman, gives us in her epigraphs samples from primary sources to show us how close she comes to real lives and real voices of the time, black and white.  She has given her black, male, teenage protagonist an appealing voice and strong agency in his own salvation; there is no White Savior, here.

Anderson's other works include memoirs of her own experience with abuse.  When she writes about Curzon's despair and anger under someone else's absolute power over his body, she writes with authority.   In Chains, both Isabel and her nemesis Madam Lockton suffer arbitrary decrees and physical beatings.  In Forge, it's different. As Isabel fills Curzon in on a particularly violent slave trader, she stops talking.  Curzon is mystified:

I was overcome by an unsettling sensation, as if some giant had picked up the whole of the earth and tilted it.  She'd been hurt, scarred on the inside of her spirit, and I did not know how to help her.  (189)

Curzon lacks our culture's generic phrase sexual abuse for what Isabel experienced.  But Curzon knows it when he sees Isabel forced to lather Bellingham's face while the odious man soaks in a tub. Giving orders, the man casually pets Isabel.  Curzon barely contains himself, thinking

Take your hand off her, you foul whoreson.
"Of course, sir," I said.   (207)

Though victimized, Isabel is no victim.  When she and Curzon make risky plans, Curzon says, "We should wait... for our luck to turn" (270).  He observes, with admiration, that others, female and male, would have "blubbered" and "backed out":

Not Isabel. The reverse side of her pigheaded stubbornness was unshakable courage that was worthy of a general.
"If our luck does not turn for the good on its own," she said, "we'll make it turn." (270)

For the finale, Anderson whips up action, humor, surprises, poetic justice, and a perfect conversion of her major themes, forge, freedom, and guys. As the story ends, Curzon is once again laughing, "walking out of Valley Forge the way I walked into it, with friends."

[See my response to Ashes, concluding book of the trilogy, 06/2020]