Race and Play

I mentioned in my last post that race had always been a part of the story in my novel. I wanted to make sure there were no doubts about this so I left clues in the text. Back in grad school we would have said something very funny about encoding the text with an absent presence. 

Allusion is the writer's conjuring device. To allude is literally to play with some other text. It isn't just a reference. That is more like a quotation. Allusion is playful. It's writers playing together. Unfortunately one of them is usually dead at the time. I played with a number of texts in the writing of The Merry Life of Charles Parker and made present some things that weren't overtly apparent on the page. There are nods to Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. I won't give away all my secrets but The  Merry Adventures of Chuck Parker don't merely point to Robin Hood. Isn't Chuck a type of Huck? He isn't as wily as Tom Sawyer but he lives in their shadow. Like Huck, he's haunted by his father. 

As for race, that's a story that is bigger than what Chuck understands. It's a narrative that takes place around him. I knew this but Chuck doesn't. So I built it outside of his story. Chapter titles can be useful. "Parting the Waters," "A Pillar of Fire" and "At Canaan's Edge" are chapters 21, 24, and 27 respectively. They are also the titles of three books by Taylor Branch about America in the Years when Martin Luther King, Jr. was active. This allusion and the story of Phil Groll -- Stevie's older brother -- sets up a Venn diagram. The fate of Kenny Kilpatrick can't be separated from the fate of MLK. Of the characters we meet, only Phil would have some awareness of that, being a pre-law student at the University of Michigan. 

The playfulness of allusions can only take us so far from very painful realities. There were people on the margins of Chuck's story. I don't believe in THE great American novel. But I believe we can attempt to write great novels in America, ones that take a hard look at where we've been. 

How else will we know where we're headed?