The Caste of Characters in My Novel Set in Rural America.

The canopy of trees also covers a diversity of wealth in rural America.

As a writer from the lower middle class, who has only peeked around the corner to catch glimpses of wealth, I do not wish to put wealth on a pedestal. In my novel, "Severed," I don't drop too many designer names and I purposefully stay away from the bling-bling trappings of so many contemporary American novelists, who place wealth as the real protagonist. However, the concept of wealth is a very important subtext to the novel. The lengths that people go through to become wealthy forms part of the mystery.

Set in a rural pocket of Northwestern Louisiana, Nakadee is a university town with a population of under 40,000.  Luscious in its comparison to swampy, crowded New Orleans and its northern neighbor, a complacently citified Shreveport, Nakadee is a fictional sleepy hollow that is likely to grow in leaps and bounds given a potential natural gas pipeline construction project which will change its economy.  Some Nakadee residents can't wait, while others don't care: the rich will only get richer, however, the lower classes might get some good jobs, for a change.

The citizens of Nakadee, whose ancestors have lived there for several hundred years, while trapped in its relative remoteness, are thankful for its refuge. They purposefully wish to live life in the slow lane.  The town is a mix of Americans, Black, European, Creole and Cajun, the latter two a melange resulting from questionable "hookups," over the centuries, between the first two racial groups, that defied racial sexual taboos back in the day. Nearly every native of Louisiana is a variation on that theme.  All citizens have their crosses to bear in living, out loud, the ancient roles of slaveholder, slave, today, as a Louisianan.

Even rural roads lead to power

The wealth of those groups is also relative of one's color. But there are exceptions, and my novel explores it through the eyes of the protagonist, Dr. Lula Logan, a Northerner Black woman who grew up solidly lower middle-class.  Hailing from California, her father had a secure job in the U.S. Postal Service, and scrimped and saved for his only child. He was frugal to a fault, and managed to handle his government benefits wisely enough to grow a trust for her that is worth several million dollars.  Lula's mother, his widow, is still alive and Lula is gainfully employed, with no need to draw upon her inheritance. 

Growing up, Lula lived on the periphery of the Black social circles of debutante balls and elite Black social clubs. Not prone to class-isms or people-pleasing, she is more intellectual than social. While no stranger to the good life, she knows she has to pay for it herself, so when the investigation in which she becomes involved relates to several wealthy individuals, she's intrigued by what she witnesses, and must, herself, decide whether she has any biases against the people she comes across as part of the investigation.

Mind you, the wealthy she's dealing with are not the nouveaux riches Kimyes and Jay-Zs of the world who sing about their acquisitions, but old money and old power, whose wealth is very much unseen, and more hidden in their closed door Congressional offices.  Lula must come to terms with her professed values and her feelings, which are muddled after meeting Congressman Girabeaux.

A Black Republican who is from a family of freeman who owned slaves in the antebellum South; the other, an older, more traditional White Congressman whose patted enough backs and greased enough palms to place him next to the highest players in Hollywood, his constituency.  Though they are rich, they are only bit players in a grand scheme. In fact, they are hired guns of the real power brokers of the uber wealthy--twelve degrees, instead of six degrees of separation. But they know that to stay in power they must do someone else's bidding, even if they never meet the person whose interests they represent.

When Lula meets the Black Congressman, despite her progressive politics, she finds herself falling under his spell.  Is it the limousine driver or his personal chef that makes him so appealing? And what does she truly feel about her ex-boyfriend, a Creole detective, the only one of color on the police force, who is comfortable with his place in town, but who, to Lula, manages to always play it safe?

In the U.S., we witness the lives of the rich and famous on television. But how do you handle it when you see it up close and personal? The cast of characters in the novel is large, and wide, intentionally so; any small town has its own variety. In this investigation, however, when severed fingers start to appear in different parts of the small town, Lula comes across some of the town's characters beneath the surface of notoriety, but characters just the same.

The South is one big caste system through which Lula must negotiate. Although never on the surface, her beliefs about race are a major factor in her own metamorphosis as she comes to terms with her new home in Nakadee, Louisiana.

Black America's "French Connection"

Yearning to Breathe Free

I dropped out of my beginner's French class in college because the professor picked on me a lot for reasons I don't understand to this day. I had a B+ average in the class, and he had actually suggested that I take a more advanced class because my aptitude was quite good, without serious effort.  Still in my teens, I didn't have the fight in me to take him on. In fact, I transferred to another school altogether to finish my university studies. My French professor's attitude toward me wasn't the reason I transferred, however.  There was a lot of racial strife on campus, and, having earlier determined that I couldn't apply to film school, I decided to study international relations and journeyed to Washington, D.C., finishing my last two years in college there.

Monsieur Charles Boyer

My first roommate, an Italian-American and big Anglophile, spoke French and Russian, and we would often-times speak French. I credit her with keeping the language alive in me. Besides its being a romantic-sounding language, I also grew up watching Charles Boyer movies, and loved his accent. I had memorized parts of the opera, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in high school, taking the album (which I had bought for my birthday) to my friend's home to play, as we didn't have a stereo.  I would date a Haitian man, decades later, who had Boyer's same deeply-French accent, and I loved speaking French with him.  However, as punishment for not electing to be a member in his stable of other women (he would flip through photographs of all the women who wanted to be with him, as if that should somehow convince me to do the same), he would only speak English with me.  That relationship didn't last too long, although we are still friends.

I have had no connection with France other than when I took my short trailer to the Cannes Film Festival, trying to raise money for a feature film. I enjoyed my stay there, but it was all work and no play, honestly. After eating baguettes, hot chocolate, and Orangina throughout the day, I would treat myself to a first class meal at night.  I had a pizza with the first Robocop, at the time. He was normal. Nice. So un-Hollywood.  My sister's best friend, Darice, joined me there. Darice was a world traveler in her own right, and died several years ago of cancer, something my family and I cannot get over.  Years prior to her death, Darice had a birthday celebration in Louisiana,  as her family, like many others from Southern California, hailed from there. I joined my sister, and Darice's other friends to party, in New Orleans, planning to continue my travels to the northwestern part of the state to continue to research my novel.

Louisiana is a state unlike the other 49, and we have the French to thank for that, for better or for worse. That state's legal system is based upon French Napoleonic codes, as opposed to the English- based stare decisis (legal decisions born of earlier judicial precedent).  The mix of the races is legendary, spawning Creoles, Cajuns -- a melange of European, African, and Native American blood.  But the plantation system was also legendary, too. Under the yoke of American slavery, Black Americans were chattel, told where they could go, what they could do, whom they could marry. They were considered 3/5ths of a human being.  Notwithstanding France's contribution to American slavery, there were abolitionists.  Indeed, in a brilliant stroke of subliminal indoctrination, the French abolitionists gave America the Statue of Liberty, to protest against slavery, and send a colossal physical reminder of what America claimed to be: a beacon of hope for people around the world.


Fifty years later, after World War II, the French still embraced Black Americans' ability to create joy notwithstanding the degradation of its people, and France embraced Black culture.  The love affair was mutual, especially after the War. An excerpt told by Barbara "Aisha" Johnson, daughter of a Black American transplant to France:

My father Howard Tuck would often talk about the war. He was in France and in Germany during WWII. There was a lot of hardship, the countryside, all bombed out, was desolate. Combat was hard and stressing, but they got breaks in between. African American bands would come to France to entertain the troops. The French loved jazz. They would come to some of the shows. And if the French could play, they would join in. There was dancing. No one lifted an eyebrow if an African American soldier danced with a French woman. While there was discrimination in France at that time, the racism was nowhere near what we experienced here. The Negroes were received as human beings, as individuals.

On the other hand, African Americans liked the sharp way the French dressed. They started to knot a silk scarf around their neck the way the French did, to wear tweed blazers, and the beret of course! They brought that fashion back to Harlem. It became a trade mark for African Americans who wanted to show they were smart and educated.

http://africanamericansandthefrench.com/Your_stories.html

The reception by the French to Black Americans is excerpted from this blog:

African-Americans also had another benefit when moving to France in that their skin color actually helped them, rather than provided a burden. Many Parisians, when meeting an African-American in Paris would assume that the person was an artist, writer, or performer of some sort. As Parisians have a profound respect for those involved in some form of artistic and/or creative expression, they were treated with the upmost respect.

Although slavery was abolished, and some progress has been made to redress its scourge, economically, Blacks still suffer under policies that move at Paleozoic speeds of government restitution to this day.  One need only read the vitriolic comments against American Indians in 2009, who were slated to receive restitution or reparations for intentional injustices against them by the federal government. The government, of course, is made up of people, many of whom are conflicted in their duties as public servants, and who can keep the wheels of justice from moving, to a standstill, because of their prejudice and bias. 

It is easy to romanticize the French, who profess, as an official maxim, not to care about race.  France has no census, and on government forms there is no check box for one to mark next to one's color or ethnicity. Imagine that! Not to be categorized by color.  It is fair to say that Black Africans in France don't have the same experiences as Black Americans once had, as their collective entry on France's shores from Africa were not as part of a liberating force, like those of the Black American soldiers who fought with the US military.  The Black communities of France are also in banlieues, or far-flung, isolated communities of "otherness" that suggest their identity and plight as refugees, is ignored.  But don't call their low-income communities ghettos:

Several social scientists in France reject any conflation of French housing projects with black ghettos in the US. Sophie Body-Gendrot (2007) argues that US history is marked by a founding racial conflict relegating those deemed inferior to a stigmatized realm. She takes up US sociologist Douglas Massey’s term, “soft apartheid”, to describe a system institutionalized over the course of several centuries that is still more inclined to wall in the ghettos than call them into question. Unlike the US, however, France has been spared such systemic racial segregation, in which the identity of the self and the other hinges chiefly on the colour of one’s skin. Body-Gendrot finds that, ultimately, the French republican ideal eschews the racialization of social relations, favouring unity over heterogeneity.

Similarly, Loic Wacquant (2005; 2006) notes significant disparities between French housing projects and the American black ghetto. First of all, he points up the gap in size and scale between US ghettos and French urban renewal zones. He then observes functional and ecological contrasts: unlike American ghettos, French social housing projects are “residential islets” that are not cut off from other urban areas. Wacquant, a Bourdieusian sociologist, also underscores the fact that US ghettos are entirely and exclusively black, whereas poor French suburbs exhibit considerable ethnic diversity. He also points out that US ghettos are plagued by levels of poverty and indigence and forms of violence unequalled in France. Finally, according to the author, many American black ghettos are in a state of utter dereliction unknown in France.

Hmm... um...

President Barack Hussein Obama's inauguration awakened minority populations in France to demand more attention about their socio-economic condition, a difficult proposition if there are truly no statistics to shed insight into their plight as minorities. I champion their cause; but I, daresay, the strides of some Black Americans in this country does not mitigate the malaise that regular, non-famous, Black Americans feel for being enfants terribles in their own country. Both Black peoples within each others' nations could learn from one another.

I still might take up French again.














 

Fiction is Fictional.

I'm always amused when a fiction writer is chastised by critics and other readers that his or her book is inaccurate. Can we, the readers, know as much as the writer about his or her fiction book?  Is there a communal consciousness where we all go and experience the same thing or event, then judge whether the writer properly tapped into it? Is there a continuum by which we can somehow experience "fiction" as it unfolds, thereafter turning it into non-fiction, when it is written, for readers to dissect and digest as a part of their reality? Certainly, this has been pondered before, but my experiences have made me question the zeitgeist of fiction writing and whether the concept of fiction really exists.

The background of my novel is loosely based upon lots of Internet research about contemporary Louisiana, and three visits to the state.  My first visit was to Baton Rouge, in 2002, at about the same time that the Beltway snipers were terrorizing America, playing target practice with innocent American travelers who would randomly fall victim to their sick game.  The killers were loose and on the run.  I was traveling to do research for my novel when someone had only recently been murdered in Baton Rouge, and there was a law enforcement belief that the killer was still roaming around there (there was no inkling that there were two killers working in tandem). By the time of my visit, I had decided upon which cities where my killer was going to be wreak havoc, namely, Washington, D.C., Baton Rouge, and New Hampshire. Considering my plot about a serial killer on the loose, and given the nation's terror, I was not immune to being spooked at the prospect that I could become a victim while traveling alone.

It was almost closing time when I visited the barbecue place that was to be an important location in the novel, at least at that iteration of my plot. I was ordering take-out, like my character was supposed to do, in my novel.  I sat next to a Black man, who, at the time, could have fit the description of the Baton Rouge murder suspect, who was deemed to be brown-skinned, medium frame, with short-cropped hair.  My suspect was by himself, too. I have to admit that, for the first time in my life, I was terrified of a black man: I was alone in a strange city, staying in a hotel, traveling by car--where cross-hairs could easily have been pointed at me.  Thankfully, once we started talking, I warmed up to him, and he to me.  Our orders arrived at about the same time. When I was walking out of the restaurant, he told me to be careful, warning me about the killer on the loose. I was scared when he said it.  Did I just get a pass, where he was allowing me to live, or was he as fearful as I was, too? It would turn out to be the latter.

Africa House, Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches,

After a friend suggested that my location be changed to Cane River country, in the northwestern part of the state, I finally did decide to focus my novel on a fictional town near Natchitoches, Louisiana (pronounced, "Nagadish,"), where historic plantations that once housed slave captives for manual labor still stood. While there, in 2005, I was analyzing the quaint historical parish, through the eyes of my protagonist, a black female forensic anthropologist, a transplant from California.  I arrived at the real plantation near closing time. When I told the U.S. Park Ranger my purpose in scouting a location where forensic anthropologists might work, the Ranger told me to wait around as there was someone to whom I could speak.  I was gobsmacked when she told me that there was a female forensic anthropologist that was in the field that day, doing research--doing exactly what my character was supposed to be doing.  And imagine my shock to see that she was Black. Considering the hour, as it was dusk and she was finishing for the day, she was very friendly and informative. She showed me the tools of her trade and took me to the site of her research.  She pointed out to me the grounds where she was conducting her studies: a grassy area where slaves were believed to have been unceremoniously buried, without headstones, in a field abutting the Cane River.  In fact, the forensic anthropologist had just made a real find:  coffins jutting out into the river bank where soil erosion and excessive moisture were causing the ground to literally fall into the river, exposing the coffins of the captives.  She also told me that she hailed from California.  Like my character, Lula. 

Uncle Jack, the good 'ol Darky

Lula's field work does not figure prominently in the novel. Her presence in Louisiana was a pretext for her to be in the state during its heralded Mardi Gras celebration, around which time the mystery unfolds.  I could have just as easily not  visited those places, Baton Rouge and Natchitoches, because I decided to create a fictional town called Nakadee, an amalgamation of some of the true places I had witnessed in my travels throughout the state. There is one true-life reference in my novel, to a hat-tipping "darky" statue, Uncle Jack, in the real parish of Natchitoches that still stands, an intransigent reminder and remainder of the good old days. 

Will I be chastised for misrepresenting facts about my fictitious parish? I know my topographical descriptions are hued from real study of the land I traversed, in criss-crossing the state, and looking exhaustively at aerial maps.  Other parts are mere imagination, added from another place to add context to my non-fiction origins.  I will be ready when people criticize me for not "getting" something right, or misrepresenting an area that has some basis in reality. I guess I should care, but I don't. The story is my fiction, born of my real imagination--that turned into part-premonition of real experience, that I re-fictionalized for the reader.  

So, Perhaps there really is no such thing as fiction, after all.  

Here's a historical perspective on the Uncle Jack controversy, which has only scant mention in my novel, but which speaks volumes about its time and place in our nation's history and present state of affairs.