Highway 59

Bluebird, Bluebird and Heaven, My Home - Attica Locke

   Last week I heard an interview with Attica Locke on the radio...I think it was during a mid-day errand, so maybe the interview was from "Here and Now"? I can't remember. But I do remember how fascinating her latest book, Heaven, My Home, sounded. 
   The seedbed of this series, she says, is the region itself, east Texas: scraggly pines and farms, ranches and bayous, stretched along Highway 59, Houston to Texarkana. She needed a character to plant in this soil, to show us around, and along came Darren Mathews - Black, Texan, Ranger. How do those three identifiers define him? inspire him? afflict him? confine him?
   Equally fundamental to the story is the social landscape, race and racism in the fall and winter of 2016, just after Trump's campaign and victory. What happened with Trumpism and racism? "Something feels different." Lots of people keep saying that, including myself, and "feel" is the word I most want to understand. Yes we know he emboldened folks to be more blatantly racist, but it has felt different in quality, not just quantity. Different. It's not just that the toxic racist soup we have left on the stove boiled over once again; there might be a new ingredient in there.
   The third leg of her story's stool is an ongoing argument between Darren's twin uncles, William (now deceased) - a Ranger - and Clayton - a lawyer and academic. Both men want to protect and serve their black family and community. William thinks that is best accomplished from inside the legal establishment. Clayton believes that the law and law enforcement are too fundamentally biased against black folks to be of any help. This argument continues in Darren's soul and career - do I protect black folks with the law? or do I protect black folks from the law?
   The plots of these two books are good, the characters are solid, the idioms are fun, and Locke can turn a most handsome phrase. But her sharp racial awareness is the gold leaf of these books; Locke illustrates race and racism a foot, in process, on the move, in the flesh. She can jump right into the sticky 'tar' of stereotypes without getting stuck; catch the butterfly of identity without breaking its wings; pin the tail on racism while still blindfolded-in-love with Texas.



Bluebird, Bluebird notes

• .In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself
• Southern fables usually went the other way around: a white woman killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead.
• ...for every story about a black mother, sister or wife crying over a man who was locked up for something he didn't do, there was a black mother, sister, wife, husband, father, or brother crying over the murder of a loved one for which no one was locked up. For black folks, injustice came from both sides of the law, a double-edged sword of heartache and pain.
• He got it confused sometimes, on which side of the law he belonged, couldn't always remember when it was safe for a black man to follow the rules.

Heaven, My Home

• Daily, he marveled with a befuddled anger at what a handful of scared white people could do to a nation.
• After Obama, it was forgiveness betrayed.
• ...It gave Darren an odd feeling of dislocation; for a second he actually didn't trust his visibility. He felt as if he'd wandered onto a movie set. He could see the actors, but Darren was reflected in non of the action around him.
• But Darren did not suffer from the peculiar affliction that felled many a well-meaning white person - an allergic reaction to race talk, emotional hives breaking out and closing the throat completely...
• "Don't let anybody steal your grace"
• ...because even here, even in the house where he'd grown up, home was always a reach back in time, glassed as it was in memory. It was still an idea he couldn't exactly touch. Food could sometimes reach it, a pot of peas and ham hocks on the stove. Stories too. But music did it every time. Texas blues were the way home.
• "There is no redemption, there is no future free from their past sins. You give 'em an inch, they'll take a town."
• "...the gilded-lily-white amnesia that is the tourism industry in this town."
• "Perpetuating and profiteering off a fraud - the friction of bloodless prosperity, an antebellum life of civility and grace - while conveniently forgetting the lives that made this town possible."