Author Archives: sydlogsdon

86. N——

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Be sure to drop in to Serial where I am presenting a piece about a boy coming to grips with racism on the verge of the Civil War.

There it is, the N—– word. Everybody in America is afraid of it. When Paula Deen admitted using it during her youth (at a time when everybody in the South was using it freely), they almost crucified her. Granted, a lot of people were just waiting for a chance, but that was their excuse.

I could write it out plainly. It’s my blog; nobody is going to censor me. I feel a little foolish writing a letter followed by dashes, as if eveybody didn’t know what it meant. But if I spelled it out, I would feel like a little kid cussing in front of his parents, then pretending he didn’t know they were there.

I grew up whiter than white (see  posts 46. and 81.), in a black-free community. So how do you learn to hate or fear someone you never see?

Easy. You listen to your parents and their friends, and absorb their attitudes. I didn’t come to hate, in part because my parents didn’t hate. But they did fear.

Black folks seeking freedom during the sixties taught my mind and my heart not to fear them. But the gut takes longer. Forty years later I wrote a poem to confront the fear that lingered.

          Mother Tongue

               I saw a calf born.
His mother, in her need to clean him,
Knocked him over on his first rising,
And on his second rising.

In her need to make him safe,
she drove him to his knees.

               Words are like that –
A mother tongue that overwhelms us,
That makes us what we are,
and sometimes, what we should not be.

*****

When I see a black man, I hear “nigger”
Spoken sharply in my father’s voice.
I step back, my eyes grow tight,
Suspicion fires my blood,
And for one moment he is my enemy.

Then reason returns,
And I am shamed.

It is my father’s fear.
I would leave it in my father’s grave,
If I could . . .,  but I cannot!

I can only drive it down;
And bury it deep in shameful, hollow places.

If reading can remake our thoughts, writing can do even more. Making this poem a decade ago and facing my shame largely removed that inherited fear.

Voices in the Walls 4

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I don’t like dealing with the Civil War. I understand its pivotal role in American history, but I have no understanding of those who spend their career studying it or writing about so repulsive an event.

In Voices in the Wall I’m telling the story of one young man’s coming to terms with race, and with the way in which his understanding of the world has been wrong. If I were to set that during the Civil War, the blood and guts would get in the way. Voices is actually a hopeful story, and nothing hopeful came out of the Civil War. Slavery was ended, of course, but only at the cost of hardening the attitudes of the South and bringing about a hundred plus years of Jim Crow.

The novelist’s solution is to set Voices close to, but not during the Civil War. This was also a practical necessity, since the “voices” of the title are the voices of slaves escaping via the underground railway. So Voices is set in that brief period between Lincoln’s election and the attack on Ft. Sumter.

Unless you completely compartmentalize your visits to this website, you know by now that over in A Writing Life I am doing about six weeks on the subject of race. It is the American preoccupation, and my early rejection of racism set the tone for the rest of my life. I owe a lot to the people of the Civil Rights movement. I have said that repeatedly, and I will continue to do so.

Voices was my way of coming to terms with the racism of my childhood, just as A Fond Farewell to Dying was my way of coming to terms with religion. The fact that Voices stalled when it did, tells me I have some work left to do, on myself as well as on the novel.

I am sharing this for a number of reasons: 

  • Although it is not finished, even this fragment is worth reading for it’s own sake.
  • It will become a tutorial on planning a novel. I taught middle school for twenty-seven years, and I can’t shake the habit of teaching.
  • It will serve as a companion piece and counterbalance for the posts on race which are occurring over in A Writing Life.
  • It will serve as a forum on the moral responsibilities of writing, including getting your facts right and not shooting your mouth off about things you don’t understand.

more tomorrow as we begin Chapter one

BIG SPOILER ALERT.

In about a month, you will get to the end of the fragment. You will not get to read the rest of the novel until I finish it – and I have half a dozen novels in the queue waiting to be written – and I’m 68 years old . . .

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

85. Why me?

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I’m a white guy. You might ask, “What does a white guy know about Black history?” More to the point, “What right does he have to talk about it?” That’s a fair question.

You might also ask, why is a science fiction author writing a series of posts about race? Another fair question, and it has more than one answer.

I am a citizen, an observer, a teacher, a student of history and culture, and a writer on a number of subjects, and the current Serial demonstrates. It is largely coincidental that my novels so far published have been science fiction.

I grew up in a white town (see post 81.). For a lot of reasons, none of them having anything to do with race, I didn’t leave to go to college. I escaped to go to college. Once there I switched from biology to anthropology, which is, among other things, a study of the variety of lousy ways humans have treated each other. It is also a study of how groups form to manage that treatment, and how various ethnic groups interact, not according to reality, but according to how they are taught to see each other.

It sounded a lot like home.

Like any other human system of thought, anthropology has its core beliefs. Cultural relativism states that other cultures provide the for the needs of people in those cultures, and those cultures don’t need to be changed by the hand of imperialistic countries like Britain and America.

Fair enough. However, the norms of those cultures are often a set of rules designed to maintain the perks of the powerful. The groups who are contending for power are often defined by ethnic identities, and those definitions often have little to do with historical reality.

Again, a lot like home.

One non-mainstream anthropologist explained it this way. In exchanges in an South Asian village, the farming castes gives food to their landlords, and in return get the benefit of not being hit on the head by a club.

Okay, not like America this year, but a lot like the South in 1840.

I spent four years at two institutions studying South Asia and South Asians in overseas colonies. My first MA was on caste based economic interactions. Years later, while writing, I returned to college for a second BA and MA in history, concentrating on Britain and America in the last three hundred years.

But I’m not black! I am more than aware of that “deficiency” and I would never think that I understand black perspectives from the inside. However, there will be innumerable black people writing this season; they will tell their story, as they should.

My outsider’s perspective will also be valid.

Voices in the Walls 3

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Prolog

The smoke of battle had cleared long since, and even the smell of death had become faint in the hills around Gettysburg. Long rows of crosses, raw wood under fresh paint, regimented the fields where the Union dead lay buried. The clouds were low and gray, a sky for weeping over a land shocked numb. For a hundred years it had been a land of farms and families and ordinary life until Time and History had staggered in on horseback. Men armed with rifles and gatling guns had lifted Gettysburg forever from the ordinary, and had set its name on every lip.

I was a thousand miles west that day, also fighting. It is an irony of war that an event as important as the fall of Vicksburg should be overlooked because it happened the same day as the battle of Gettysburg.

Stepping down from the train, I knew that I had come home. Since Waterside had been destroyed, my Aunt Rachel’s old farmhouse, where I had lived in three short weeks in the autumn of 1860, was the only spot on Earth I could call my own. Here I had begun the journey that would lead me to manhood – a convoluted journey that had taken me into that strangest of countries, my own childhood seen through newly opened eyes.

It had begun with the sound of horses hooves in the night, and a summons from my father; and with that summons, all that had been was no more, and my life was changed forever in the blink of an eye.

It had begun with the sound of horses hooves in the night, and a summons from my father that had changed my life in the blinking of an eye.

I put that memory aside when I saw the two women waiting on the wagon seat.

Aunt Rachel stepped down and Sarah followed her. It was as if time had turned back upon itself. Tall, rawboned, and blonde; plainly dressed and smiling a welcome that still reminded me of my mother, Rachel Pike strode across the platform to greet me. She was small in the circle of my arms, but the change was not in her; it was all in me. Then Sarah stepped up, shy and smiling, and she had changed the most of all. She had been a child when I left and now she was a young woman, and a stranger again, as she had been throughout our childhood. My sister, whom I had never really known.

I put my arms around them both, remembering . . .

*****

This was not the original beginning of Voices. I first began with that “summons in the night” and moved ahead with straightforward chronology. It didn’t quite work for me.

I wanted Matt to mature through the novel, but that is always a bit tricky. You expect callowness at the beginning of a young adult novel, but adult readers generally want maturity from the very beginning.

Bracketing can solve that problem. It allows you to show the protagonist at a later stage of his development, musing about the events the reader is about to see. It works here, but I didn’t write this prolog until the novel was well advanced. I wouldn’t have know enough about events or tone when I began writing.

This bracket is particularly effective because it will pick up again after the last chapter as an epilog. This is one thing I knew from the beginning – that I was going to end the novel at the wind-down of the Civil War, with a cameo of Lincoln at Gettysburg.

You might have noticed that paragraphs four and five need to be collapsed. That is the kind of thing I would see but ignore, leaving the final tweaking until the whole novel is finished.     more tomorrow

84. Homegrown Terror, 1989, (3)

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In 1989, I was writing a novel about being a school teacher and mirroring my story against real events when a school shooting took place in a nearby city. I wrote reality into the novel. This post is the third in an excerpt from Symphony in a Minor Key.

*****

Neil drove to the mall after school and went to a department store where he had seen racks of televisions on display. He had no TV himself and he did not want to watch this with Carmen. He could either watch it alone, or in the anonymity of a public place, but not with someone he loved. He arrived at the store just in time to see the whole bloody scene on the news. All normal business had stopped in the store as clerks and customers stood riveted by the horror of it.

A second channel picked it up and Neil watched again. His fascination was like a private shame. He hated the newsman for the way he shoved his microphone into a child’s face to ask her how she had felt, but he could not turn away.

The next morning the Modesto Bee devoted five full pages to the tragedy. Neil, who did not subscribe, went out early to buy a copy and read it all. Five dead. Thirty wounded. That would be half of the kids he taught. And all the rest, the other three hundred students, would never feel safe again. Like a rape, it would tear them out of their childhoods and plunge them into a mad, adult world long before their time.

What would he say to his own students today?

*****

As it turned out, he didn’t have to say very much. Less than half of them were aware of what had happened, and few of them were very interested. They were talking about it when they came in from the buses; those who had seen the news were telling those who had not. But it had come to them through the plastic reality of the television. It was no more real than a drug bust, famine in Ethiopia, or oil spills. Or Miami Vice. It was just another part of the endless effluvium of human suffering that washed about them every day; with marvelous sanity, most of them remained unmoved.

A few of them were affected. Tanya Michelson looked as if she had been crying when she came in and stayed unnaturally quiet all day. Lisa Cobb jumped at every sound. Oscar Teixeira had been thinking hard about what it all meant. He went straight to the fact that the children who had died had all been Asian. With a clarity of thought all out of proportion to his age, he made the connection to the celebration of Martin Luther King Day just before the shooting. Of course he did not speak of irony – not at eleven years old – but he did recognize the juxtaposition.

*****

I taught for twenty-seven years – about 4000 students by my best estimate. Most of them are a blur now, but when they were with me, they were a joy that filled my room and my life. Black (there were a few), Anglo or Mexican, or the very few of other ethnicities, all were precious.

I grew up in a time and place when everyone looked alike, sounded alike, and went to the same church. As I said on Monday, the black people who marched in Selma showed me another way of thinking.

This memory of the assassination of Asian children has inserted itself into a series of posts largely on black history, just as it inserted itself, most unwelcomely, into the novel I was writing in 1989.

It’s all part of the same story.

On Monday I’ll tell you in more detail how a white guy came to be writing on race.

Voices in the Walls 2

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Yesterday I told you how Voices in the Walls began, then stalled. Part of the problem lies in what I would call my philosophy of fiction, if I were inclined toward formality and talked like a critic.

I don’t think first in terms of plot and action. Before I know the details of my story, I get to know my main character. I get to know his strengths and – more importantly – his weaknesses. I don’t care as much how he is going to get from A to B, as I care why he wants to get from A to B.

Of course, that isn’t the whole story or I would be writing sermons instead of novels. How a character achieves his goals, or fails to achieve them, is the backbone of fiction. I work very hard to make the plot move forward through scenes which are both exciting and believable. But that is the job of day to day writing. I don’t want to know the details of what is going to happen the my people too far in advance.

I usually know generally where my novel is going, and I know exactly why it is going there. I know in some detail the events of the next few chapters, but the rest of the story is as much a surprise to me as it is to my characters.

Did I mention that I rewrite a lot?

*****

My main character, Matt Williams is a personal surrogate. That’s a bit more than saying that he is based on my personal experiences. He exists to work out the same issues I had to work out when I was his age.

My personal story – on the surface anyway – would freeze me at the keyboard, unable to type because of sheer boredom. The issues that moved me, however, are important. I can off load them onto Matt, then dump him into the last days of peace just before the beginning of the Civil War, and now we’ll have a story people will read.

As I explained Monday over in A Writing Life, I was raised white in a white town, with no black people in sight. I had no opinions of my own on race, but the opinions around me were all negative. When the civil rights movement began, what I saw on television convinced me that everyone around me was wrong, and the black people were right.

That’s a story worth a novel, but not the kind of novel I write. I lived it, but I wouldn’t want to read it.

Dumping it onto Matt Williams’ head, however, changes everything.

*****

Enough chit chat for now. Tomorrow we’ll look at the prolog to Voices, and talk more later.     more tomorrow

83. Homegrown Terror, 1989, (2)

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If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, this will make no sense. Slide on down to post 82. We’ll wait.

The non-Anglo students at my school were Mexican or Mexican-American. I never knew which were native to the U.S., which were legal immigrants, and which were illegals. No one told me, no one told me to ask, and I didn’t need to know. I did try to teach equality and tolerance whenever the opportunity arose, like my alter ego Neil McCrae.

*****

Neil had not had a good day. He had obtained a video of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech to show to his students in connection with the holiday. His morning class had responded with very little enthusiasm when he tried to get them to discuss what it meant. There were no black children at Kiernan, and Neil had not been able to convince them that the civil rights Dr. King had fought for were for all of them. To these children the events of the fifties and sixties were another world, as foreign as ancient Athens. They were indifferent to it all.

His afternoon class was even worse. He had almost reached the point of giving up in disgust and trying some other tactic, when Bill Campbell came to the door of his classroom and motioned for Neil to join him outside. The look on Bill’s face alerted Neil that something serious had happened.

“I just got a phone call from Elaine Sanders. There has been a shooting at one of the elementary schools in Stockton. Apparently, there were a bunch of dead and wounded. Elaine wanted us to be on the alert.”

Bill’s words were just words. The reality of them did not hit Neil at once. He said, “On the alert for what?”

“I don’t know. Strangers on campus; anything like that.”

Since the American Navy had accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner the previous summer there had been talk of terrorist reprisals, and American schools were one of the targets being threatened. If that was the case, and the school which had already been struck was so close . . .

Neil found himself searching the playground with his eyes, and at the time it did not seem melodramatic. He said, “What do you want me to do?”

“Don’t say anything to your students, but be on the alert. Join Tom and me out front when the buses come to pick them up. It’s late enough in the afternoon that we probably won’t have any parents coming in to pick up their children because they heard it. If some parent comes in, get their child out of the classroom without a fuss. If we can manage it, I want to get these kids home with their parents before they hear about it.”

Bill went on to pass the word and Neil returned to his classroom. Bill’s words “a bunch of dead and wounded” rang in his head as he sat down and looked at his kids. Little Randi Nguyen with her boundless energy; Rabindranath who was calm and bright and utterly without a sense of humor; Lisa Cobb with her erratic behavior and terrible puns; even Jesse Herrera. Dead or wounded . . .; he had to shake his head to drive the vision away.

The bell for the last break of the day caught him by surprise and he jumped. Somebody laughed, then hid his laughter. The students all rushed for the door. Neil was on his feet in an instant and out the door to pace the playground in paranoid fear. All of the other teachers were out, exchanging worried glances and saying nothing.

When the buses came, a phalanx of teachers was there to protect their students from an enemy who never appeared.

This excerpt concludes tomorrow.

Voices in the Walls 1

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I began the post Serial on August 31, 2015 because I had a backlog of short material I wanted to share. That well has run dry, but I still have a stock of novels and fragments.

Today the next phase begins, with a long fragment worth reading on it’s own merit, which is also tied closely to the next six weeks of posts in A Writing Life and offers a look over my shoulder at a work-in-progress.

NOTE – I said fragment. You might find this to be an Edwin Drood kind of experience. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I know that Serial is supposed to be fiction, but you are going to have to put up with some reminiscence to set the stage for the weeks that follow.

How often do you get to see an author’s work in progress? Steinbeck gave a fascinating and unique vision in his Journal of a Novel which detailed his thoughts on the novel East of Eden, but I can’t think of another instance.

I know that I would not be able to keep up an ongoing self-commentary while I am working on a novel. While in progress, novels are all consuming. Afterward, the work itself remains but the act of writing fades. Right now, I have a hard time remembering what year I wrote which part of some of my novels.

Some writers begin by knowing where their story will end, then write a gripping hook, and proceed from A to Z in a logical manner. If you are a would-be writer out to build a career, I suggest that you emulate this logical pattern.

I don’t. I am slow planner, a fast writer, and an unending tweaker, tinkerer and re-writer.  If I could manage to fully outline a novel at the outset, I wouldn’t be able to write it. There would be no fun left in the project, just the literary equivalent of paint-by-numbers.

Which brings us to Voices in the Walls, a fragment I plan to use for several purposes over the next several weeks. I need to explain why I have such a fragment.

As I explained in post 55 (also called Voices in the Walls), a tour guide at the Washington Irving mansion in New York said that the house had been a station on the underground railroad, and that the family could sometimes hear noises through the walls while escaping slaves were hiding in the basement. I heard the story in 1986. Some time in the next year, as best I can remember, I roughly laid out the sequence of events that would make up the story and began writing. After a month or two, on page 45, I stalled. It should have been a temporary cessation, but events intervened.

This was a busy time in my life. After years of writing-induced poverty, I had begun teaching, had settled into that life, and was finally able to take long vacations during the summer. My wife and I spent the summer of 1986 touring the east coast by car where we heard the Washington Irving story, then we spent the summers of 1987 and 1988 in Europe. We were able to do that on a teacher’s salary because we had no kids and because we were cheap. We slept in a tent, ate bread and apples, and lived like teenagers (or homeless people) even though we were both forty.

This was the period during which I wrote my teaching novel Symphony in a Minor Key (post 35, and as a Christmas excerpt here in Serial). As soon as I had finished Symphony, I turned our experiences living close to the ground in Europe into Raven’s Run (post 24), a contemporary thriller. Since I was teaching full time and catching up on living, those two and a fragment novels took about a decade to complete.

By that time I was hungry to get back to science fiction and fantasy, so Voices continued to lie fallow.     more tomorrow

82. Homegrown Terror, 1989, (1)

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“Life is not a well told tale.  Things come out of nowhere, and in their wake, everything is changed.”

On the day after Martin Luther King day in 1989, terror struck Stockton, California. I was teaching in a small middle school about forty miles away and writing a novel about being a middle school teacher. As I said in post 35, I had decided to have events in my novel mirror events in the real world, not knowing what a trap I had laid for myself. The next three posts are an except from that novel. For factual research, I had only to open the day’s newspaper.

Terror

Life is not a well told tale.  Things come out of nowhere, and in their wake, everything is changed. There is frequently no warning, and even afterward, those events may make no sense.

In Stockton, thirty miles north of Kiernan School, at about eleven thirty in the morning, a distracted young loner named Patrick Purdy parked his car outside Cleveland Elementary School. As he left his car, he used a fourth-of-July sparkler to light a pipe bomb in the front seat, and entered the school yard through an unlocked gate in the fence. He crossed a grassy field, rounded a classroom building and waited there watching the playground where the students were at recess. He was wearing a 9mm automatic pistol and carrying an assault rifle.

Purdy had attended that school for four years when he was a child. At that time it had been a white, middle class neighborhood. Now the community was filled with southeast Asian refugees. Most of the children in the playground were Asian.  Purdy had told acquaintances how much he hated Asians.

Two things happened almost at once. The bomb Purdy had left in his car exploded, and the bell ending the recess period rang.  The children turned from their play and ran back toward their classrooms. Purdy raised his AK-47 and calmly, matter-of-factly, fired a burst of thirty rounds into the mass of students. They fell, screaming and bleeding, or silent and already dead.

He replaced the ammunition clip and fired again.  A teacher herding her children toward safety was shot down, and more students fell. Teachers inside the building at Purdy’s back huddled on the floor with their students, but he did not turn in their direction. He walked to his right, crossing in front of them, still firing into a school yard now littered with huddled heaps of the dead and wounded.

He rounded the far corner of the building just as the first sirens began to sound in the distance. Laying aside his assault rifle, he pulled out his pistol, put the barrel of it to his chin, and fired once.

He was dead when the first officers arrived at the scene.  Five students lay dead. Twenty-nine students and a teacher lay wounded.

*****

Terror was not invented on that day, nor did it end with Stockton. However, no other event ever struck so close to home for me. I went back to school the following day in a school little different from Cleveland Elementary. Our ethnics were Mexican, but so what? Mexican, southeast Asian, or Black – or, in other decades, Polish, Japanese, Irish, or Italian, so what?

I didn’t want to write about Purdy and his handiwork, but I did. It did not exploit the children of Stockton, but honored them by not hiding the truth.

More follows in the next two posts.