Novel review of "Red Clay" by Charles B. Fancher, with afterword

Why did we love and re-watch Ryan Coogler’s  “Sinners”? I saw it in theatres twice. I started conversations with the phrase “Have you seen Sinners yet” at work, with parents, and friends.

         To answer my own question, there are a myriad of correct and applicable answers highlighting the most impresisve facets of Coogler’s new masterpiece. Vampires, suspense, intimacy, trust, betrayal. Many of us left with questions built on the cloying need for the story not to be over, and one of mine lay in the Jim Crow South, realizing that I couldn’t have defined for you what a “sharecropper” was, and how (or if) their lives differed from those of slaves. Do films and books like this simply not rise to the mainstream surface, or am I not seeking them out, opting instead for narratives that I know better or am naturally familiar with? Is it an intersection of both?

         Red Clay by Charles B. Fancher was published this year, months before the release of the afformentioned vampiric thriller. A slaveowner dies, resorting to eight-year-old Felix to bear his secrets to, forcing the will of his ownership over the boy to affect his discretion. They arrive back home, one dead and honeycombed with wounds, one a traumatized slave child. Nothing can be the same again at the Road’s End plantation, and the figures of Felix’s parents, the family of the deceased slaveowning patriarch, and the looming future of the “freedom” of Black Americans following the South’s defeat in the Civil War jump out to catch the oncoming plot as Felix steps off that carriage. Even though we move through the generations in this epic at a flying pace, characters coming in and out of focus through the years, a passing conversation seeming like a useless moment of examination, we are reminded of our unending interconnectedness as momentary interactions inevitably play a role imperative to a crossroads at a later point in the novel.

         Reconstruction in the post-Antebellum South gives Black American characters and White slaveowners the opportunity to turn on a dime as their lives are permanently changed. Do the White people embrace the change, adjusting to the lifestyle that has become their new normal, or do they turn to bitterness and resentment, resorting to violence and evil as they cling to the notion that their race procludes them to certain entitlements? When Black Americans, for the first time in their lives, are told that they are not owned by someone else, reconcile with the panic that sets in given the concept that, although they were enslaved, their prison is the only home they know and the only one available to them? What resources can someone gather when they have been oppressed all their lives, and how can their proximity or access to whiteness help or hurt them?

         Protagonists prevail and are prey of racists and the Klan. People benefiting from their race recognize their hypocrisy and repair it, and again others do not register this hypocrisy at all. In Red Clay, there are so many infinitesimal shards to spoil in a review and unpack. Escapism to “safe” cities, moments of audible gasping terror as protagonists are whisked away violently into the night, and the inevitability of needing to analyze both the enslaved and the slaveowning perspectives to depict a complete image all stand out to sing in this piece of historical fiction. Fancher leads us to consider ripples turning into riptides through the years and the depth of the consequences and complicity of our pasts.      

         The only vampires are the slaveowners and Klanspeople that White readers might see in the ancestral mirror, and they’re already inside the house.

Afterword →

Transparency is imperative to protecting the truth of our world. While writing this review and enjoying a narrative denouncing slavery and racism both in the past and present, I must add heritage that is unavoidable to how it has irrevocably affected my life and de facto privilege. I am a descendant of William Whipple Jr. who was a slaveowner and merchant who heavily benefitted from the slave trade. One of the people that he bought was named Prince Whipple, a Ghanaian forced soldier in the American Revolution, who has grown to interest in some historical circles. While it is questioned based on historical accuracy, he is sometimes believed to appear in the legendary paintings of Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware  and Sully’s Passage of the Delaware. 

         Prince was brought into the war by my ancestor. He protested to this, known to have observed to his captor, “You are fighting for your Liberty, but I have none to fight for.”  Whipple agreed to free Prince if and only if he completed his involuntary position in the war. Though William Whipple did keep his promise, Prince lived as a slave until he was thirty-one and was manumitted years later.

         Problematic history in my ancestry likely does not begin or end with the practices of the Whipple family. Erasing the past would be foolish and impossible. Examining inconvenient history with open eyes is the only way set our future choices apart from it.