Augurs...Well?

This is a blog post doubling as an assignment for Professor G. Truck. See, I recently got my honorary degree in serendipitously-timed reading, courtesy of OBX Dave. And I'd like to see someone who actually knows how to do literary criticism take on this double-header.

Our man at the beach has a wonderful habit of sending me stuff to read from time to time, which has come in handy during my sabbatical. Over the past month or so, I finished Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson and Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. The first is a carefully researched non-fiction work about how America from its founding onward informally and formally created a social hierarchy that's relegated Black people to the bottom. The second is a work of fiction about a poor boy from one of the places in America bypassed and then forgotten by progress.

They would seem to have very little in common. And yet there are some fascinating threads that tie the two together.

Wilkerson's 2020 book is sobering, adding weight and detail to some of the issues I first read about in Ta-Nehisi Coates' famous essay on reparations in The Atlantic - and others have known about, and lived, for a long time. One specific historical item that continues to linger with me concerns the connection between Nazi Germany and America. 

As the Nazis came to power and sought to write the Nuremberg Laws, which codified the dominance of the white race and the subjugation of others, like Jews, they traveled to the U.S. to study our system. And found it, at least in some ways, too harsh for their tastes. In particular, the practice in several U.S. states of defining Black people by multi-generational legacies. Writes Wilkerson, “[The Nazis] could not abide ‘the unforgiving hardness’ under which an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins is counted as black.”

Tennessee, it seems, was worse than the Nazis. At least by one measure.

Caste examines similarities between the U.S. system of hierarchies and that of India, where one's options have long been predetermined by the caste to which they were born. Wilkerson tells the story (likely apochryphal) of Martin Luther King, Jr. traveling to India and being introduced before a speech to a group of Dalit schoolchildren as a "fellow untouchable". Says Wilkerson, “In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America."

Demon Copperhead is not a book about race. In the entirety of the book there are three non-white characters, and all of them are portrayed in a positive light. Ironically in the context of my reading, one of them, a convenience store owner named Mr. Golly, who employs the title character briefly, is a Dalit who came to America and found his untouchable status erased, though he wasn't welcomed to the elite.

But where Caste focuses on race as a means of systematic stratification, Demon explores a different dimension of social strata and the difficulty in moving up them in poorest rural America. Lee County, Virginia, where the novel is set, ranks 2,967th out of 3,143 U.S. counties in median family income. As the book opens at the turn of the 21st Century, the mills have closed, as have the mines. The nearest big city, Knoxville, might as well be a million miles away, as is the ocean, something the title character has never seen.

Young Demon starts off rough. As he puts it, “I was a lowlife, born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash." Things go steadily downhill from there. He's thrown into a series of foster homes, most of them headed by people using the system for the payments that come from the Department of Social Services. He's poorly supervised, barely educated, and it doesn't even take him to his teenage years to develop a recreational drug habit.

The segmentation in Demon's world is between us and them. To wit, he says, “This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes. … We can actually hear you.”

As he matures, filling all the way out to a strapping 6'4" as a ninth-grader, Demon finds he's valued for his size and athleticism as a tight end on the Lee High School Generals. From a nobody, he's a hero. For a minute.

After a serious injury casts doubt on his football career, the story's real villain comes to the fore. Kingsolver is unsparing in her disdain for Purdue Pharma and the way its formidable sales engine took advantage of Appalachia and ground down county after county on the way to record profits on the broken backs of the poorest in America. Dreamland does an excellent job of reporting the facts of the opioid crisis; Demon Copperhead puts human faces on it.

There are redeeming moments in Demon Copperhead, and the protagonist's sardonic self-deprecation covers over a goodness at his core that shines briefly here and there throughout the book. As I read it immediately after Caste, I found myself marveling at the systematic way entrenched power has worked on an entire race and an entire class of people in our nation. And I was more than a tiny bit ashamed at the way I've viewed people who I'd perceived as voting against their self-interest when their self-interest was and is preservation against a system they rightfully view as being stacked against their kind.

I'm still grappling with the themes of both books, and how to make sense of the ways they intersect. On matters of race, I'm convinced there's been a systemic effort to ensure blacks have been kept in their place, one that'll take generations to unravel. And class distinctions, while perhaps not as intentional in their implementation, have created a seismically tense division between people who probably have more in common than they think.

After that free-associated word salad, I leave the pieces of my scattered brain for my good friend Professor G. Truck to pick up and assemble. Godspeed, sir.