My first novel, A Place You Can’t Escape, (Click here to view on Amazon), is set on a Southern military base, and the town nearby, in the 1960s. Though the book isn’t autobiographical, I happened to live in eastern North Carolina during the same years the novel covers. One of the things I remember about it is a billboard on the main drag just south of town.
“Welcome to North Carolina. You are in Klan Country,” it read. “The United Klans of Ameria. Help Fight Integration and Communism.” There were other billboards nearby exhorting Americans to “Save the Republic. Impeach Earl Warren.” Earl Warren was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, when the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling striking down segregation was handed down. Ten years later, when those billboards were trumpeting the Klan’s presence in North Carolina and elsewhere, Klansmen murdered three civil rights workers in Mississippi.
The word the Klansmen invariably used for African Americans makes its first appearance on page 8 of A Place You Can’t Escape, and four more times after that, always in dialogue. Most people in the 21st century find the word shocking, offensive and obscene in any context, including a novel. I would be profoundly disturbed if they didn’t.
But as offensive and hurtful as it is when used as a derogative, it is the way we used it casually, as descriptive or stereotype as much as slur, that I hope readers will find at least as disturbing. I intend my use of it to show how pervasive and offhand our racism was. I chose not to include any of the jokes nearly all of us laughed at. The use of the single word, five times in 280 pages, would, I hoped, suffice.
There are other offensive words in the book as well – some would say equally offensive -- words that reflect the rampant sexism and homophobia of the times.
A good argument can be made that I could have – should have – avoided those words entirely. Everybody knows the history of racism, of sexism, of homophobia in the United States, that argument goes. We don’t need to be reminded of them by use of words that hurt so deeply. But I think that argument presumes too much -- that people do remember enough, that we have learned enough, that there is no nostalgia for those times, that we have come farther than we have.
Americans are a pragmatic people. We expect to solve problems, and we love to tick the boxes next to them when we do, job done. I think too many of us were too quick to tick the race box when we elected our first African American president, or certainly now, when we have our first female African American presidential candidate from a major party. But what is Kamala Harris’ opponent making a touchstone of his campaign? Yeah. The ‘60s might seem to be a long way back in our rearview mirror, but like the little sign on the mirror warns, the objects are closer than they appear.