A Protest Artist, a Klansman, and a Reckoning with Race https://ift.tt/BhzrPZE
In the pantheon of Grit Lit authors, it can be hard to stand out. But David Joy uses both familiarity and pain to unearth the truth of our humanity in nuanced ways and manages to create a voice all his own. Those We Thought We Knew is his latest novel to dig through the dirty and ugly to tell us about ourselves.
As in his other work, Joy shares his affection for the North Carolina wilderness in lines like, “The way the mountains surrounded her back home had always felt comforting, like she was being held in the palm of God’s hand.” But here we also find the deeply hideous. Instead of questioning the individual demons in our desires and the broken legacies of our families (as in his 2015 novel Where All Light Tends to Go), he brings a far more insidious evil to light, one that plagues American society past and present: racism.
Those We Thought We Knew is not just an invitation to readers to talk about race; it’s an opening for white people to enter the conversation in a meaningful way. He looks past the label “racist” to understand what it means to be racist. And Joy doesn’t care if you think you’re racist or not. He’s interested in a reckoning: “things like that word and things that go unsaid and a whole lot of things that fall in between.”
An essay or historical critique won’t do for David Joy. What he’s crafted here is a murder mystery complete with red…er… white herrings. After William Dean Cawthorn arrives in town, a Klan hood and sheets are found in the back of his car. Even more concerning is the notebook containing the contact information of some of the most powerful people in the area. His arrival coincides with Toya Gardner’s art-as-protest displays around town. As Toya combats the whitewashing of history and the promotion of Confederate icons, her notoriety grows. The community fractures, with those on one side wanting to hold onto the past and those on the other ready to turn the page on oppression. The price of this fracture is Toya’s murder.
John Coggins, the local sheriff on the verge of retiring, tries to solve the murder at the same time he searches for the men who bludgeoned one of his deputies, all while reconciling his and his community’s core conflict: tradition versus the stories we tell ourselves about tradition. Joy burrows into our conscience to uncover the broken beliefs beneath our performative virtue signaling: He asks us what what we really think, and why we really think it.
Everything is on the table in this book: Confederate statues, Black Lives Matter, the thin blue line, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, shadow power-brokers in business and government, gentrification. Joy is calling it out — and calling us in. The endpoint of the story is honesty. And when it comes to an honest history, Joy believes “as long as you’ve got that, you’ve got everything.” Even if it can’t be as beautiful as the precious heirloom necklace Toya’s grandmother Vess was speaking of in that line, we would at least have something real.
It is the women, in fact, who tow the moral load throughout the novel. The heroines, not the 4 x 4 pickups driven by the men, move mountains. Their vision is so clear, their touch so deft – they are the counterbalance to the concentrated evil of racism running rampant. Their virtue stands in such stark contrast to the failings of the men around them that they seemed to inhabit a different world.
And when it comes to the novel’s villain, Joy doesn’t give you the satisfaction of a big reveal. You will not think smugly, “I knew it!” There is no mastermind lurking in the shadows. The villain is obvious early, but you don’t want him to be the villain. You don’t want to accept it. As his book’s title implies, we are all villains. The culprit in this whodunnit… is us.
With this heavy subject and its tense vessel, Those We Thought We Knew could have been preachy or philosophical. But Joy folded all this into a page-turner. I brought it with me on a road trip and found myself consuming sixty pages at a time when everyone else was sleeping. Whether, like me, you’ve been reading David Joy for a while, or whether you decided to start here, you’ll be happy to find yourself with him in the thick of it. But you’ll have to earn Joy’s lesson. Just as Vess said, “Nobody in this world owes you anything!”
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