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Writing the Past in
Twenty-first-Century
American Fiction
Alexandra Lawrie
Writing the Past in
Twenty-­first-­century
American Fiction
Writing the Past in
Twenty‑first-­century
American Fiction

Alexandra Lawrie
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to
produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Alexandra Lawrie 2022

Cover image: Hudson River waterfront of Manhattan around 42nd Street, New York, 1947.
(Photo by Andreas Feininger/Getty Images)
Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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The right of Alexandra Lawrie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
 Contents

Acknowledgementsvi

Introduction1
1. Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration in
C. E. Morgan and Hari Kunzru 20
2. Ben Lerner and Literary Antecedents of the City 56
3. Dana Spiotta and Political Commitment 86
4. AIDS Activism and Looking Back in Tim Murphy and
Garth Greenwell124
5. Anxious Futures in Colson Whitehead and Omar
El Akkad 159
Conclusion185

Bibliography188
Index196
 Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to friends and colleagues who have offered advice

and encouragement at various stages of this project; particular
thanks are owed to Sarah Carpenter, Simon Cooke, Andrew Taylor
and Jonathan Wild. I am also indebted to Randall Stevenson, not
just for his support of the project, but also for reading and com-
menting on one of the chapters at a key stage of its development.
And I am very grateful to Lee Spinks, who was kind enough to read
several chapters in their draft form and offer insightful suggestions
each time. I’ve also learnt a great deal from our conversations about
American history and culture. Edinburgh University Press’s two
anonymous reviewers provided careful and constructive feedback
which helped shape my thinking throughout the project, and my
editor Michelle Houston was enthusiastic and supportive right from
the start. My thanks also go to staff at the Edinburgh University
Library and the National Library of Scotland, to students on my
Twenty-­first-­century Fiction course, and to my mother Lavinia and
my sister Hope. This book is dedicated to Marlowe.
 Introduction

In an essay for the New York Times in June 2021, the novelist
Jonathan Lee declared that a reawakened commitment to historicity
was now shaping the contemporary novel. He described how ‘For
the past two decades, the novels celebrated for defining our time have
almost always been books set within our time’, with historical fiction
perceived as ‘fusty’ and ‘easy to caricature’. Yet more recently ‘the
tone of such conversations has begun to change’, with the historical
novel undergoing a revival, increasingly ‘embraced and reinvented’:
witness, for instance, Colson Whitehead’s 2017 Pulitzer for The
Underground Railroad, and his second for The Nickel Boys three
years later. Even authors usually drawn to contemporary contexts,
such as George Saunders and Lauren Groff, have ‘swerved into the
past’ for their most recent works, driven backwards by a feverish cul-
tural mood that feels altogether too transient to narrate. The current
study examines a group of twenty-­first-­century novels profoundly
shaped by the historical consciousness Lee describes, yet they also
remain anchored, at least in part, to a present-­day setting. In that
sense they accomplish two feats at once: firstly, they reflect on the
tumultuous events that have punctuated the new century, with refer-
ences (both oblique and overt) to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
President Obama’s election victory, the 2008 financial crash, the
Black Lives Matter movement, and the climate emergency. And sec-
ondly, alongside this sustained attention to the politics and culture of
the new century, these novels are conceptually linked through their
shared engagement in historical archaeology: each of them examines
how aspects of America’s past exert various types of pressure on the
contemporary moment. This forms the central concern of this study:
it takes a group of novels largely set in a recognisable, present-­day
2    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

America (C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, Hari Kunzru’s White

Tears, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document and
Innocents and Others, What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell,
Christodora by Tim Murphy, Zone One by Colson Whitehead and
Omar El Akkad’s American War), and explores how scenes and
memories from an earlier period or periods repeatedly interrupt the
contemporary narrative in ways which underline the past’s contin-
ued relevance to the characters’ lives.
These historical parallels and evocations, which are either recalled
by the characters, described in narrative flashbacks, or emerge
through recurrent images and motifs, compel the protagonists to
regard their own contemporary experiences (and in many cases,
their own struggles) as part of a broader pattern. In some cases, this
is the re-­emergence, in another place and time, of dormant feelings
of shame or of centuries-­old structures of discrimination; in another,
less disturbing example, a narrator’s encounters on the streets of
New York are reinterpreted through the redemptive influence of
an earlier writer. Across five chapters the impact and focus of this
historical awareness varies ­widely – f­rom the ways in which politi-
cal decisions relating to Vietnam half a century ago continue to be
felt today, to the legacy of the HIV/AIDS crisis in narratives of queer
identity, to the spectre of historical racism in contemporary struc-
tures of race-­based oppression. In several of the novels the characters
themselves are required to carry out the excavation work, as they
unearth historical parallels, long-­since buried, which help them make
sense of their current circumstances: acknowledging past crises is for
many of the protagonists a necessary step towards understanding the
position they currently find themselves in, even if this does not lead
directly to positive change. The novels use extended flashbacks and
non-­sequential narrative arrangements which appear to dissolve the
distance between decades and even centuries, momentarily closing
the gap between events and circumstances which are temporally far
apart. These instances of temporal slippage allow the novels to fore-
ground the recurrence of structural inequality, violence and discrimi-
nation, and (in response to those issues) political resistance through
protests and demonstrations.
This interest in how structures and ideas from earlier decades
rematerialise in the present day is not of course unique to writing
of the new century: to varying ends, American authors including
(but by no means limited to) James Baldwin, Michael Chabon,
Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner,
Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Tim O’Brien,
 Introduction    3

Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Susan Fromberg

Schaeffer, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker and Richard Wright have
traced how individual lives are reshaped and even blighted by the
reappearance of historical pressures. To take one example from that
list: Schaeffer’s 1989 novel Buffalo Afternoon describes the horrors
of the Vietnam War and its lasting effect on veterans such as Pete
Bravado, an Italian American from Brooklyn who enlisted at the age
of seventeen and spent a year on combat duty. While Pete’s disturb-
ing experiences in Vietnam take up much of the novel, a long final
section depicts his life after returning to America, where for the next
two decades he is haunted by what he has seen and ­done – ­trauma
which manifests itself in nightmares, hallucinations and acts of
extreme and unprovoked violence. One of the novel’s final scenes
takes place at a reunion dance for former soldiers; in a dreamlike
sequence, Pete stumbles into a room where veterans can go back and
redo a particular ambush or patrol over and over again. Pete’s friend
Mickey, who has tried it three times already, marvels at how real it
feels: ‘The foliage’s so thick in there you can hardly see your hand in
front of you. Nothing’s changed, man’ (635). While Mickey wants
to relive those experiences, Pete fears their reappearance, later telling
Sal, an old army friend, that ‘The past’s a minefield, man. You learn
more about life, you walk on new ground, you set something off. It
turns out you didn’t forget after all’ (644).
Schaeffer’s novel is an earlier example of historical pressures (in
this case, war trauma) stubbornly re-­emerging in different ­contexts
– ­a useful reminder that the collapse of temporal boundaries is not,
by any means, a new contrivance in fiction. Nevertheless, this study
identifies a heightened awareness within contemporary novels of the
permeable boundary linking past and present, ­and – ­in some ­cases –
­of the possibility for a productive relationship between the two. The
increased focus on historical sedimentation in novels published this
century, this book suggests, is partly down to the level of disruption
in American cultural and political life over the past two decades. But
the somewhat paradoxical effect of this turmoil is not to impress on
each character the sense that their own period is unique in terms of
the changes taking place; rather, it encourages them to place these
events in correspondence with historical precursors and consider
their ongoing impact. The year 2020 seems particularly momentous,
encompassing as it did a global pandemic, mass protests calling for
racial justice following the murder of George Floyd, and the defeat
of President Donald Trump after four divisive years. But the crises
started mounting up almost as soon as the twenty-­first century had
4    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

begun: the contested election of 2000, which led to President George

W. Bush’s victory by the narrowest of margins; thereafter the terror-
ist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror,
with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey;
the financial crash of 2008; mass shootings, including at Sandy Hook
Elementary School; and Trump’s presidency, which was mired in
scandal and ­disarray – ­the Russia investigation, two impeachments,
the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville and the rise of the alt-­
right, nuclear tensions with North Korea, the detention of migrant
children on the US–Mexico border and, finally, Trump’s false
accusations of voter fraud and his claim that the 2020 election was
‘stolen’. As later portions of this introduction will explain, moments
of contemporary crisis depicted in the novels under discussion push
the narratives backwards: when characters attempt to make sense of
their disordered lives, this means taking a broader historical view,
laying bare how past events persist in shaping the here and now.

Because the novels examined in this book are set predominantly

in the twenty-­first century, they tend to be categorised as literary
fiction, contemporary realism or (in the case of Ben Lerner) autofic-
tion. Their present-­day setting also sets them apart from the more
‘conventional’ historical novels published in this century, which tend
to remain within a specific historical period or periods, rather than
base part of their narrative in the present moment. Jonathan Lee’s
examples include Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017), which
takes place in 1930s and ’40s New York, and George Saunders’s
Lincoln in the Bardo (also 2017), set during the Civil War. To these
we might add Rachel Kushner’s first two novels, which are notable
for their vivid depiction of specific historical settings: Telex from
Cuba (2008) follows a group of American expatriates in 1950s Cuba
prior to Castro’s revolution, and The Flamethrowers, published in
2013, is set largely in the 1970s New York art world, with stretches
in Italy and Nevada, and shifts back in time to fill in the story of
T. P. Valera, who grew up in Alexandria and Milan at the turn of
the century, and went on to found a motorbike company, Moto
Valera. Parallels between the 1970s and the years before 2013 (when
the novel was being written) may be ­inferred – ­both were times of
significant financial crisis, with New York as a case study in wealth
­inequality – b ­ ut the novel stops short of any explicit comparisons.
Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, Gilead (2004), shifts between
earlier historical periods in ways that are more fragmentary and
elusive: it is set in 1956, when John Ames, a Congregationalist min-
 Introduction    5

ister in the small rural town of Gilead, Iowa, sits down to write an
account of his life for his young son to read after his death. But the
letter also includes details of Ames’s family history, in particular his
grandfather’s friendship with John Brown, and his violent participa-
tion, on the abolitionist side, in Bleeding Kansas during the 1850s.
His grandfather’s actions, and the consequent dispute between him
and Ames’s father over the ethics of responding to the violence of
slavery with further violence, forms a type of double narrative, with
Ames’s advice to his son interrupted by often charged moments of
recall. Like Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, the events described in
Gilead might usefully be placed in dialogue with present-­day ­issues
– ­for example the Republican Ames’s repudiation of racial inequality
during a key moment in the civil rights movement could reasonably
be shown to anticipate the re-­emergence, during the Trump era, of
the rhetoric of white resentment. But this possible contemporary
parallel is extrinsic to Robinson’s narrative, which never strays later
than the 1950s.
This study draws a distinction between the category of historical
novel where the narrative takes place in an earlier period or periods
(even if contemporary resonances might plausibly be perceived),
and texts which move freely and overtly back and forth between the
twenty-­first century and past decades or even centuries. This inter-
weaving of past and present is just one of the features that sets them
apart from the historical novel as conceived by Georg Lukács in his
1937 work The Historical Novel. For Lukács, the historical novel
was an essentially realist form, epic in scope, and occupied by issues
of nascent nationhood. He presented Walter Scott as his archetypal
historical novelist, who portrayed historical struggles through ordi-
nary individuals: these characters were ‘mediocre’, tending towards
the ‘decent and average’ (36), but also representative, ‘in their psy-
chology and destiny’, of ‘social trends and historical forces’ (34). By
narrating history through the lens of ordinary people, Scott’s readers
could see themselves represented on the page: he showed how the
everyday lives of people like them were altered by the major crises and
conflicts of their age, and they were also portrayed as active partici-
pants in those historical struggles; this lends the novels an immediacy
and ongoing resonance. Lukács wrote that Scott ‘makes history live’,
as his writing ‘brings the past close to us’ (53); the novels are ‘both
humanly authentic’ and ‘re-­liveable by the reader of a later age’ (40).
Lukács also emphasised Scott’s sense of ‘historical necessity’ (58),
a progressive understanding of historical development which views
the outcomes of past conflicts as having a positive ­transformative
6    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

effect on the nation, while at the same time perceiving history as

ongoing and developmental; Lukács’s point was that history is an
‘uninterrupted process of changes’ and ‘has a direct effect upon the
life of every individual’ (23). Lukács’s book remains a classic account
of the historical novel which still occupies a prominent position in
more recent discussions of the form, such as Perry Anderson’s 2011
article ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’, which begins with Lukács
and Fredric Jameson, and argues for the historical novel as having
been born out of the ‘romantic nationalism’ (24) generated across
Europe in response to the Napoleonic Wars. Anderson describes
how, from the highpoint of War and Peace and the 46-­ volume
Episodios Nacionales by Galdós, as well as later examples by Robert
Louis Stevenson and Edward Bulwer-­Lytton, the genre went through
a long period of decline, so that by midway through the twentieth
century it was a purely lowbrow form: popular, formulaic and mass-­
produced. But Anderson’s account of how historical fiction has
fared in recent decades is perhaps more relevant and certainly more
arresting, as he describes how ‘abruptly, the scene changed’, and ‘in
one of the most astonishing transformations in literary ­history . . .
­the historical novel has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more
widespread than it was even at the height of its classical period in the
early 19th century’ (27). Anderson attributes this remarkable ‘res-
urrection’ to the ‘arrival of the postmodern’, noting that ‘the most
striking single change it [postmodernism] has wrought in fiction
is the pervasive recasting of it around the past’ (27). And while he
acknowledges that not all historical fiction of the past three decades
contains postmodern features, he draws his most recent examples
from among their ranks, including Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo,
William Styron and Toni Morrison.
While Anderson’s article is reluctant to look beyond the ‘post-
modern revival’ (28), Alexander Manshel has identified, in a 2017
article, a more recent development in historical fiction, as he sets out
to answer the question posed by Jameson in his 2013 The Antinomies
of Realism: ‘What kind of History can the contemporary historical
­novel . . . ­be expected to “make appear”?’ (263). Manshel’s response
to this is: very recent history. He describes the emergence of a ‘new
literary sub-­genre’ which he terms ‘the recent historical novel’; these
are novels which narrate twenty-­first-­century events such as 9/11,
the Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis and Obama’s election victory
(n.p.). Manshel’s three examples are 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha
Station by Ben Lerner, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
– novels which contain specific details and events which situate them
 Introduction    7

in a recognisable time and place. Instead of depicting an ‘amorphous

present’, these novels are ‘precisely datable’ (n.p.). For Manshel,
this allows them to seem both relevant and authentic (‘the work is
elevated by its contact with capital-­H history’), but also means they
contribute to the process by which recent events are historicised.
Readers are invited to compare their own memories of a disaster
with its novelised version, although in this re-­ telling they know
how the event ends; this has a dual function, in that they perceive
themselves as witnesses to h ­ istory – ­their memories are now ‘the
stuff of history and, what’s more, literary history’ – while reassuring
them that those events are now firmly in the past, ‘marked through
writing as a bounded and closed period of history’ (n.p.). Manshel’s
article can be placed alongside Theodore Martin’s Contemporary
Drift (2017) as recent explorations into how we might periodise
‘the contemporary’ through fiction and film. The current study care-
fully examines the present-­day context for each of the novels under
discussion, but is generally less concerned with conceptualising the
period than with establishing some of the parallels and resonances
between earlier decades and the present time. The exception to this
mostly ‘backward turn’ is the final chapter of this book, where por-
tions of the ‘past’ under consideration are ‘now’ – the early years
of the twenty-­first century. Omar El Akkad’s American War and
Colson Whitehead’s Zone One are both set in a near-­future America
blighted by decisions made in the present time; they explore how
foreign policy manoeuvres and several decades’ worth of indiffer-
ence about climate change could play out in the years to come.
Mitchum Huehls would regard these as examples of the ‘historical
novel of futurity’, a post-­2000 approach which ‘renders the present
as the prehistory of the future’ (146). But whereas Huehls regards
this novelistic approach as a pragmatic response to ‘history’s inac-
cessibility’ in an era still marked by traces of postmodernism (148),
my final chapter suggests that in a near-­future America, ‘history’ – or
more simply ‘the past’ – continues to hold sway as a compelling and
ultimately fathomable presence. And just as the rest of this study
explores how images, structures, and responses from multiple tem-
poral periods might reappear within a single novel set in the present
day, the novels by El Akkad and Whitehead do not confine their
historical consciousness to the twenty-­first century, but also contain
allusions to earlier events such as the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The approach to literary historicity taken by the authors in this
study might usefully be termed historical recursion or archaeology,
and is emblematic of a larger novelistic drift already noted by a
8    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

number of critics. Robert Eaglestone has suggested that ‘the past’s

grip on the present has become even stronger’ in recent fiction; he
terms this ‘the resurgent past’, by which he means ‘an intense concern
for the impact of the past on the present’ (311), and the ‘ever more
diverse and contradictory array of modes by which the past is rep-
resented, forms which far exceed the historical novel as usually con-
ceived’ (312). Adam Kelly writes that ‘twenty-­first-­century novelists
who attempt to connect past and present’ are generally ‘disinclined
to see the present as a radical break from the past’ (50). And lastly
Peter Boxall has argued that novels of the new century are attempt-
ing to ‘gain a new understanding of the way that historical material
asserts itself in the contemporary imagination’; this ‘emergent mode
of historiography’, he suggests,
is characterised by a fresh commitment to what we might call the
reality of ­history . . . ­grounded in a keen awareness of history as
event, history as a material force which is not simply produced by
narrative, but also shapes and determines it (41).

Boxall makes the important point that twenty-­first-­century novels

tend to treat history as a fixed and coherent reality, and this is true
of the novels this study explores: aspects of the past might have
been repressed, hidden or left unexplored in these fictions, but this
does not mean that that history cannot finally be accessed, or that
it remains irresolvable. This conception of historicity distinguishes
these novels from much postmodern fiction, where received history is
often regarded with profound distrust. Jameson famously declared,
in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
that the ‘postmodern’ is characterised by a ‘weakening of historicity’
as it grapples with the ‘disappearance of the historical referent’ (6,
25). E. L. Doctorow is Jameson’s exemplar of this position: Ragtime,
he suggests, ‘float[s] in some new world of past historical time whose
relationship to us is problematical indeed’, underlining ‘the evident
existential fact of life’ that there is no longer ‘any organic relation-
ship between the American history we learn from schoolbooks and
the lived experience of the current multinational, high-­rise, stagflated
city of the newspapers and of our own everyday life’ (22). Jameson’s
account of postmodernism’s ‘crisis in historicity’ (22) is taken up by
Mitchum Huehls, who describes how novels by Doctorow, DeLillo,
Morrison and Pynchon betray a ‘pervasive skepticism toward
all foundational truth claims’, portraying history as fragmentary,
indeterminate and beyond comprehension (141). In books such
as Ragtime, Libra, Beloved and Gravity’s Rainbow, these authors
 Introduction    9

present ­counterhistories – ­re-­writings of historical events that not

only problematise the received narrative, but also the process by
which those ‘truths’ were constructed in the first place.

History, in these and other postmodern writers, is presented as

‘flamboyant cartoon’, ‘magical myth’, ‘paranoia’, ‘metafiction’ or
‘unknowable trauma’ (Huehls 141). In Libra (1988) the historical
facts are available in voluminous piles; the mistake is in imagin-
ing they might generate a single and unambiguous interpretation.
DeLillo presents the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a CIA plot
orchestrated by a group of former agents still smarting from the
failed Bay of Pigs invasion, who determine that the US government
could be forced into a second invasion if they can choreograph an
event ‘that will make it appear they [Cuba] have struck at the heart
of our government’ (27). In Lee Harvey Oswald they find their ideal
assassin: a former marine and communist sympathiser who defected
to the Soviet Union. Now back in America, he produces a trail of
evidence the CIA men would have otherwise had to create in order
to make him seem a feasible assassin, and he therefore seems a ‘quirk
of ­history . . . ­a coincidence’, who ‘matches the cardboard cutout
they’ve been shaping all along’ (330). Oswald too feels ‘swept up,
swept along’ by history, as a series of coincidences, premonitions and
patterns convince him that his ‘destiny’ (277) is linked to Kennedy’s
death. But the ‘third line’ which ‘bridges the space’ (339) between
the CIA plot and Oswald’s own plan is impossible to make out: in a
substrand of the novel, Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who
spends years attempting to write a secret history of the assassination,
finds that while the facts of the case are available to him, their con-
nection to each other seems to defy logic and deny meaning.
DeLillo, alongside his contemporaries Toni Morrison and Thomas
Pynchon, continued to produce major work in the 1990s and
beyond: their respective novels Underworld, Paradise and Mason &
Dixon were all published the same year, 1997. These novels’ con-
struction of alternative histories, and their inclusion of conspiracy
theories and magical elements, contribute to the sense that historical
fiction of that decade still tended to regard history as inconclusive
and subject to revision; Huehls suggests that historical novels of
the 1990s ‘struggle to escape residual postmodern forms’, and this
‘threatens to foil these novels’ various attempts to capture history
and produce historicity’ (140, 142). As Huehls acknowledges, this
broadly accords with arguments put forward by Samuel Cohen in his
2009 study After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s,
10    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

which considers how 1990s authors set out to reassess ideology-­

driven ‘truths’ about America’s national character and its victorious
past. Cohen suggests that between the end of the Cold War and 11
September 2001, American culture ‘took on a markedly retrospective
quality’ (10). Finally released from the decades-­long threat of nuclear
war, writers took the opportunity to reconsider America’s ‘continu-
ing reliance on particular narratives’, particularly the ‘triumphalist
school of American history’ (7) which re-­surfaced after the Cold
War. Cohen takes a group of mainly postmodern writers (Pynchon,
DeLillo and Morrison, but also Roth, Didion and O’Brien) who, in
contradistinction to Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 declaration,
refuse the reassuring sense of closure that comes with that ‘end of
history’ narrative. These authors construct ‘counternarratives’ (28)
which suggest history ‘might have turned out differently, or might
still’ (52), and explore ‘the effects of myth’ (the stories America tells
about itself) ‘on the way history is understood’ (83). For Cohen the
1990s was an ‘interwar decade’, coming as it did between ‘the fall of
the Wall and the fall of the Towers’ (4). Stephen J. Burn, in Jonathan
Franzen and the End of Postmodernism (2008), considers the decade
to be ‘transitional’ (9) in the development of the American novel:
while the surviving first-­generation postmodernists raged against the
dying of the light, a new generation of writers (whom Burn terms
the ‘post-­postmodernists’) tended towards realism over metafiction,
and plot over formal experimentation, though they shared with their
predecessors the ‘ambition to produce an encyclopedic masterwork’
(20), and included ‘knowing winks to the reader’ about those older
writers in their own novels (19). Most importantly in this context,
Burn identifies that we get a ‘fuller sense of a character’s personal
history’ in the work of post-­postmodernists like Jonathan Franzen,
Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, because they ‘more freely
interrupt time’s passage through strategically deployed analepses’
(24) – the flashbacks represent ‘a younger generation’s more funda-
mental belief in the shaping influence of temporal p ­ rocess – ­that the
things that happen to you in the past make a difference to who you
are in the present’ (25).
In Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), each of the novel’s long sec-
tions focuses on a different member of the Lambert family, usually
beginning in the present day of the narrative before rewinding to
significant moments in the previous days, weeks or years which
help illuminate their current circumstances. The novels examined in
the current study also make substantial use of analepsis, but these
flashbacks are not only a means of revisiting an episode that felt sig-
 Introduction    11

nificant for an individual character; often they return to periods and

events which had far-­reaching implications for the nation as a whole.
Some of these flashbacks are therefore embedded, at least partly, in
specific events and ­organisations – ­in Spiotta’s Eat the Document,
the protagonist is a former member of 1970s militant group the
Weatherman Underground Organization; in Murphy’s Christodora
one of the central characters was a leading figure in ACT UP (AIDS
Coalition to Unleash Power). Each novel also stages its non-­linearity
differently. In Christodora the narrative is presented largely non-­
chronologically, with the date given at the start of each chapter. This
non-­sequential arrangement produces a range of effects: at the most
obvious level it encourages the reader to modify their view of a char-
acter or situation once the back story has been filled in, but a more
significant consequence is the redirection of emphasis away from a
character’s trajectory (because that has already been established), and
onto the reasons behind the often s­ tartling alteration in their circum-
stances. (Even when a pair of chapters are presented in order, they
might be set several years or even decades apart, and this too empha-
sises the changes that have been wrought.) But the most important
effect of this non-­linear structure, and one which is common to all of
the novels in this study, is to call attention to the porous relationship
between past and present: in the case of Christodora and of What
Belongs to You the distance between historical periods seems to melt
away altogether as the shame and grief of an earlier era continues
to shape the responses of the central characters. This is perceptible
in Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, too, where the temporal shifts are
less clearly marked: the novel consists of long sections which move
across the period 1783 until 2006, the roving narrative eye taking in
slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil rights era in the South
and the War on Drugs movement. In each section the reader has to
piece together references to the wider historical context in order to
establish the exact setting, and in a sense that is exactly the point: the
novel captures how racist structures and violence endlessly repeat,
regardless of year or context, over more than 200 years, including
in the contemporary period. In Lerner’s 10:04 the various temporal
shifts are even more subtle and indistinct: Ben, the narrator, is on
a writing retreat in Marfa when his identity starts to merge with
that of Walt Whitman during the Civil War era; meanwhile lines
from modernist poetry and prose also occur to him seemingly at
random, suggesting he is subconsciously eliding his own experiences
in twenty-­first-­century New York with those of prior interpreters
of urban life. Ben slides uneasily between the 1860s, the 1920s and
12    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

the 2010s; at one point he describes himself as ‘falling out of time’,

a phrase which usefully captures the thematic concern of this study
as a whole, as well as the structural devices employed in each of
the novels. The point to be made is that in each of the novels those
earlier scenes or motifs do not exist only in the past, but are continu-
ally reconfigured in new contexts, interjecting themselves into the
contemporary in ways which range from the revelatory and affirma-
tive to the frightening or simply demoralising: in Eat the Document
(which ends in 2000), a new generation of teenagers seems unwilling
to protest against globalisation and corporate greed, and the novel
juxtaposes this with the energy and commitment (but also violence)
of their parents’ anti-­capitalist stance some twenty-­five years earlier.
The connection between past and present has a more destructive
effect on Allmon Shaughnessy, the young Black man at the centre of
Morgan’s novel: when he discovers how long-­established those racist
structures of control really are, he judges them insurmountable, and
starts to lose hope.
Morgan’s novel would be considered realist, although the nar-
rative is capacious enough to incorporate numerous different styles
of writing, with long diversions into equine genetics, a seven-­page
sermon from Allmon’s grandfather, and even brief passages of meta-
fiction. And 10:04, the subject of Chapter 2, is an example of auto-
fiction: the narrator is also called Ben and shares some of Lerner’s
biography; at the start of the novel Ben is celebrating a large advance
for his second novel, which appears to be the novel we are reading.
10:04 is probably the most formally innovative among the books
discussed here, most of which largely eschew experimentation at the
level of form, opting for broadly realist approaches to narrative and
characterisation. This is another means by which these texts offer a
contrast to the ‘highly mediated and self-­conscious nature’ of much
postmodern narrative (Huehls 140): while each of the novels are for-
mally interesting, they remain committed to the idea that reality (and
indeed history) can be represented in a relatively straightforward
manner. In Adam Kelly’s essay on ‘Formally Conventional Fiction’,
he presents ‘historical novels of the 2000s’ as a pertinent example of
the ‘spirit of skepticism’ (50, 47) regarding formal experimentation
more generally: these novels ‘tend to be accessible on a narrative
level, disinvested in an overly experimental approach to language’,
and feature protagonists who ‘attempt to attain and share histori-
cal understanding’ (50). This explicitly involves the reader, who is
‘appealed to first and foremost as a partner in the construction of
shared meaning’ (51). That last point seems particularly pertinent to
 Introduction    13

the end of 10:04, when Ben reaches for lines from Whitman’s poem
‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ in order to speak directly to the reader in
a moment of shared sympathy and reassurance: ‘I know it’s hard to
understand / I am with you, and I know how it is’ (240). In the poem,
Whitman’s appeal to his future readers is rooted in their common
experience of city life; Ben not only finds personal solace in this cross-­
temporal connection, but also borrows the poet’s words to construct
with his own readers an empathetic vision of urban experience.
While each of the novels discussed in the following pages have
a shared investment in moments of historical recursion, their focus
varies widely, and across five chapters this book explores a range
of thematic concerns through the lens of historical consciousness.
Chapter 1 takes Morgan’s novel The Sport of Kings (2016) and Hari
Kunzru’s White Tears (2017) in order to explore the persistence of
racist structures across different periods in America’s history, and its
contemporary manifestation in discriminatory policing, arrest, and
sentencing. The Sport of Kings has a wide historical sweep which is
presented in a non-­linear fashion, ending in 2006 with the story of
Allmon Shaughnessy, a young Black man who takes a job as a horse
groom on a Kentucky Thoroughbred farm. The limits on Allmon’s
freedom and choices replicate several aspects of post-­enslavement
experience, with his life following a trajectory analogous to that of
his ancestor Scipio, who had been enslaved on the same farm in the
1820s; nearly 200 years later, in 2006, Allmon predicts that little will
change for him under Obama’s presidency. White Tears similarly
parodies the notion of a ‘post-­racial’ America: two white college
friends, Carter and Seth, remix an old blues song and market it as
their own, before discovering that the song had belonged to Charlie
Shaw, a Black singer in the 1920s who was arrested for vagrancy
and forced to work on a levee under the system of convict leasing.
Charlie’s reappearance in ghostly form forces Seth to consider the
structural connection between Charlie’s fate in the Jim Crow period
and that of contemporary Black men, targeted by the police, and
handed excessive prison sentences. Taking its lead from Michelle
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of
Subjection and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, this chapter will con-
sider how the continual collapse of temporal boundaries in these two
novels demonstrates how structural and often violent resistance to
civil liberties tends to be reconfigured, rather than dissolved, across
different periods.
Chapter 2 examines Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, which
is set in New York around the time of the Occupy Wall Street
14    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

­emonstrations in 2011. The narrator, a writer called Ben, has

d
benefited directly from the financial system currently in place (his
second novel having become an expensive commodity for which
he lands a six-­figure advance), yet he remains ambivalent towards
the structures of neoliberalism which are physically rendered on
the Manhattan skyline, and is intrigued by the contemporary mood
of protest stemming from the 2008 financial crash. As this chapter
describes, Ben’s sense of unease leads him to draw parallels between
the Occupy demonstrations and the dissatisfaction voiced by mod-
ernist writers, around a hundred years earlier, regarding the impact
of new industrial processes. But while Ben’s experience of urban
life appears to replicate the chaos and alienation represented at the
level of form and theme by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and John
Dos Passos, these literary antecedents eventually prove inadequate,
and he turns instead to Walt Whitman, particularly his 1856 poem
‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, which provides a redemptive vision of
New York and a mode of resistance to neoliberal totality, author-
ising Ben to recast his place in the contemporary city. The history
Lerner excavates in this novel is literary history: Ben identifies in
Whitman’s writing (and in Whitman himself) a precursor for his own
withdrawal from ordinary temporal routines during his long periods
of writing, and a model for a more sympathetic mode of social
behaviour when he re-­emerges from this retreat.
Chapter 3 explores the long-­ term impact of militant protests
carried out by New Left activists in the 1970s. The protagonist of
Dana Spiotta’s 2006 novel Eat the Document, Mary Whittaker, is a
member of the notorious Weatherman Underground Organization,
an anti-­capitalist and anti-­imperialist militant group formed in 1969.
Mary’s terrorist activities as part of the Weatherman force her to
withdraw from society altogether, changing her identity and living as
a fugitive. The lethal protest tactics of her youth are assessed against
the much less effective, but also less violent protests planned by teen-
agers in her hometown of Seattle nearly thirty years later, where she
has settled under a different name. By continually eliding the differ-
ences between these two periods of activism (the 1970s and the late
1990s), Spiotta frustrates the reader’s urge to take sides, and to see
either response as more legitimate. Similar tensions are at work in
her 2016 novel Innocents and Others, which considers the role of
commitment in the context of filmmaking. Meadow Mori is a docu-
mentary maker with an uncompromising approach to her subjects,
but the films also cause other people immense pain, as she coerces
participants into reliving painful moments from their pasts. This
 Introduction    15

forces us to consider whether these inflammatory documentaries,

which come from a position of commitment, are necessarily more
commendable than the mainstream comedies made by her friend
Carrie Wexler. This chapter will consider how we judge a commit-
ted but ultimately destructive approach, whether in politics or in art.
The Kentucky horse farm where Allmon takes a job in The Sport
of Kings is owned by Henry Forge, who can trace his own family line
back to the first settlers to make it through the Cumberland Gap.
But this proud family lineage erases the family’s enslaver past, its
support for the Ku Klux Klan, and its murder of a Black employee
in the 1950s: these stories have been ‘whitewashed’ out of history.
Chapter 4 tackles another instance of historical amnesia, looking
at Tim Murphy’s novel Christodora and Garth Greenwell’s What
Belongs to You (both 2016) to consider the long-­term impact of the
HIV/AIDS crisis on those who experienced it first-­hand. Like the
novels examined throughout this study, Christodora is presented
out of sequence during a narrative which stretches over forty years,
from 1981 until 2021. The after-­effects of those years of trauma are
traceable in most of the characters, but particularly Hector, a leading
figure in ACT UP during the 1980s and early ’90s, who campaigned
for funding into research while friends and lovers fell ill and died.
The deaths of so many of Hector’s friends exist as textual absences
in the novel, replicating the official silence about the crisis, and its
partial erasure in subsequent decades. In Greenwell’s novel, feelings
of shame and disgust the narrator had internalised as a gay teenager
in 1980s and ’90s Kentucky continue to shape his responses as an
American abroad. During a long flashback midway through the
novel, he recognises that the homophobic environment of his youth,
and the conflation of same-­sex desire with disease, has been repli-
cated in contemporary Bulgaria, which at first had seemed an escape
from such prejudice.
In Chapter 5 the ‘past’ is, in part, the early years of the twenty-­
first century. If, as the previous chapters have suggested, the past
continues to have a profound effect on individuals in the contempo-
rary period, then it seems reasonable to expect that the consequences
of major events over the last two decades will still be felt in the
years to come. This final chapter looks at two novels that opt for an
anxious near-­future setting in order to examine how decisions relat-
ing to climate change, foreign policy and neoliberalism are likely
to play out in later decades. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011)
takes place after a zombie apocalypse, with ‘skels’ still roaming
across America as the country tries to rebuild from the ground up.
16    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

Whitehead’s protagonist Mark Spitz has so far survived the plague,

and has found work helping to clear New York of zombies, so that
other survivors can begin moving back to the city. Yet as with the
other novels examined in this book, Zone One also reaches further
back: Mark Spitz is confronted with memories and artefacts of his
past life, and these allow him to resist the government’s propagandist
narrative that post-­plague America is simply a continuation of life
before, as they paper over the full extent of the crisis. The burning
of zombie bodies in post-­plague New York has generated toxic rain,
filled with human particles, which Mark Spitz’s fellow sweepers
claim not to notice; the second novel this chapter explores, Omar
El Akkad’s American War (2017), is focused more explicitly on
climate change: the novel begins in 2074, when rising sea levels have
worn away the Southern coastline, while the landlocked states are
scorched by drought. Meanwhile the country is locked in a second
civil war, with the Northern government deploying drone strikes
and ground assaults against the Southern states, and foreign agents
infiltrating the region to build their own strategic alliances. As well
as reflecting on the damage wrought by US foreign policy decisions
in the present time, El Akkad’s novel is also backward facing: his
fictional conflict is pitched as an anachronism, closely resembling the
‘first’ Civil War in terms of the rhetoric used by each side. In substan-
tive terms this is also a country in retreat, decades of in-­fighting and
a stubborn attachment to fossil fuels having occasioned its decline
from superpower to impoverished nation.
This book does not aim for extensive coverage, and nor does it
claim that the novels under discussion are unique in their preoc-
cupation with historical sedimentation and recursion; Eaglestone’s
suggestion that this is a ‘distinctive and dominant theme’ (311) in
contemporary fiction is borne out by American novels such as Teju
Cole’s Open City, Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, Junot
Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Jennifer Egan’s
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex,
Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man and
The Lazarus Project, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Edward P.
Jones’s The Known World, Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love,
Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s
The Sympathizer, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Jonathan
Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Ocean Vuong’s On
Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, as well as those older writers who
have continued to produce work this century such as Marilynne
Robinson, Philip Roth and Sarah Schulman. One notable point of
 Introduction    17

commonality linking the novels discussed in this book is the theme

of protest, and this becomes a minor thread running through the
chapters. A September 2018 article in Vulture which attempted to
put together a ‘canon of the 21st century’ (not just of fiction, but
also books of essays, poetry collections, and memoirs), described
how the chosen novels in particular capture the ‘waves of hope and
despair’ that have gripped America since 9/11; the editors concluded
that ‘instability’ is the ‘hallmark of the era’, with the first eighteen
years of the new century having witnessed ‘wars, economic collapse,
permanent-­seeming victories for the once excluded, and the vicious
backlash under which we currently shudder’. And Americans have
taken to the streets in unprecedented numbers to protest these divi-
sive government policies, as L. A. Kauffman explained in an article
for the Guardian, also from 2018: she pointed out that ‘We are in
an extraordinary era of protest’ as a result of Trump’s presidency,
during which ‘more people have joined demonstrations than at any
other time in American history’ (‘We are living’). This began the day
after Trump’s inauguration, when ‘4.2 million or more people took
to the streets in more than 650 coordinated Women’s Marches all
around the United States’, making this ‘almost certainly the largest
coordinated protest ever in US history’ (Kauffman, How to Read,
59). Just three years later, in 2020, the Black Lives Matter move-
ment was reignited following the murder of George Floyd by a white
policeman in Minneapolis, an event which sparked several weeks
of protests across the US and around the world. An estimated 15
million to 26 million people in the US attended a BLM demonstra-
tion, according to a New York Times article, many of them new to
protesting.1
While the Black Lives Matter movement gained huge global
support in 2020 (and brought about some immediate, though all too
limited changes in police policy), the movement actually began in
2013 after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the death of Trayvon
Martin, and rose to prominence the following year after the deaths
of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. The novels by C. E. Morgan
and Hari Kunzru (both published before 2020) draw direct parallels
between the treatment of Black men in contemporary America and
the murder of Black men in the Jim Crow South around the time of
the civil rights ­movement – ­the era which witnessed the first and most
iconic mass protest in US history: the 1963 March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom.2 Two years later, in 1965, protesters converged
on Washington once a­ gain – t­his time for the March Against the
Vietnam War, organised by the Students for a Democratic Society
18    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

(SDS). Chapter 3 considers Spiotta’s portrayal of the late 1960s and

’70s militant group the Weather Underground, an anti-­imperialist
splinter group of the SDS which engaged in violent antiwar protest
activity including the ‘Days of Rage’ in Chicago in 1969; this chapter
also compares the Weather Underground’s tactics with the WTO
protests in Seattle in 1999, which saw 50,000 anti-­ globalisation
protesters gather in the city. Meanwhile in Chapter 2 Ben allows an
Occupy Wall Street protester to use his shower and washing machine
before he cooks him ­dinner – a­ gesture which forces him to interro-
gate his default to the ‘bourgeois household’ and to consider, perhaps
for the first time, ‘a world in which moments can be something other
than the elements of profit’ (47). Chapter 4 considers another, more
effective example of protest activity: the tactics and achievements of
ACT UP, which was established in New York in 1987 and led the
fight against AIDS, using high-­ profile stunts and demonstrations
to demand federal funding for research and access to experimental
drugs. While the novels in Chapter 5 do not explicitly reference any
protests, the issues they ­address – ­foreign policy, global capitalism,
climate c­ hange – h
­ ave each triggered mass demonstrations of varying
effectiveness: on 15 February 2003 millions of people across the
world protested against the United States-­led invasion of Iraq; and
growing anger about the climate crisis, particularly among young
people, has sparked waves of protest activities which have brought
the climate emergency to public attention, and vastly increased pres-
sure on politicians to make meaningful pledges to reduce emissions.
The Global Week for Future strikes in September 2019 took place in
the days leading up to the UN Climate Action Summit, a deliberate
piece of planning designed to focus global leaders’ minds.
Protests become necessary when individuals and groups are
excluded from the decision-­making process, their concerns ignored
by those in power. Often these protests have no discernible effect on
government policy: they register the sense of anger, but fail to bring
about change. Not all of the protagonists discussed in this book are
protesters, but each of them is characterised by a degree of restless-
ness and unease, as they struggle to locate themselves comfortably
within their contemporary moment. In the chapters that follow, their
anxieties, and the context for those concerns, are placed in dialogue
with some of the most lasting and tumultuous episodes in America’s
past.
 Introduction    19

Notes

1. The same article suggests that the largest demographic of participants

in the BLM protests were those who were young and wealthy, with
much more support from white Americans than previous BLM protests:
‘nearly 95 per cent of counties that had a protest recently are majority
white, and nearly three-­quarters of the counties are more than 75 per
cent white’ (‘Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S.
History’, New York Times, 3 July 2020).
2. Kauffman’s book How to Read a Protest looks in depth at the planning
of this march, and the impact of the signs that were carried by protest-
ers.
 Chapter 1

Historical Racism and

Contemporary Incarceration in
C. E. Morgan and Hari Kunzru

The opening pages of C. E. Morgan’s second novel, The Sport of

Kings (2016), describe a young boy, Henry Forge, attempting to run
away from his father and the punishment he can expect for having
killed one of the neighbour’s bulls. When he is eventually caught
by Filip Dunbar, a Black farmhand on the Forge estate, Henry’s
father, John Henry, beats him with his belt having first tied him to
an old whipping post for enslaved ­people – a­ n early indication both
that the Forge family had been enslavers, and that this racist history
has a tangible ongoing presence on the estate. This opening scene
takes place in Kentucky in 1954, but the novel as a whole, which is
a complex, multigenerational exploration of slavery’s aftermaths,
is set in both Kentucky and Ohio, and spans the period 1783 to
2006. As the novel develops, the focus remains for a time on Henry’s
growing interest in breeding Thoroughbreds, as he transforms his
father’s estate from corn production to a horse farm. By the 1980s,
Henry is inculcating his daughter Henrietta with his own obsession
with genetics and evolution; together they set about trying to breed
the perfect racehorse. But the novel contains a parallel to this nar-
rative of ambition and privilege: around a third of the way through
the reader is introduced to Allmon Shaughnessy, the son of an absent
white father and low-­income Black mother, whose childhood and
adolescence, roughly contemporaneous with Henrietta’s, is spent in
the poorest parts of Cincinnati. When his mother’s sickness forces
him out on to the streets to sell drugs for money, he is made to coun-
tenance the stark truth about his lack of choice in a time and space
where structural racism catches him and his mother in a double bind.
Following six years in prison and the death of his mother, Allmon
trains as a horse groom, and the two narratives converge when he is
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    21

hired on Forge Run Farm by Henrietta. But this is not the first time
their stories have overlapped: Allmon’s ancestor is Scipio, a fugitive
from slavery who was owned by Henrietta’s ancestor Edward Forge
in the 1820s. Scipio successfully escaped the estate, crossing the
border into Ohio by swimming the Ohio River at night; his journey,
and the illusory freedom it offers, is replicated by Allmon over 150
years later, when Henry tricks him into accepting a deal which leaves
him far worse off than before.
The second novel this chapter will examine, Hari Kunzru’s White
Tears (2017), also cuts between different periods in America’s
history in order to highlight the ­reappearance – c­ ontinuance, ­even
– ­of institutional racist structures. It begins in the contemporary
period, with two white college friends, Seth and Carter, bonding
over their shared interest in music, Black music in particular. They
start a recording studio with Carter’s family money, and remix an
old blues song and market it as their own, when in fact the song
originated in the 1920s, sung by a young Black man named Charlie
Shaw. Charlie had been on his way to a recording studio in Jackson,
Mississippi when he was arrested for vagrancy and forced into hard
labour under the system of convict leasing. Charlie reappears in hal-
lucinatory form, forcing Seth to consider the links between Charlie’s
fate in the Jim Crow period and that of contemporary Black men,
also picked up for minor infringements, subjected to police brutal-
ity, and handed disproportionate prison sentences. In this novel the
Wallace family fortune, to which Carter is the heir, were the direct
beneficiaries of convict leasing during Jim Crow, and they continue
to generate vast revenue from prison construction in the twenty-­first
century. Seth’s deliberate ignorance as to the source of his friend’s
wealth is destroyed when his own identity is conflated with the ghost
of Charlie, giving him first-­hand experience of the centuries-­long
history of violence and discrimination towards Black men.
This chapter considers the presentation of post-­slavery experi-
ence in each of the ­novels – t­he ways in which racist structures of
violence and control, although manifested through different ‘means
and modes’, repeatedly ‘fracture the present’ (Sharpe 12, 9). It takes
Morgan’s novel first, examining the reappearance of images and
circumstances that pertain to the Forge family’s enslaver past, its
ongoing involvement in racial violence from the antebellum period
until the twenty-­first century, and the impact of this on individual
characters such as Filip and particularly Allmon. In particular it
looks at the novel’s comparison of Reconstruction-­era violence in
Kentucky with the white supremacist backlash to the civil rights
22    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

movement in the 1950s; thereafter the chapter examines Morgan’s

suggestion of further temporal slippage, this time between the ante-
bellum period and the present day, focusing in particular on the
treatment of Scipio (in the 1820s), and his descendant Allmon (in
the late-­twentieth and early-­twenty-­first centuries). It also considers
Allmon’s impoverished upbringing in Cincinnati, the manifold ways
these circumstances hold him back throughout his life, and the simi-
larities between his situation and that of Black men during the Jim
Crow period. This chapter will then turn to Kunzru’s novel in order
to explore the direct links between Jim Crow-­era convict leasing and
present-­day policing, arrest, and sentencing. It looks at how discrimi-
natory laws in place during the first half of the twentieth century are
replicated in parts of America today as a way to generate revenue
and to imprison vast numbers of Black men.
Drawing particularly (although by no means exclusively)
on Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997), Michelle
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) and Christina Sharpe’s In the
Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), this chapter examines how
in these two novels by Morgan and Kunzru, racist structures of vio-
lence and constraint continue, daily, to ‘rupture the present’ (Sharpe
9) in ways that range from the overt to the barely visible. In these
novels white supremacist violence during Reconstruction resurfaces
during the civil rights movement; limits on Black freedom and move-
ment during the Jim Crow era re-­emerge, in slightly altered form,
during the War on Drugs; the conditions of antebellum servitude
are replicated in twenty-­first-­century working conditions; systems
of policing and mass incarceration in the early twentieth century
continue to operate in the present day; and the racist backlash to
civil liberties during the 1950s has its contemporary resonance in
the era of Black Lives Matter. Sharpe describes this ongoing violence
and subjection as ‘the past that is not past’ (9), and as ‘Living in the
wake’, by which she means ‘living the history and present of terror,
from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black
existence’ (15). Her book, which draws on examples of Black suf-
fering and death in her own family, as well as from literature, film,
photography and historical records, emphasises the reconfiguration,
rather than reduction, of racist attitudes and structures through
time: while the context has shifted from the conditions of slavery
to more contemporary forms of control, violence and exclusion
nevertheless endures. Yet Sharpe proposes that ‘wake work, wake
theory’ (20) is not just ‘recognizing antiblackness as total climate’
(21), but ‘inhabiting’ this ‘blackened consciousness’ to conceive of
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    23

‘particular ways of re / seeing, re / inhabiting, and re / imagining

the world’ (22). Sharpe therefore moots the possibility of resistance
through knowledge: wake work, she writes, is a process: ‘a mode of
inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and
un / imaginable lives’ (18). Hartman, whose work Sharpe draws
upon, uses the phrase ‘nonevent of emancipation’ to make the case
that ‘racial slavery was transformed rather than annulled’ (116, 10).
Hartman’s book describes ‘the still-­unfolding narrative of captivity,
dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in
the Americas’ as ‘the history that hurts’, but this is a pain which ‘has
been largely unspoken and u ­ nrecognized . . . ­due to the sheer denial
of black sentience’ (51). Both Morgan and Kunzru’s novels track the
ways in which slavery and its afterlives of ‘subjection’ and ‘exclu-
sion’ (Sharpe 12, 14), which amount to ‘an abiding legacy of black
inferiority and subjugation’ (Hartman 10), still shape Black experi-
ence in America, but these texts also contain moments of ‘resistance’
and ‘rupture’ to ‘that imposition of non/being’ (Sharpe 21, 22, 21),
as characters become increasingly cognisant of the structural barriers
placed in their way.

I.

Morgan’s long opening section, covering Henry Forge’s development

from child to young adult, spans the period 1954 until 1965, making
it exactly synonymous with the civil rights movement. His father,
John Henry, is furious at the challenges to Jim Crow laws in the
federal courts, and following the Brown v. Board of Education deci-
sion in the Supreme Court in 1954, he removes Henry from school
altogether, keeping him at home and hiring a private tutor from New
Jersey. John Henry is explicit about his rationale for taking his son
out of the public education system: ‘things are happening right now
in the courts. There are changes in the air, changes I don’t want you
exposed to. I swear the Negroes are intent on delivering themselves to
hell’ (25). In reality these changes took years to enact, hampered by
immense resistance on the part of local and state authorities, violence
carried out by a revitalised Ku Klux Klan, and the hostility of White
Citizens’ Councils, made up of wealthy right-­ wing businessmen,
professionals, and religious leaders opposed to desegregation. As a
lawyer and rich landowner fiercely opposed to racial equality, John
Henry would almost certainly have been a Council member, and he
tells his son that ‘The Klan and their ilk, for all their ­rabble-­rousing,
24    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

often have a keen sense of right and wrong undiluted by relativism,

and they can carry out justice with alacrity. Rough justice, yes, but
justice’ (56). And like some of the real-­life Council members, he is
not unwilling to call on their services: his comment to Henry that
‘the Klan comes in handy. They’re more discreet these days than they
used to be’ (57) is retrospectively laden with malevolent meaning
when on the following page we learn that Filip, his Black farmhand,
vanished overnight, just after John Henry discovered he was having
an affair with his wife, Lavinia.1 The narrator offers a deliberately
muted response to Filip’s disappearance, leaving readers to interpret
the situation for themselves: ‘The next morning, Filip did not show
up for work at the Forge house, nor did he appear any day there-
after, and the code on the white, silencing streets of Paris was that
the man had simply left town’ (58). But the narrator, here and else-
where in this novel, is unable to maintain this complicit silence for
long. There is a sardonic tone to subsequent remarks that ‘After all,
sometimes black men simply left a small, Southern town’ and (fol-
lowing a list of several other public lynchings around the same time)
‘this was the 1950s and Kentucky had stopped hanging its black
laundry’ (58, 59). Filip’s own mother, who was ‘born out of the foul
pussy of slavery on a Jessamine County farm’ (59), lived through Jim
Crow and kept a long list of the Black men and women lynched in
Kentucky during the 1930s, even lighting Advent candles for those
killed around Christmas:

December 23: Sloan Allen, George King, seven men together in

Georgia, James Martin, Frank West, Mack Brown, Mr. Brown,
and one ­unidentified man.
December 24: Kinch Freeman, Eli Hilson, James Garden, five
together in Virginia, and fourteen unidentified men in Meridian
on this day (59–60).2

When the Forge’s cook, Maryleen, also Black, returns from her
Christmas break to discover that Filip apparently ‘ran off’ (64), she
imagines a ‘lynch mob’ waiting for her too, and flees from the house
and the state, leaving ‘this bloody borderland behind’ and moving to
New York: ‘by the time she was approaching the outskirts of town,
sweating through her blouse, she could almost see Filip hanging from
a tree right before her eyes, and her decision was made’ (67).
Maryleen’s ­fears – a­nd Filip’s probable m ­ urder – ­shows how
dangerous Kentucky was for Black Americans in the decades before
and during the civil rights era.3 In fact that reference to the ‘bloody
borderland’ suggests that there is a direct connection between this
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    25

period in Kentucky (the 1950s) and the immediate aftermath of

the Civil War nearly a hundred years earlier, when Kentucky was
gripped by wave after wave of racial violence, with the Ku Klux Klan
instilling fear across the state. John Henry, in 1954, describes Black
Americans as ‘monkeys’ who ‘never realize until they leave the cage
that they were warm and well fed in the cage’ (25), and he tells his
son that
there are not merely masters and slaves by happenstance, or overse-
ers and laborers by ­happenstance . . . ­these divisions are inherent and
unavoidable. God save the m­ ark – ­there were slaves in the Republic,
and these liberals would imagine themselves greater minds! (55)

John Henry wants to restore the system of slavery that had been out-
lawed long before he was born, echoing the sentiments of conserva-
tive Democrats in the 1860s hoping to return to a pre-­Civil War social
order. This expression of affinity with earlier stages in Kentucky’s
history is worth focusing on: during Reconstruction (1865–1877) the
state was notoriously violent, and a lethal place for Black Americans.
Its loyalties during the Civil War had never been entirely clear-­cut, but
it was generally regarded as a Union state: Anne E. Marshall puts the
figures at between 66,000 and 76,000 white Kentuckians fighting for
the Union, and between 25,000 and 40,000 on the Confederate side
(20). After the war, however, many conservative white Kentuckians
from the Union side found themselves struggling to celebrate Civil
War victory when it was practically synonymous with ‘black eman-
cipation and Republican politics’ (Marshall 93) and the state quickly
gained a reputation for extreme lawlessness, with white Kentuckians
engaging in ‘loosely organized campaigns of intimidation, shooting,
burning, ransacking, and lynching’ in a bid to restore ‘as much of the
prewar social and racial order as possible’ (56).4 Kentucky’s reputa-
tion for acute racial violence in the two decades following the Civil
War meant that a state which had been largely Union during the
conflict was now perceived as part of the former Confederacy. And
Confederates in Kentucky actively promoted this image, constructing
monuments to memorialise Confederate soldiers, publishing soldiers’
memoirs, and taking up the Lost Cause i­deology – t­hereby remar-
keting its lawless behaviour as being rooted in ‘honor and chivalry’
(Marshall 73), and working towards reconciliation with the North.
But this promulgation of a supposedly more honourable rationale
for the racial violence did not alter the fact that Kentucky was a
lethally dangerous place.5 And John Henry’s impassioned call, nearly
a century later, for a return to slavery, coupled with his advocation
26    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

of racial hostility (and even murder), reveals that this chapter in

Kentucky’s history never in fact ended: his avenging of Filip’s affair
with his wife is an example of the ‘personally sanctioned justice’, or
the ‘southern code of honor’ that Marshall suggests was characteris-
tic of Kentucky both before and after the Civil War (75). The murder
of Filip, and Maryleen’s response to that death, is therefore part of
what Sharpe terms the ‘precarities of the afterlives of slavery’: the
‘disaster of Black subjection’ which is both historical and ‘deeply
atemporal’ (5), as that earlier stage of terror and violence is continu-
ally reconfigured through the multiple and varied atrocities that are
still enacted against Black l­ives – m
­ urder, in Filip’s case, and the fear
of murder in Maryleen’s.
Kentucky is a compelling example of how memory can be
reconstructed for a particular purpose. National amnesia enabled
Kentucky to remarket itself as a Confederate state driven by chivalric
ideals. And John Henry’s apparent nostalgia for the conditions of
pre-­emancipation Kentucky, and for the violence of Reconstruction,
allies him with those proponents of the Lost Cause nearly a century
earlier who similarly defended slavery as a necessary and benevolent
institution. But this is not the only time John Henry offers a take on
the past that deliberately glosses over the reality of racial violence.
He promotes a particular narrative of Forge family history which
emphasises its ‘long, distinguished line’ (22), traceable all the way
back to Samuel Forge, who travelled from Virginia with an enslaved
man in 1783. This lineage, John Henry believes, is what gives the
family its pedigree, and this is the lesson he teaches Henry: ‘All
roads have led to you, ­Henry . . . ­I’m a planter’s son, and you’re
a planter’s son. There is no need for improvement, Henry, only
adherence to a line that has never altered, because it’s never proven
unsound’ (51). Years later Henry gives a ‘towering donation’ to
fund the Genealogical Museum of Central Kentucky; when he and
his daughter attend the reception to mark its opening, the woman
giving the toast explains that ‘The Forge family is one of the crown
jewels of the Bluegrass’ and ‘We wouldn’t ­be – ­we couldn’t ­be – w ­ ho
we are without men like John Henry and Henry Forge, men who
preserve our past and guide us into a future where the past still
matters’ (359). But this particular version of Forge history conveni-
ently overlooks the existence of enslaved people who were front and
centre in running all aspects of the estate in the antebellum p ­ eriod
– ­enslaved people built the house in the first place back in the 1780s,
and thereafter carried out all farm work and domestic jobs for nearly
a hundred years. Henrietta’s inculcation in the ‘dignity’ of her family
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    27

line is such that when, at the age of thirteen, she stumbles across a
ledger from 1827 detailing Edward Forge’s will, which includes a list
of twelve enslaved people, including Scipio and his mother Prissey,
she swiftly returns it to the shelf in her father’s library:

the heat of the thing was threatening to scorch her fingers. What to
do with this remnant of another century still hot enough to burn?
Put it away. Which is exactly what she did. The names, whispering
repeatedly out of the flames, were dampered by the closing book
and then the black ledger was returned to the shelf, where she would
soon forget about it entirely, this page from the history her family
had made (140).

Clearly only one version of the Forge family history has been offi-
cially recorded, and this is a whitewashed narrative, from which the
parallel history of the enslaved people owned by successive genera-
tions of the family has been expunged. The Forges have remarketed
themselves as founders of the Commonwealth, whose own blood
and sweat built its foundations and supported it ever since.
That handwritten draft of a will from 1827 temporarily disrupts
Henrietta’s understanding of her family’s past, as she discovers (but
just as quickly forgets) that her own fortune was built on slavery. The
ledger is swiftly returned to the shelf; the world of Thoroughbred
breeding is her sole concern, and she is unwilling to accommodate
this dark revelation. And in a similar fashion, Scipio’s narrative of
enslavement emerges in brief, rather impressionistic fragments which
are always about to be swept aside, or overwhelmed, by the more
dominant Forge storyline. This narrative hierarchy replicates the
unacknowledged trauma of Black American experience, repressed
and contested by a much more powerful white national discourse.
But Scipio’s harrowing experience as an enslaved man in the 1820s,
however fleetingly rendered in the novel, is worth dwelling on here,
not least because his escape across the Ohio River and his remaining
years as an ostensibly free man in Bucktown, an African American
neighbourhood in Cincinnati, foreshadows the various limitations
placed on his descendant Allmon more than 150 years later, in the
last few years of the twentieth century. Their yoked fates underlines
Sharpe’s thesis that Black Americans are ‘living in the afterlives of
that brutality that is not in the past’ (99), as slavery ‘changed over
time’ so that ‘its duration expands into supposed emancipation
and beyond’ (106). In the novel Scipio is the product of rape: his
mother Prissey, the Forge family cook, was raped by her master,
Edward Forge. After Prissey’s death Scipio makes a desperate bid for
28    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

freedom, running at night towards the Ohio River. And when Allmon
is first introduced in the narrative, he too is heading north across the
border after the death of his own mother. He has been invited to
live with a distant relative down in Lexington, Kentucky, but in the
middle of his first night there, homesick and grief-­stricken, he steals
the woman’s Cadillac and heads back ­north – ­only to be stopped
by police while crossing the border and sentenced to ten years for
possession of just five grams of crack cocaine. Scipio, too, found
that the Ohio–Kentucky border offered a vision of freedom that was
ultimately illusory: while on the run he encountered another escaped
enslaved person, the heavily pregnant Abby, who begged Scipio to
take her with him. While swimming across the river together he mis-
takenly kicked her, before leaving her to drown during his desperate
scramble to reach the other side. Having reached literal freedom
on the Ohio side of the river, so that ‘His broad, white-­latticed
back is a curtain drawn on the crude festival of the South’, his guilt
over Abby’s death created a sense of moral constraint: the narrator
explains that Scipio ‘found something worse than slavery’ (305),
and he hanged himself fifteen years later, finally overwhelmed by
his own guilt. Consistent with Sharpe’s point about the rhythms of
repetition, Allmon, like Scipio, is also wracked by guilt after imagin-
ing himself suddenly free: he accepts a sham deal from Henry which
promises him future earnings on a racehorse providing he cuts off all
contact with Henrietta. But Henry then withdraws the horse from
racing, tricking Allmon out of his money. Rather than being set up
financially, Allmon is left with nothing, and at the same time he has
unwittingly walked away from his pregnant girlfriend, and inadvert-
ently allowed his baby son to be raised by Henry.
The falseness of Allmon’s supposed ‘choice’ to make that deal to
leave Forge Run Farm is exposed by Reuben, the Black jockey, who
draws a direct parallel between Allmon’s situation and that of an
enslaved woman forcibly separated from her child:
White lies don’t add up to the truth! Your only choice was no choice!
. . . You think little sister had any choice when Massah sold her baby
off the auction block at Cheapside, not seventy miles away from this
here horse track? They call their madness logic, but that don’t make
it logic! Your life or your child? You call that a choice? (514)

Reuben, unlike Allmon, operates from what Sharpe terms the ‘posi-
tion of the wake: from a position of deep hurt and of deep knowl-
edge’, having understood the way ‘gratuitous ­violence . . . ­occurs at
the level of a structure that constitutes the Black as the constitutive
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    29

outside’ (Sharpe 27, 28). He fully grasps the way Kentucky’s violent
history endures into the present day, warning Allmon to ‘learn your
history!’, because ‘This land right here under your clumsy-­ass feet’
is still the ‘No-­Man’s-­Land, the Borderland, the Dark and Bloody
Ground, the In-­ Between, the Slaughterhouse, the Wild Frontier’
(512), and ‘fuckery and perversion’ is still the ‘cant of Kaintuckee!’
(514). Allmon’s entrapment at different stages of the novel is made
worse because he is sold the illusion of choice: not just by signing
his name to Henry’s deal, but also before that, in juvenile deten-
tion, where he was repeatedly told there was an alternative path for
him should he wish to take it: ‘you have to choose to move beyond
race. It’s your choice. You want to be a victim forever?’ (269).
Hartman uses the term ‘burdened individuality’ to describe the
‘double bind of freedom’, which equates to being technically self-­
determining while at the same time denied access to resources and
opportunities that would allow one to capitalise on that freedom:
‘being freed from slavery and free of resources, emancipated and
subordinated, self-­possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liber-
ated and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject’
(117). This is the ‘gap’, Hartman explains, ‘between the formal
stipulation of rights and the legitimate exercise of them’ (123). Even
when Allmon is free, his life is circumscribed in countless ways: his
poverty-­stricken childhood in a tough part of Cincinnati, with an ill
mother too sick to work but without health insurance, leaves him
little choice but to sell drugs in order to support them both. That
Allmon’s fate is predetermined seems so obvious that even Henry is
moved to acknowledge it: when asked where Allmon came from, he
laughingly answers, ‘From wherever they grow America’s criminals’
(339) – the implication being that Allmon’s arrest and imprisonment
was a direct, involuntary consequence of his early environment.
In the late-­nineteenth-­century context Hartman mainly focuses
on, those restrictions on freedom included ‘vagrancy, breach-­ of-­
contract, and antienticement laws’ (141) – so-­called ‘Black Codes’
which placed limits on employment and even movement; arrest
for these and other crimes would likely lead to fines and thereaf-
ter forced labour under the system of convict leasing (145). She
describes how the onus was nevertheless on the individual to become
a self-­supporting freed man in spite of these restrictions. He needed
to prove himself a responsible citizen, worthy of his freedom. This
led to self-­imposed constraints on the freed man’s conduct; any per-
ceived shortcomings in discipline or productivity might suggest to
outsiders that one’s work ethic simply fell away without the threat
30    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

of the overseer’s whip. Hartman’s context is the post-­Civil War era,

but these ideas map usefully onto Allmon’s situation in the early
2000s.6 Allmon was tricked into taking a deal with Henry which was
presented as the only means to secure any type of future for himself;
Henry also lied to him that Henrietta had had another man’s baby.
But when Allmon discovers the truth about the deal, his instinct
is to blame himself: ‘a sneaking thought: Forge lied, but I sold my
child. My soul is as rotten as old fruit’ (510). Allmon is similar to
Hartman’s freed man who was encouraged, by various conduct
handbooks, to attribute any failure to support his family to his own
idleness and moral ineptitude, rather than those far-­reaching and
punitive restrictions on his freedom: ‘to be responsible’, Hartman
explains, ‘was to be blameworthy’ (125). Allmon has absorbed these
lessons, believing himself entirely responsible for this failure to safe-
guard his child, rather than the practical barriers standing in his way
such as poverty, lack of education and discriminatory treatment as
an ex-­convict.
As a teenager Allmon followed the same course as his enslaved
ancestor Scipio, driving north across the border towards a longed-­
for freedom. And aspects of Allmon’s situation after release also
replicate some of the day-­to-­day conditions of slavery. Having been
forced out of his position at Forge Run Farm and into a low-­paid
job with Mack, the family’s horse trainer, his living conditions are
hardly better than those of the enslaved people owned by the Forges
in the antebellum period, and are actually worse than his prison cell
at Bracken Penitentiary. Allmon sleeps in ‘unventilated cinder-­block
dorms with dingy, mold-­streaked walls and sputtering lights’ along-
side the Peruvian and Guatemalan migrants also working as grooms;
the lack of an air conditioner means that he ‘sweated in the swampy
ninety-­degree nights and watched the other grooms swoon and puke
from the heat’ (417). The narrative perspective enters Allmon’s mind
during a passage when he starts to imagine himself as somehow
non-­human: ‘You drew flies like any other animal’, he thinks to
himself (417). Those appalling conditions under Mack’s employ-
ment, of sleeping in humid conditions and working without a day
off ‘unless you were dying’ (417), are Allmon’s only option having
been banished from Forge Run Farm following the discovery of his
relationship with Henrietta. But of course, that dismissal also echoes
the disappearance of Filip, back in the 1950s, when he was killed by
Klansmen after John Henry found out about his wife’s affair. The
point to be made here is that Allmon’s existence calls to mind various
different aspects and moments of antebellum and post-­ slavery
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    31

e­ xperience, with racial violence existing in diffuse ways which vary

from the insidious to the flagrant. When Reuben suggests to Allmon
that they ‘Swap prison tales!’ (426), he hints at the fact that although
he has never been physically incarcerated, the modes of control
affect him too; he later remarks that ‘It’s no longer the man but his
very house’ (432) – that is, the entire structure is to blame. Allmon’s
discovery of Filip’s dire fate becomes a moment of illumination akin
to Reuben’s revelatory point that ‘The man that stole your child is
the same man that killed your mother, the man that put you behind
bars, that’s the same man that’s been stringing up the black brother
since time immemorial’ (514). When he hears of Filip’s murder, he
finally realises that his own life has been hampered by a centuries-­old
system designed to constrain him:

The Forges had murdered a man, the woman had said. Of course
they had. Of course! He felt the righteousness of his vindication like
a sun in his chest; it transformed and shined light on the guilt that
had been torturing him. He had always known what the Forges were,
but in Henrietta’s deceiving arms, he’d allowed himself to ignore it!
Of course, he’d known; he’d spent his whole life on the run from a
fucking lynch mob (485–6).

Allmon reaches, in this late stage of the novel, what Sharpe terms a
‘state of wakefulness; consciousness’ that his l­ife – a­ nd Filip’s before
­him – i­s lived in ‘the wake of the unfinished project of emancipa-
tion’ (Sharpe 4, 5). Reuben, who has known this for some time, has
repeatedly warned Allmon that Kentucky’s bloody history is still
ongoing. But Allmon has tried to disregard these stories, to ‘close
[his] ears to time’ (485), only to find, when it is altogether too late,
that he cannot outrun the truth. ‘Time told stories that busted your
eardrums and made them bleed’ (485), he thinks, as he recognises
that aspects of his experience contain echoes of Filip’s fate, and even
of Scipio’s some 200 years earlier.
This long history of exploitation and violence, which Allmon
only latterly understands, has already been signalled to the reader in
a more subtle way, through a set of racially-­charged images that are
loosely replicated within different temporal ­contexts – ­rematerialising
in diverse ways across decades, and even centuries. This contributes
to the novel’s sense of historical sedimentation, and underlines what
Henrietta, in a different context, considers the ‘brittle veneer between
past and present’ (342). The Forge kitchen in particular repeatedly
operates as a space of racial encounter in this novel, and in the first
(1950s) section, the cook, Maryleen, hears Filip and Lavinia having
32    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

sex in the pantry, just off the kitchen. When she goes to investigate,
she sees ‘Filip and the lady of the house, clutching at each other’ and
flees from the kitchen ‘with the negative of their black and white
scorching her eyes’ (44). The direct upshot of this discovery is the
murder of Filip. This scene is subtly evoked many years later when
Henrietta interviews Allmon for the groom job: ‘Has there ever been
a black man in this kitchen before? In their house? Some memory
was rattling around in her mind, but it wouldn’t stand still’ (185).
Later, when Henrietta is having sex with Allmon, the pair are seen
by Mack, the horse trainer. Before he too flees the scene undetected,
he uses the same imagery as Maryleen as he considers what he has
seen: ‘the black guy moving over a white woman who had turned
her face a­ way . . . ­it stood out in his mind later with all the startling,
upending stark of a photographic negative’ (356). Very soon after,
Allmon (in a less violent parallel with Filip) agrees to the deal that
banishes him from the estate and bars him from any further contact
with Henrietta. But these scenes in the kitchen, unbeknown to those
involved in them, implicitly recall an even earlier moment, this time
of sexual violence, which took place in the same room around the
turn of the nineteenth century, when the cook, Prissey, is raped by
her enslaver, Edward Forge: having forced some of the others to have
sex at gunpoint, he ‘charges through the kitchen door’ to Prissey,
and yanks her into the ‘cornmeal and spice smell of his own pantry,
where she is saying no no no no please no . . .’ (484). Prissey, mother
of Scipio, is Allmon’s distant ancestor; this may be why Allmon
‘instinctively’ knows his way around the kitchen ‘as if he’d been
there before’ (364).
Allmon’s proximity to the conditions of enslavement is also sig-
nalled by Morgan during an earlier scene at a yearling sale, when the
narrative temporarily confuses Allmon with the horses on sale:

And like a barn cat, Allmon was everywhere. Even ­here – ­brown like
a bay, Henry ­thought – a­ t the yearling sale in the Keeneland pavil-
ion. There were occasional glimpses of him in the parade of horses
brought to the auction block, where the auctioneer presided ten feet
high on the dais, flanked by his relay men, whispering and pointing,
their eyes trained on the proceedings below. The auctionable flesh
emerged stage right, passed to the black ringman in his coat and tie,
the yearling striding to the center with a hip number trembling on its
quarter, eyes bobbling with fear . . . (338–9).

Henry considers Allmon’s skin colour in equine terms at the start

of that passage, but the conflation of him and the horses becomes
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    33

altogether more arresting with that phrase ‘auctionable flesh’, which

seems at first to refer to Allmon. The subject of the sentence has
switched, between sentences three and four, creating a narrative slip-
page that suggests, very briefly and before things are clarified with
the mention of the ‘yearling striding to the center’, that it is Allmon
who is being brought to the auction block. This momentary but
disturbing confusion collapses the temporal distance between the
present day and antebellum Kentucky, when enslaved people were
routinely put up for auction. And while working for the Forges,
Allmon feels constantly under siege; even with Henrietta, his body
seems to be ‘tied up in old rope’ (346): he wishes to ‘escape’ (351),
but her arms were ‘like iron bands’ (350) around him. Maryleen,
back in 1954, thinks to herself that some of the kitchen equipment
she is using ‘probably dated from slavery days’, but ‘she’d bet fifty
dollars if anyone actually cared’ (42). In the early 2000s, the old
whipping post is still standing in the garden, and the house has kept
its enslaved persons staircase: tangible proof of the sedimented layers
of racist violence and exploitation which continue into the present
day, and which the Forges consistently refuse to acknowledge.

II.

There are important correlations between Allmon’s situation in

around 2006 and that of his ancestor Scipio in antebellum Kentucky,
and of Filip during the civil rights movement in the 1950s. And
Allmon’s situation also evokes the treatment of Black Americans
during the Jim Crow period, when hundreds of laws were passed
to legalise racial segregation and restrict civil liberties. Allmon’s
entrance into the narrative is delayed until almost 200 pages of the
novel have passed by, but the chapter detailing his troubled early life
swells to nearly 100 pages, side-­lining, for a time, the previously dom-
inant Forge storyline which he subsequently enters when he is hired
by Henrietta. In that long Allmon chapter, set in Cincinnati during
the 1980s and ’90s, Allmon and his mother Marie are trapped in a
system which marginalises their struggles with poverty and ill-­health,
and punishes them when they try to find a way through. Marie is left
to care for Allmon on her own after his father, Mike Shaughnessy,
abandons them; with only one meagre income they move to a cheap
apartment in Northside, a dangerous and almost exclusively Black
neighbourhood: Marie is accused of being a ‘race traitor’ (203)
because Allmon’s father is white, and Allmon, aged nine, witnesses
34    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

the suicide of a young Black girl whose ‘pert ski-­slope nose’ was ‘like
a white girl’s’, and had ‘made her a beloved pariah, as despised as she
was envied’ (222). When Marie collapses at work, having been sick
with lupus for some time (a disease which disproportionately affects
Black women, and gets little in the way of research), she is too poor
to pay for an ambulance or proper medicine, but earns just too much
to qualify for ­Medicaid – ­and her medical records mean she would
be rejected for health insurance anyway. The doctor’s apologetic
remarks sum up the impossible situation: ‘There’s really nothing else
to do but take steroids. We’re all still following a script that was
written fifty years ago’ (257).7 The situation reaches breaking point
when Marie’s food stamps are taken away after she is found guilty of
defrauding the welfare system for owning a car she no longer drives.
Summoned downtown to a ‘pre-­ appeal disqualification hearing’
(247) (the full implications of which are not made clear), she is not
offered legal representation, and clumsily answers the panel’s ques-
tions. Desperate, in great pain, and finally unable to feed her son, she
exposes the hopeless agony of her double bind:

I’m sick, and I can’t do anything about it, because I’m broke, and I
can’t go to a specialist. I promise you, it’s a ­fact . . . ­I’m so sick I can’t
hardly work, but I can’t stop working or ­what – ­or what? What are
we going to do? Does the world just want us to roll over and die?
(249)

That speech calls to mind Hartman’s point that ‘Being emancipated

without resources was no freedom at all’, as she emphasises ‘the
absence of the material support that would have made substantial
freedom ultimately realizable’ (136). There are clear distinctions to
be made between Marie’s 1980s context and scenes taking place a
century or more earlier, yet Marie and Allmon nevertheless experi-
ence a version of those ‘exclusionary strategies’ (Hartman 134) which
render it inevitable, after they move again to the cheapest place they
can find in the worst part of the city, and Marie becomes too ill to
leave the house, that Allmon should start running drugs for a local
dealer to pay for rent and a doctor. The swiftness with which Allmon
tracks down the local drug dealer, Aesop, demonstrates how easy
(but also how necessary) it is to slip into criminality. In a passage of
free indirect style Allmon reflects on his new circumstances:

he studied on Aesop (caps, glocks, swagger, wit, threat, diamond

signet ring on his pinkie), who his mother didn’t know a thing about,
but then she didn’t know anything about being a man, what it was to
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    35

be in your body, how you were born into obligation. A man’s whole
life was a haymaker. So he continued to run in the afternoons after
school. Sure, you weren’t supposed to lie, to cheat, to bribe, to hit,
to sneak. But increasingly, the world of rules was being shown up
for what it really was, a rigged system, a fixed game. You should be
good, d­ efinitely – ­but only until you couldn’t, until everything you
loved was on the line. It just made him want to kill someone if he
studied on that too hard. So the key was to not study on the ­truth
– ­the madness in the center of everything that was called common
sense in a white-­ruled world (258–9).

This passage communicates several aspects of Allmon’s state of

mind at this point: firstly, his fetishization of gangster ­culture – ­the
‘swagger’ and ‘wit’ of Aesop, but also his gun, money, jewellery and
clothes. These objects represent power and wealth, and signal it to
outsiders. But there is more to the passage than that: the line about
being ‘born into obligation’ and ‘being a man’ echoes the language
used to drive home the ‘responsibilities of independence’ laid on
formerly enslaved men after the Civil War, who were expected to
work hard without complaint; the ‘failure to meet this obligation’,
Hartman explains, ‘at the very least, risked the loss of honor, status,
and manhood’ (135). Allmon evokes Hartman’s self-­regulating freed
man at another stage of the novel (as we have already seen) when he
instinctively blames himself for taking Henry’s rigged deal. And even
here, as a teenager, Allmon has a clear sense of his responsibilities:
he is accountable for his family’s success. But crucially he has also
seen the barriers placed in his mother’s way when she tries to make a
reasonable living: her hours at work are cut, her welfare is stopped,
and she cannot afford healthcare, nor risk falling into debt. Her
work ethic has offered her no security and not enough money; those
watchwords like ‘industry’ and ‘diligence’ (Hartman 135) – qualities
which the freed man was encouraged to develop in order to become
disciplined and ultimately self-­ policing – ­have not brought any
reward. While Allmon therefore feels that same sense of obligation
to support his family, he does so by circumnavigating the discrimi-
natory and unlucrative workplace altogether, directing his energies
towards making money through any means possible.
Allmon reacts with weary acceptance to his sentencing of two
years in juvenile detention for arson, despite having no involve-
ment in the riot: in fact, he was arrested in front of his grandfather’s
church, screaming as he watched it burn to the ground. And in the
‘dingy courtroom’ where he is first among dozens to be sentenced
that day, they ‘threw the book at him. But he didn’t need to read it,
36    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

he already knew all the words by heart’ (267). Like his mother during
her welfare hearing, Allmon ‘never had the benefit of an attorney or
even the offer of one’, and therefore he ‘couldn’t pretend to be sur-
prised when they sentenced him’ (267). Michelle Alexander’s book
The New Jim Crow examines the mass incarceration of Black men
in America, convicted of trumped-­up drug charges, denied legal rep-
resentation and handed disproportionate sentences for non-­violent
offences. It allows us to understand Allmon’s ­trajectory – ­and par-
ticularly the inevitability of his arrest and i­mprisonment – a­ s part of
a broader social and political pattern. Alexander points out that the
extraordinary rise in the prison population is a direct consequence
of the War on Drugs launched by President Reagan in 1982, which
licensed police to focus their efforts particularly on Black communi-
ties, to hand down vastly longer sentences for possession of crack
cocaine (arrests for which tended to be majority-­Black) than the
powder version (predominantly white), and thereafter to operate a
system of ‘legalized discrimination’ for ex-­offenders, barring them
from jobs, housing and welfare for the rest of their lives (7).8 The
upshot of this, Alexander explains, is that young Black men are ‘part
of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of
mainstream society’ (7).
It is worth exploring some of the ways in which Alexander’s find-
ings correspond to Allmon’s experiences in Cincinnati. During the
riot, when Allmon is arrested for the first time, police have flooded
the Black working-­class neighbourhood of Over-­the-­Rhine, notori-
ous for its high crime levels, in order to make hundreds of arrests.
Alexander describes how the police are incentivised to ‘round up’
(17) as many drug criminals as possible, which means they tend to
operate in poor communities of colour: ‘decisions must be made
regarding who should be targeted and where the drug war should be
waged’ (123), she explains, and ‘So long as mass drug arrests are con-
centrated in impoverished urban areas, police chiefs have little reason
to fear a political backlash, no matter how aggressive and warlike the
efforts may be’ (124). Allmon instinctively understands this: he hears
the ‘sirens looping out of the precinct house’ and the sound ‘jogged
something’: he senses that ‘They’d all be rounded up, or there’d be
blood, or both’ (265). In fact, the police have already shot one of
Aesop’s friends ‘in the motherfucking back’ (263). Alexander uses
the term ‘ghetto communities’ to describe poor, racially-­segregated,
inner-­city areas which have high numbers of ex-­offenders, because
they have nowhere else to go after release (196). Allmon’s grandfa-
ther prefers the even starker terms ‘ghetto plantation’ and ‘Jim Crow
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    37

prison’ (217) to describe the progressively worse parts of Cincinnati

where Allmon and his mother move, drawing a more explicit histori-
cal comparison with earlier systems of racial control.

Living in a dangerous and deprived urban area made Allmon’s initial

move into criminality already more likely, and after he is released
from juvenile detention, his chances of finding gainful employment
are slim. As an ex-­offender, his best chance of a job would have
been in construction or a large factory, but this once-­viable option
has disappeared as a result of d ­ eindustrialisation – C
­ incinnati is a
Rust Belt city, hit hard by the decline of heavy industry, increased
automation and the transfer of manufacturing overseas. Previously
industrial parts of the city, which once employed large numbers of
unskilled men, are now falling apart: when Marie loses her benefits
they move to

a noplace crumbling under the black shadow bands of the viaduct

and I-­74, where the houses were shambling, filthy, and few, over-
shadowed by the behemoth brownfields looted of their industry,
windows shattered by rocks and bullets, down into forgottenness
where few families lived and the ones who did lived in decay, in the
bowels of the city (250–1).

Allmon cannot travel far for work because he needs to report to his
parole officer, and has no access to a car; he also needs to look after
his mother. He is therefore trapped in a loop, and the novel describes
how within five days ‘He was back in it in every w ­ ay – r­unning,
hanging with the crew, pocketing change, wearing a bomber Aesop
gave him’ (274). Allmon marvels that ‘it’s just crazy how you slip
into your old gambling seat at the casino, start stacking chips like
you never even went anywhere’ (274). During his second arrest, this
time for stealing a relative’s car and driving north from Lexington
back into Ohio, multiple charges are laid against him, including ‘pos-
session of five grams of crack cocaine’, for which he is sentenced to
ten years, and a further two for ‘motor vehicle theft and possession
of a weapon and resisting arrest’ (289). The judge, having listened
to Allmon’s description of his circumstances (‘Northside, juvie, your
momma, her ­dying – n ­ o, wait, I was something else before all that, I
promise’), declares himself ‘tired’ of the familiar ‘sob story’ he hears
from ‘identical young men who parade through these chambers and
ask for leniency, day after day, year after year’ (524).
After release, convicted offenders like Allmon continue to be
discriminated against in what Alexander terms a ‘parallel universe’
38    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

where ‘discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and

privileges of citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-­limits’
(94). Once they ‘check the box’ marked ‘felon’ on job applications
they are much less likely to find e­ mployment – ­this is the case for
Black offenders in ­ particular – ­and convicted criminals can also
legally be refused public housing, making it more likely they will
end up homeless, or in a shelter; in many states they will also be
denied access to welfare (94). The right to vote is also withheld after
­release – ­in some states, for the rest of the offender’s life. And even
those legally entitled to vote tend not to r­ egister – ­either because they
have been told, ‘by parole and probation officers’, that they are no
longer eligible, or because they fear ‘any contact with governmental
authorities’ (160). The reality of Allmon’s situation is articulated in
a passage of second person narration near the novel’s end, in 2006:

They say there’s gonna be a black president someday. Maybe. Or

maybe just black skin. Either way, you won’t ever get to vote in
Kentucky. Won’t have a place to live, ’cause you won’t qualify for
Section Eight housing to get your feet on the ground, won’t ever serve
on a jury to keep a brother out of jail, won’t ever get a good job once
you X the little felony box, can’t legally carry a gun to keep some
crazy racist from killing you, and there was never any protection
against the cops to begin with (530).

Allmon therefore recognises, too late, that the treatment of ex-­

offenders like him amounts to a form of state-­sponsored control that
replicates the legalised discrimination under Jim Crow: unable to
vote (or serve on a jury), segregated in the worst areas of the city and
discriminated against at every turn.
That quotation also brings into focus the specific context for this
novel, which ends two years before Barack Obama’s 2008 election
victory. Allmon’s prediction that Obama’s presidency would have
little impact on the lives of ordinary Black Americans like him was one
that was frequently articulated in the months and years leading up to
the ­election – p
­ rominent writers on race such as sociologist Eduardo
Bonilla-­Silva, together with Victor Ray, highlighted the incoming
president’s refusal to tackle (or even really discuss) the issue of racial
inequality; his dissociating himself from civil rights activists (includ-
ing, controversially, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of his
own former church); and his presentation of a ‘post-­racial persona
and political stance’, a ‘strategic move towards racelessness’ which
ensured he remained a viable proposition for white voters (178).9
Obama was fully cognisant that to address racial inequality ran the
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    39

risk of alienating large swathes of white voters by ‘offending white

innocence’ (Coates 115), and stirring up an already rabid right-­wing
press who took any opportunity to focus on his Blackness and accuse
him of representing only Black Americans, rather than the country
as a whole. And as Ta-­Nehisi Coates has described, this was made
plain on those rare occasions when (during his presidency) he did
comment publicly on race and policing: the backlash was fierce when
(in 2009) he described the officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates
in his own home as having ‘acted stupidly’, and stated (after Black
teenager Trayvon Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman
in February 2012) that ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon’.10
For the most part, Obama avoided making contentious statements
on race, pitching himself as a moderate, pro-­business conservative
who could be trusted to look after the economic interests of white
Americans; and far from addressing those obstacles put in the way
of Black Americans, his presidency made it even less likely that racist
structures would be challenged, because those two election victories
seemed to prove that those structures no longer existed.11 White
voters in particular after 2008 and 2012 could feel satisfied that the
country no longer had a racism p ­ roblem – ­after all, many of them
voted in a Black p­ resident – d
­ espite the fact that housing and educa-
tion remained (and still remain) largely segregated; that higher-­level
or managerial positions are still disproportionately white; and that
prisons are still filled with Black men. Michelle Alexander makes
this point towards the end of her book when she suggests that ‘Black
success stories [like Obama’s] . . . “prove” that race is no longer
relevant’ because they ‘lend credence to the notion that anyone, no
matter how poor or how black you may be, can make it to the top,
if only you try hard enough’ (248). These examples of Black excel-
lence therefore ‘legitimate a system that remains fraught with racial
bias’, because singling out particular examples of high-­ achieving
Black Americans contributes to the continuation of discrimina-
tory policies by suggesting to observers that those policies do not
exist, and that the failure of other Black Americans to achieve suc-
cesses of their own must therefore be their own ­fault – ­in this way,
‘society is absolved of responsibility’ (248). Obama himself seemed
to underline this point during a commencement speech to students
graduating from Morehouse College (an all-­male HBCU and the
alma mater of Dr Martin Luther King Jr) in May 2013: in comments
which recall Hartman’s ‘burdened individuality’ (117), he talked to
students about their ‘individual responsibilities’, telling them that
‘there’s no longer any room for excuses’ and ‘nobody is going to give
40    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

you anything that you have not earned’, before reminding them ‘to
work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by’.12 These
cautioning remarks emphasised individual responsibility as the path
to success – ‘set[ting] a good example for that young brother coming
up’ – which was matched by his reluctance to enact specific policies
to address the systemic barriers holding Black Americans back.13
And in words which echo the judge’s words to Allmon when sen-
tencing him, Obama also warned the students that ‘Nobody cares
how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some
discrimination’. Obama’s presidency post-­dates Allmon’s death in
2006, but by this stage he has already concluded that his circum-
stances are unlikely to change for the better: ‘men like Forge had the
keys to everything’ (510), he reflects, and finding a path through the
‘white fucking maze’ (453) of contemporary America seems nigh-­on
impossible.

III.

Like Morgan’s novel, Hari Kunzru’s 2017 White Tears is also

concerned with issues of racial incarceration, both historical and
contemporary; also like The Sport of Kings, the opening section of
this novel quickly establishes the wealth and privilege of its central
white characters. Kunzru’s novel begins in contemporary America,
at a ‘not-­quite-­Ivy school’ where the narrator, Seth, first encounters
Carter Wallace, a very rich fellow student and amateur DJ who
enjoys ‘quasi-­celebrity status’ (9) on campus. Carter has dreadlocks
and a ‘Blond beard plaited into a sort of fashionable rope, no shirt
and a tattoo of Mexican calaveras on his chest’ (8). Seth, on the
other hand, is a self-­declared ‘loser’, whose personal style seems to
be that of a ‘homeless computer scientist’ (10). But Carter recognises
that Seth shares his interest in music and in making his own record-
ing devices, and invites him over to listen to old vinyl records on his
expensive analogue equipment. Carter is also a serious collector, par-
ticularly of rare and undiscovered records, and is a music obsessive,
listening ‘exclusively to black music’, which he feels is ‘more intense
and authentic than anything made by white people’ (9). This music
has to be both old and undiscovered: having already been through
a hip hop period, and before that a phase of old house and techno,
Carter’s taste has settled on blues music from the late 1920s and
early 1930s; Seth notes ruefully that ‘An ever longer list of things
was not real enough for him, tainted by the digital sins of modernity’
Historical Racism and Contemporary Incarceration, Morgan and Kunzru    41

(19). After college the pair move to Brooklyn and set up a recording
studio together (with Carter’s family money), and Carter insists that
all the equipment must be pre-­digital:
always with a history, everything at least forty years old, tube amps
and sixties fuzzboxes and a desk certified to have once been installed
at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals. Vocals went through a pair of
nineteen-­fifties AKG C12’s that cost fifteen thousand dollars (25).

The boys’ ­obsession – ­or f­etishization – ­of Black music becomes

harmful when Seth happens to record a chess player in Washington
Square Park sing a line from a blues song. Carter mixes the song and
brands it the work of Charlie Shaw, a name he apparently makes
up on the spot. When the boys release the hoax record to various
file-­sharing sites, the response from other collectors is of feverish
excitement, but also triggers a series of violent and unsettling events
enacted on the two boys: the song, and Charlie Shaw, seem to possess
a ghostly revenge motive originating in the Jim Crow era, when the
real-­life Charlie, a young musician from Mississippi, was arrested on
his way to a recording studio in Jackson. The narrative cuts between
Seth’s first-­hand testimony as progressively stranger things start hap-
pening to him (particularly when he takes a road trip to Mississippi
with Carter’s sister), and that of JumpJim, an elderly record collector
who tells Seth the story of Chester Bly, a white blues aficionado from
the 1950s who also took a trip South, using bullying and trick tactics
to get hold of rare records sitting forgotten in people’s homes.
Morgan’s novel contained images and motifs which recurred
across several periods. The Black body, that novel repeatedly
showed, continues to be the site of violence and negation more than
150 years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865.
But whereas Morgan’s novel focused on the persistence of discrimi-
natory structures which operate against successive generations of
Black Americans from the antebellum period onwards, Kunzru’s
novel depicts the literal reappearance, albeit in ghostly form, of a
young Black man who was arrested in the 1920s under Jim Crow
laws, and later died in a labour camp. The system of convict leasing,
which was perfectly legal under the Thirteenth Amendment, helped
to rebuild the Southern economy after the Civil War, providing free,
forced labour for mines and quarries. Charlie Shaw had been on the
way to a recording studio in Mississippi in 1929 when he missed his
train from Moorhead to Jackson and had to walk some of the way.
He was picked up in a white neighbourhood, convicted of vagrancy
and fined a hundred dollars. Unable to pay the fine, he was sent to
42    Writing the Past in Twenty-first-century American Fiction

work for a ­year – ­a sentence which was constantly being extended,

as Charlie explains: ‘always the fines for falling behind, talking
back. Everything you do they add days or dollars. And you got no
dollars so they add days. That’s how they do. That’s how they drive
you down’ (257). The judge sentencing Charlie and nine others that
morning was related by blood to those he sent them to work for:
‘Judge Wilbur, on behalf of the thrifty state of Mississippi, set us all
to work for his brothers on the levee. Then he broke for lunch’ (255).
Charlie is unable to pay the fine for the crime of ‘vagrancy’ – a
law established after the Civil War in order to control and contain
formerly enslaved people.14 He is forced to labour under inhumane
conditions, working all day in the heat, and chained together with
other criminals at night. Charlie describes a man being beaten to
death with a pick handle; others are shot in the head. In an interview
following the publication of White Tears Kunzru spoke of ‘the very
direct structural connections between present-­day policing in a lot
of places in the ­US – ­one could say across the ­US – ­and techniques
of social control that are associated with slavery’, specifically ‘the
convict-­leasing system that grew up after the formal end of slavery’.
His novel identifies the many parallels between Charlie’s fate in the
1920s of being fined for a trivial offence and sentenced for not being
able to pay, and the contemporary practice among police officers of
issuing as many fines as possible in order to generate income for the
city budget. If the violators, the vast majority of whom are Black,
find themselves unable to pay the fines, they often find themselves
in court, which generates further fees. Those who fail to make their
court appearance might be arrested and wind up in prison. Michelle
Alexander lists some examples of ‘preconviction service fees’ such
as ‘jail book-­in fees levied at the time of arrest’, ‘public defender
application fees’ for when a defender applies for ‘court-­appointed
counsel’, and a ‘bail investigation fee’, levied ‘when the court deter-
mines the likelihood of the accused appearing at trial’ (155). And
while in prison, offenders continue to generate revenue, just as they
did under the system of convict-­leasing, working on farms or in fac-
tories for little or no money. This system has become normalised, as
it was under Jim Crow: in the final pages of Kunzru’s novel Charlie’s
ghost resurfaces in the twenty-­first century at the same hotel where
he had been booked to record his music ninety years earlier, only to
discover that a conference is taking place there: banners in the lobby
welcome visitors to the ‘33rd Annual Congress of the American
Federation of Incarceration Service Providers’ (259). A system which
directly capitalises on thousands of Black men being removed from
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 Stan felt his hands clench into fists.

Nick’s tone was sarcastic as he continued, “You may have been

aces where you came from, but that doesn’t mean a thing to me.
Now get out and when I give an order see that you carry it out to
the letter. None of you have any brains to do any thinking for
yourselves. You do as you are told.”

Nick Munson turned on his heel and strode out of the mess.
Allison faced Stan. The insolent mockery Stan knew so well was in
his eyes.

“Imagine, old man,” he drawled, “you’re short on gray matter.”

“I may be short on brains, but I still pack a left hook and a right
cross. Nobody can insult O’Malley and get away with it. Not when he
isn’t here to speak for himself.” Stan’s chin was jutting out and his
eyes were blazing.

“I’d suggest waiting a bit. Colonel Munson may have some plans.
Perhaps he’s worried about the morale of this outfit,” Allison smiled
his cold smile. “Perhaps it’s too high. He might like to see a few
fights among the men. Possibly they might get the idea of quitting.
This is a voluntary job, you know.”

Stan laughed and his fists opened. “I believe you have something
there. Suppose we just circulate around and talk with a few of the
men.”

As they talked with the irate fliers, Allison managed to slip in a

word regarding Munson’s possible intention to create unrest in their
ranks. When they left the mess hall, Allison saw that the men were
beginning to get his slant. He felt sure that they would not be
goaded into making trouble.

They were crossing the field when an officer came out of the
briefing shack. It was Nick Munson. He changed his course and
approached them. They snapped a salute. Munson looked them over.

“You fellows didn’t seem much impressed by my talk,” he said

gruffly.

“We have heard a lot of speeches in this war,” Allison said very
softly.

“I’m sorry that numskull Irishman isn’t with us any more. I should
have liked to have made a flier out of him,” Nick said.

“For a test pilot without combat stripes you have done well,
Munson,” Stan said and his eyes locked with those of the colonel.

“I may do even better,” Nick boasted. “This is the land of

opportunity.”

Stan had suddenly lost interest in Munson. He was looking out

across the darkening rice fields. Three men were coming toward the
shack. Two walked ahead while another came on behind. Suddenly
Stan laughed in Nick’s face.

“You may get your chance to train O’Malley, after all,” he said.

O’Malley was striding across the field with two Japanese pilots in
front of him. He had lost his helmet and his flaming hair bushed out
on his head. He waved an arm to Stan and Allison and bellowed:

“Here I come with the reserves!”

He marched his prisoners up to Colonel Munson and halted them.

They were very meek. One of the men had a black eye that
suggested he had been hit by a fist. Nick stared at the Japs and then
at O’Malley.

“You were reported killed,” he growled.

 O’Malley looked Nick over, observed his rating and then answered
insolently:

“And you don’t like it because I wasn’t, eh, Colonel?”

“O’Malley, I outrank you. Speak in a respectful manner when you

talk to me.” Nick’s face was red and his eyes were blazing.

“Sure, an’ the Chinese are hard up for colonels,” O’Malley said. He
turned to Stan and then to Allison. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll go over an’ get
my general’s stripes as soon as I hand over these fellers.” He grinned
at his prisoners. “They are slippery ones, and don’t you ever ferget
that. My friend, here,” he nodded toward the man with the black
eye, “tried to stick a knife into me.”

“Hand over your prisoners and then report to me,” Munson

ordered. “I’m going to ground you for not following out instructions
this afternoon. You lost a valuable ship.”

“I don’t think I’ll like bein’ grounded,” O’Malley answered. “I’m

thinkin’ you and this Jap would look more alike if you had a black
eye, me foine friend.”

“Easy, Bill,” Allison warned and stepped to O’Malley’s side. “Don’t

play his game.”

Munson wheeled on Allison. “What’s that?” he demanded.

“You may outrank us, but just remember that this is a volunteer
group, and if they take it into their heads to knock those stripes off
you they can do it,” Allison answered coldly.

Munson stared hard at Allison, then he said, “No use in your

getting hot under the collar. I have to make this a military outfit.” He
turned to O’Malley. “I may not ground you, but you have to listen to
instructions. You have a lot to learn.” His voice was almost friendly.
 “The Japs taught me all I’ll be needin’ to know from now on,”
O’Malley answered. “I’m a flyin’ snake from this day on. A hit-and-
run driver.”

Munson turned and walked away. Stan and Allison went along with
O’Malley to deliver the prisoners.

“You sure hit the bull’s-eye when you cracked down on him,” Stan
said to Allison.

Allison frowned. “He gave himself away all right. Now we know
how to handle him.” He turned to O’Malley. “What made you lie
there on the ground as though you were dead? You had me fooled.”

“I figgered I’d better play possum. With the sky full o’ Japs, one of
them might have come down an’ peppered me,” O’Malley answered.

“And where did you meet your friends, the Japs?” Stan asked.

“I saw them crawl out of a bomber and I followed them,” O’Malley

sighed. “An’ did I work up an appetite walking all that way! Let’s get
rid of these birds and go eat.”
 CHAPTER V

RESCUE MISSION

The city of Rangoon lies east of the delta of the Irrawaddy River. A
hundred miles further east, the great, sluggish Salween River flows
into the ocean. Beyond the Salween lies Thailand. From Rangoon, a
railroad runs due north to Mandalay and then northeast to Lashio.
Out of Lashio runs the famous Burma Road. It swings north through
a narrow strip of Burma, then twists up and over wild mountain
country belonging to China. Making a wide circle which bends
southward, it ends at Chungking, capital of China.

The Flying Tigers were the guardians of Rangoon where the big
ships docked and unloaded supplies for the Chinese armies. They
were roving guards of the railroad and of the truck road over the
mountains. With their P–40’s, they wove a wall the Japanese could
not see and one they could not cross.

The three Royal Air Force pilots soon discovered that men of the
Flying Tigers had no real names. They were Big Moose or Jake or
Sandy; any name that happened to be tagged to them by the fancy
of their fellow fliers. They were lone wolves of the air, prowling in
threes or in pairs or alone.

To such a group, Nick Munson was poison. Within two days after
he had taken over instruction of the squadron, he had accomplished
something sinister. The Tigers were spitting at one another and were
not doing nearly so good a job of covering the vast area they had to
protect.

Stan, Allison, and O’Malley were sitting in their little bunk room.
Their bodies were stripped to the waist and gleamed with moisture.
The air seemed to press down upon them, hot and suffocating.
Outside, stars gleamed and a pale moon shone through a cloudless
sky.

“Somebody has to start a movement to get rid of Munson,” Stan

said grimly. “I never saw a tougher, more wild crew than we have,
but they’ll go to pieces if he keeps at them.”

“Sure, an’ we ought to punch him in the nose. We could throw him
out o’ this outfit and chase him out o’ Burma,” O’Malley said.

“There ought to be a better way,” Allison said. “A way that would

not make an outlaw outfit out of the gang. The Chinese want to give
us a free hand, but if we get to staging riots, they’ll have to step in
and take control.”

“We each have to watch Munson and try to catch him at some
trick or another, then we’ll have him,” Stan said.

“’Tis a waste o’ good time,” O’Malley argued.

“Stan is right. We’ll keep an eye on him.” Allison smiled. “But just
remember this, he has the three of us spotted. He knows we
became suspicious of him on the trip up here. He’ll be doing a little
watching himself, or I miss my guess.”

Stan got to his feet. “It’s too hot in here for me,” he said. “I’m
going for a walk.”

“I’m takin’ me a nap,” O’Malley declared.

“I think I’ll try for a wink of sleep myself,” Allison said.

Stan walked out into the night. There was a breeze blowing that
carried pungent smells from the city and the harbor. The city was
blacked out, except for the lights along the dock. Stan headed in
that direction and finally reached a point where he could look down
upon the scene below.

Floodlights revealed masses of trucks and cars loaded with boxed

supplies and piles of loose materials. Hundreds of new passenger
cars were lined up in the big yard. They were familiar cars, all
American made—Buicks, Chryslers, and Fords—and all destined for
China’s army. In a yard beyond the car lot stood hundreds of new
trucks being serviced by American and Chinese mechanics. Soon
those trucks would be heading for the Burma Road to haul freight
over the towering mountains.

The noise and the activity attracted Stan. He sauntered toward the
car lot. Two guards stood at the gate of the yard. Stan was not in
uniform, except for his trousers, so he did not approach the gate. He
seated himself on a bank in the deep shadows under a spreading
tree.

A car passed the guards and rolled away. It was a new Chrysler. A
few minutes later another car rolled out. With idle interest, Stan
watched the cars go by. He was wide awake and the busy scene
fascinated him. Another new Chrysler came out. It turned left and
passed close to where Stan sat.

Two fat men sat in the front seat. As the car rolled by, someone in
the back seat lighted a cigarette. The flare of the light revealed two
men in the rear. The cupped flame lighted a bony, hawklike set of
features which were not Oriental. Stan started and leaned forward
when he saw the figure beside the man who had lighted the match.
He was wearing a uniform and Stan got a glimpse of his face. He
recognized Nick Munson.

Stan got to his feet and walked around the parking lots. Down the
street a number of men were working under a big light. He moved
down to them and saw that they all were Americans and that they
were assembling car parts.
 The boss of the crew looked up. When he saw that Stan was an
American, he smiled in a friendly fashion.

“Hello,” he said. “Where did you come from?”

“I just wandered down from the flying field,” Stan replied. “Too hot
to sleep.”

The boss was instantly impressed. “You fellows are doing a swell
job. You have the toughest job there is out here. But I have my
troubles, too,” he added.

“What sort of troubles?” Stan asked.

“We have such a mixture of people that I can’t tell them apart—
Chinese, Burmans, and Malays. The Chinese on the whole are very
honest, but there are some who feel free to make off with anything
they can get hold of.” He grinned widely. “They steal the stuff and
sell it in places where there is no war at all.”

“What use would they have for car parts?” Stan asked.

“Oh, they don’t waste time stealing car parts. They steal cars and
trucks after we get them serviced and ready to roll.” The boss wiped
his forehead with the back of his hand. “This whole lower end of the
line is in Burma, not China. The Chinese just have transportation
rights. They got those rights through British pressure and some of
the Burmese don’t like it.”

“What do they do when they catch thieves stealing trucks and

cars?” Stan asked.

“It depends a lot on who they are. If they are wealthy owners of
big land grants, they just take the car and forget it. If they are poor
natives who make a business of thieving, they shoot them.” The
boss laughed. “Any way you look at it, we have a hard time
delivering enough supplies to keep the Chinese army going.”
 Stan nodded. He was thinking about a number of things. “Well, I’ll
run along. I feel as though I could sleep now.”

“Drop down to the Teeka Hotel sometime,” the boss said. “I’m
Matt Willard. I’ll be glad to show you around.”

“I’m Stan Wilson,” Stan said. “I may do that soon.”

He walked up the road and headed out toward the flying field. A
sentry challenged him, and he advanced to be recognized and to
give the countersign. After he had done so, he asked:

“Many of the boys go out tonight?”

“No go out. Only two.” The Chinese sentry smiled broadly.

“Two besides me?” Stan asked.

“You and one who cooks. He is my friend.” The sentry’s white

teeth flashed.

Stan laughed and walked on toward the barracks. He found

O’Malley and Allison sleeping soundly. Slipping out of his trousers, he
lay down.

Suddenly the sentry’s words, “You and one who cooks,” flashed
through his mind. He was puzzled. It was very strange. He was
positive that Nick Munson was in the automobile he had seen leaving
the parking lot. Why was Munson so secretive about his movements?
Stan decided to do some sleuthing, perhaps.... Within a few minutes
he was fast asleep.

The next morning the three fliers were called to Commander

Fuller’s office. Stan led the way with O’Malley trailing. Fuller looked
them over with a critical eye.

“I have a job for you fellows,” he said crisply.

 The three members of Flight Five waited.

O’Malley returned the commander’s look with an insolent grin. He

edged close to the desk and leaned forward. Fuller ignored him. He
spoke to Allison.

“You are to take up a Martin bomber on a special assignment,

Major. I have a request from Colonel Munson to pick up a Chinese
officer who has been abandoned by his caravan.” Fuller pulled a map
from his desk and spread it out before him. “The Chinese general
has two staff officers with him. They were attacked by Thai guerilla
forces under command of Japanese spies. They escaped and are at
a plantation just over the border.” He placed the point of his pencil
on the map. “Here is the location of the plantation. You will spot the
field to be used in landing by an American flag planted at the edge
of the woods.”

Allison picked up the map. “Will we be interned if we are caught in

Thailand?” He asked the question sharply.

“There will be no armed forces to stop you and no one will know
you landed. You will be only a few minutes on the field,” Fuller
answered.

“Yes, sir,” Allison said as he turned away from the desk.

“You are in command, Major Allison,” Fuller called after him.

“Yes, sir,” Allison answered.

The three fliers walked out into the sunshine. O’Malley was the
first to speak.

“What’s the need for sendin’ three fighter pilots to herd a crate on
a passenger trip?”

“We may find that out later,” Stan said.

 “We’ll make jolly well sure there is no army of Thai troops waiting
for us when we land,” Allison said.

“I can’t think of a better way of getting rid of us than having us

dumped into a native stockade where we could rot while the war
goes on,” Stan said.

They reported to the briefing room where the captain in charge

gave them their flying orders. Out on the field, a battered Martin
attack bomber sat with her propeller idling.

“The old gal looks like she has seen a hard winter,” O’Malley said.
He faced his two pals. “Suppose you boys let me take this hop. You
could sneak out on patrol and get some action. It won’t take three
of us to fly that crate.”

“We have our orders,” Allison reminded. “Besides, old man, I

might need a couple of good gunners.”

O’Malley grunted. “It’s goin’ to spoil the whole day for all three of
us.”

“I have a hunch we might meet a few Jap fighters on the way

over or back,” Stan remarked. “Just like we met them when we flew
into this jungle.”

“The best way to find out is to get going,” Allison said.

The ground men had climbed out of the bomber. O’Malley went up
first and began looking the guns over. Stan and Allison were up in
front when he came back from a prowl in the rear.

“’Tis nice equipment they furnish, these Chinese. I’m handling the
rear gun. There’s a couple o’ submachine guns in a rack back there.
If I bail out, I’ll grab one o’ them, then Mrs. O’Malley’s boy will pot
any Japs that try dirty tricks.”
 Allison settled himself at the controls while Stan took over
navigation and the forward guns. The big ship rocked to the blast of
its two Pratt and Whitney motors. It spun around and headed down
the field. Hoicking its tail, the plane eased off the ground. It was
designed to fly as fast as most pursuit planes and to maneuver well
in the air. They had been up only a few minutes when Stan
discovered that the intercommunication phone was out of order and
that they had no radio.

“This ship was never cleared for combat by the ground crew,” he
called to Allison.

Allison smiled back at him and opened the Martin up another

notch. He leaned toward Stan and shouted:

“You’re not in the R.A.F. now, son. You are back in the old brush-
hopping days.”

They bored along, spotting two P–40 patrols who eased down to
look them over. They saw no enemy planes at all as they knifed
along above a layer of clouds. Stan checked the map and charted
their course. After a time, he made a thumbs-down sign and Allison
dropped under the clouds.

They drifted over the broad and muddy Salween River and Stan
knew they were over neutral territory. He kept a sharp watch for Jap
ships, knowing that they paid no attention to neutrality. They had an
understanding with Thailand that amounted to an alliance.

After crossing the river, Allison went down and swept low over the
jungle and land which plantation owners had cultivated. He was the
first to spot the flag planted at the edge of a rice paddy. The field
seemed smooth and the flag gave him the wind, but he did not go
in. He circled low over the jungle bordering the plantation.

As they came back over, much lower this time, they saw three
men dressed in uniform waving to them from the edge of the dense
forest. Allison came around and skimmed low over the field. As he
went past, he saw that the three men were dressed in Chinese
uniforms.

“I’m setting her down,” he called to Stan. “I’ll roll in close to the
spot where those men are and then I’ll swing around so that we
head into the wind.”

Stan nodded. He had eased into position back of his gun controls.
The Martin went down lower and bumped across the rice field. It hit
solidly and rolled toward the three men. The Chinese remained at
the edge of the woods, waiting.

Allison heaved back his hatch and looked out. “They look like
Chinese officers,” he shouted above the rumble of the twin motors
that he had left idling.

With a flip, he spun the Martin around and set the brakes. Stan
and Allison swung down to the ground. They waited for O’Malley to
come out but he did not show up.

“It may be just as well to leave him to guard the ship,” Stan said.

“Good idea,” Allison agreed.

Stan called up to O’Malley. “Stick around and watch the ship. We’ll
be back with the general and his baggage in a few minutes.”

The rumbling of the motors drowned out any reply O’Malley might
have made. Stan turned to join Allison. They walked across the grass
toward the three officers advancing to meet them.

When they were a few yards away, Stan halted. “Those aren’t
generals,” he groaned. “They are Jap noncommissioned officers.”

Allison stopped and muttered softly, “Right you are.”

 Before the two pilots could wheel, six men slid out of the jungle.
They were armed with rifles which were pointed at Stan and Allison.
One of the officers rasped in perfect English:

“You are our prisoners. Do not try to escape, please.”

“Stuck!” Stan gritted as he suddenly realized that neither he nor

Allison was armed.

The Japs closed in. The officer in command spoke to Stan.

“Your other man is in the ship?”

“What other man?” Stan came back.

“We know you have a crew of three,” the officer snarled.

“The best way to find out is to look there yourself,” Allison

answered.

The officer spoke sharply in Japanese. He lifted his voice to almost

a shout. Instantly a company of soldiers came out of the woods and
began to spread out around the Martin. Stan waited for the blast of
O’Malley’s guns. The rear guns of the Martin could cover most of the
approaching men.

No sound came from the Martin. The Japs swarmed up into it.
Stan scowled as he waited for them to drag O’Malley out. The
Irishman must have gone to sleep. A few minutes later the soldiers
came out of the plane and moved toward the officer in charge. A
rapid conversation took place in their native tongue.

Suddenly the officer turned to Stan. “It is true that you have only
two men in your party. As you said, there is no one in the plane.”

Stan and Allison exchanged quick glances. Both managed to hide

their surprise at this news. Stan faced the officer. He had no idea
what had happened to O’Malley. What he wanted to find out was the
fate awaiting Allison and himself.

“You plan to intern us?” he asked.

“We do not intern mercenary fliers who hire out to the enemy.”
The Jap smiled sarcastically. “We are not so soft and so foolish. We
shoot them. That is the better way.”

Allison’s lips pulled into a sardonic smile. “So nice of you,” he said
softly.

“You will march over to the woods,” the officer ordered. “Before
we dispose of you, we have some questions to ask you.”

“Glad to oblige with any information you want,” Allison replied,

hoping to stall for time.

With bayonets at their backs, they walked to a shady spot under a

vine-choked tree.

“You may sit, please,” the officer said.

Stan and Allison sat down and waited for the questions. The
former planted himself with his back against a tree. That took the
threat of a bayonet thrust in the back out of the picture. Allison did
the same.

“How many pilots do you have in your mercenary group?” the

officer demanded. He had a pad and pencil in hand, ready to jot
down their answers.

Stan looked at Allison. “We should have somewhere near a

thousand.” He grinned and added, “That is with the last bunch that
arrived yesterday.”
 The Jap looked at Stan and then jotted down the number. “Now,
please, how many planes do you have?”

“We don’t know. They are coming in so fast we can’t keep count
of them,” Allison answered.

“But some estimate, please,” the Japanese insisted.

“Oh, several thousand,” Stan answered airily.

This seemed to excite the officer greatly. He wrote the number

down and chattered to the noncom beside him. They talked for a
few minutes among themselves. When they had finished, Stan spoke
up.

“Doesn’t that tally with the number Colonel Munson reported we

had?”

The Jap stared at him. “Colonel Munson,” he repeated

thoughtfully. He shook his head. “I do not hear of him.”

Stan was convinced that the officer was telling the truth. He did
not seem to know Nick Munson. Before he could ask another
question, a shining, new Chrysler rolled out of the woods and a trim
little man stepped out. He was a ranking officer of the Japanese Air
Force. Stan recognized his outfit at once.

The noncommissioned officer bowed and bobbed and saluted. He

talked rapidly with the Japanese officer. The little man took the pad,
looked at it, then scowled at Stan and Allison.

“Liars,” he accused. “We waste no more time with you.”

He spoke in a smooth flow of Japanese to the noncoms, then

turned about and got into the car.
 Stan stared at the new Chrysler. The Japs had not been able to
import any of that model of American cars. His mind was working
fast. Allison kicked him and mumbled:

“If we’re to make a try for it, we’ll have to do so as soon as that
car pulls out.”

Stan nodded. “We’ll dive for the brush.”

The car rolled away and was swallowed by the jungle. The
Japanese officer turned to them.

“Get up,” he commanded. “You may use your handkerchiefs to put

over your eyes. We waste no more time. My men are good shots,
however.” He sneered, exposing huge buckteeth.

Stan and Allison sprang to their feet, backing up on each side of

the tree.

“Step forward and place the blindfold,” the officer snapped.

“We don’t want any blindfolds. We can face you rats,” Stan
retorted. He shot a glance at Allison.

Allison was swaying just a little. Stan tensed himself to leap

backward and roll behind the tree. Suddenly, there was a blazing
rattle of machine gunfire from the green wall of the jungle close by.
The Jap officer spun around and tumbled to the ground. Two of his
men went down and the others scattered. They opened fire but Stan
did not wait to offer a target. He plunged behind the tree and
brought up hard against Allison.

Peering out, they saw a figure emerge from the woods. A high,
wild yell rose into the hot jungle air. Bill O’Malley was rushing upon
the Japs with a submachine gun spitting fire at them!
 The charging O’Malley was too much for the Japanese. They broke
and plunged for the cover of the jungle. Stan leaped out and caught
up a rifle.

“Get to the ship! Don’t wait to fight! Run for it!” Allison shouted
behind him.

Gripping the gun, Stan sprinted for the ship. Allison was close
behind him. Stan went up and into the pilot’s seat. He rammed the
throttle knob up and the twin motors roared to life. The Martin
shook and strained at its brakes. Stan reached down and gave
Allison a hand as he kicked off one brake and wheeled the bomber
around.

“Forward guns!” Stan shouted.

O’Malley was planted halfway between the plane and the jungle,
potting away and shouting. The Japs, hidden in the dense growth,
had recovered from their first panic and were sniping at him with
their rifles.

Allison opened up with a blast from the forward guns of the

Martin. The shells screamed into the tops of the jungle trees.
O’Malley tossed aside his machine gun and ran to the plane. As he
sprang into the compartment, Stan headed the plane out into the
field for a take-off.

The Martin lifted and Stan swung it around. With the bomber in
the air, he could nose down over the jungle and strafe the Japanese
hiding there. He was nosing in when he sighted a car moving swiftly
along a narrow road. It was the new Chrysler.

Stan laid over and went down after the car. As he roared down
upon it, he saw men spill out and tumble into the bushes beside the
road. Allison opened up, and, as they left, Stan saw that the car had
been smashed to a twisted mass of wreckage.
 He went on up and headed for home. As they roared along,
Allison poked him and pointed up. Stan saw four Jap fighter planes
coming down at them. He cracked the throttle wide open. With a
whoop, O’Malley scrambled back to the rear gun turret.

The Japs came down the chute but they were not fast enough to
make contact. The Martin showed them a clean pair of heels and
they gave up the chase.

The Martin dropped in on the temporary field and slid up beside a

hangar. Ground men swarmed out to take over. The three pilots
climbed out and headed for the briefing room where they reported
in.

“Let’s go report to the colonel,” O’Malley said. There was a savage

glint in his eye.

“First, you report how you happened to bail out with that tommy
gun,” Stan said to O’Malley.

“I spotted a squad o’ Japs near the woods. We had no phone an’

you were comin’ in fast. I jest piled out and sailed down into a patch
o’ timber. You were so low, the Japs didn’t see me bail out.” O’Malley
ran his fingers tenderly over a mass of scratches on his cheek. “I like
to niver got out o’ the mess o’ vines and bushes I landed in.”

“Aren’t you hungry?” Allison asked in mock surprise.

“I’m weak with hunger,” O’Malley declared solemnly. “But I’m mad,
too. I got to lay one on the beak o’ that Munson before I’ll get me
full appetite.”

“I think we’d better eat first,” Stan said. “We might be able to
figure out something while we watch you devour a couple of pies.”

O’Malley grinned widely. “Sure, an’ if I wasn’t so weak from

hunger, you couldn’t talk me out of it,” he said.
They headed toward the mess hall with O’Malley well in the lead.
 CHAPTER VI

ATTACK

The three fliers of Flight Five did not get time to argue. They were
only half through with their dinner when the loudspeaker over the
mess door began rasping and sputtering:

“Flight Three, all out! Flight Four, all out! Flight Five, all out!”

Before the speaker in the control room could repeat, there was a
rush of feet toward the briefing room. O’Malley galloped along with a
quarter of berry pie in his hand. He had bribed the Chinese cook into
making his favorite dessert daily.

They crowded into the small shack and began scrambling into
their fighting outfits.

“Munson found out we got back,” Stan said as he slid into his
parachute harness.

“Faith, an’ he’s a wise bird, that fellow,” O’Malley growled.

“This must be a real attack the way they are turning half the force
out,” Allison said as he shoved over to the desk to get his orders.

Men raced out on the field and dashed toward their idling planes.
As they ran, they looked up into the blue sky. They heard no
bombers and they could see no fighters, but they knew the Japs
were up there.

Never had the enemy been able to bomb Rangoon. They had been
smashed with heavy losses on every attempt. The Flying Tigers were
proud of their record and eager to keep it clean.
 As motors roared and hatch covers slammed shut, Stan heard Nick
Munson’s voice rasp in his headset:

“Instructor Munson taking command. Squadron, check your

temperatures.”

Reports came crackling back.

Stan scowled as he bent forward. Nick Munson was going to lead

the attack. That was not good news.

“Up to eight thousand feet. Hold your formation for orders,”

Munson droned.

Stan jerked the throttle knob open, jammed down on one brake
and wheeled around in a tight circle. Nine other P–40’s were
whipping into line. There was less of the formality of an R.A.F. take-
off. Each plane blasted its tail up with a rush of exhaust pressure
and headed down the field. Stan saw O’Malley hop his ship off long
before the others left the field. Allison went straight out, wide open,
with Stan at his right wing.

With the ground swirling by in a blur, Stan heard Allison’s voice:

“Up, boys, and at them.”

He pulled the nose of the P–40 up and she zoomed with a lift that
fairly hurled her into the sky. Allison rode up close beside him. They
raised above O’Malley but he came on, leveling off to force his
speed.

“Formation! Squadron, close in!” Munson was bellowing.

Stan grinned. This was the first flight the colonel had taken with
the Tigers and they were not acting the way he thought they should.
Finally, the nine fighters closed in and took up line formation.
 “Up to twelve thousand,” Munson ordered.

The Tigers went on up, following their leader. Stan looked across
and saw O’Malley’s head bobbing back and forth. Suddenly, he heard
O’Malley’s voice:

“What kind o’ show is this?”

“We’re out for a bit of exercise,” Allison came back.

“We ought to be over in those clouds,” Stan cut in. “That’s the
place to look for trouble.”

Far to their right rose a high-piled bank of clouds. Stan kept

watching that bank and wondering when Munson would head that
way. He also wondered if the colonel had ever been in combat
before. A man who would lead his flight through the open sky with
clouds on either side needed some practical training.

Stan chuckled. The Japs would give him that training if he stayed
in this game very long and went upstairs every day. Stan was still
looking at the big cloud bank. He blinked his eyes. Around from the
far side of the cloud came a flight of Japanese planes.

“Off to the right! Jap planes on the right!” Stan shouted into his
flap mike. “Coming under the cloud.”

“Peel off and after them!” Allison chimed in.

“Sure, an’ I’m on me way!” O’Malley yelled back.

“Hold formation!” Munson bellowed. “I’m giving the orders here.”

His voice blurred out in a blast of static.

The three P–40’s on the right end of the line formation ducked
and darted away. The others stayed in formation, following orders.
 It soon became evident what the Japs were after. They were
diving on the hangars and planes on the ground at the field. The
three P–40’s went in with Allison in charge. They cut across the neat
enemy formation and there was a scattering of ships. In and out,
back and forth roared the three members of Flight Five. The twenty
Japanese planes gave up the idea of strafing the field installations.
They turned to the task of smacking down the roaring demons that
had hurtled down on them. Three Japs went down in flames under
the first dive.

Stan came back through with his thumb on the gun button. He
twisted and turned; but he could not get a Jap in his sights. As he
went up, he saw that O’Malley had learned his lesson. The Irishman
was topping a high-zoom and coming back over, belly to the sun. As
he went in, Stan saw him saw a wing off a Karigane and send it
spinning to the ground.

The Japs seemed to be panicked by the savagery of the attack.

They whirled and fled back toward their bases. The three victorious
P–40’s roared up into the sky and circled. Allison’s voice came in with
a slow drawl:

“Does that formation headed for Rangoon look like bombers?”

“It does,” Stan called back.

At that instant, they saw the six P–40’s under Munson’s command.
They were high up above the clouds, too far up to intercept the low-
flying bombers headed for the city.

“After them!” Allison ordered.

The three ships streaked toward the bombers. Long before they
had overtaken the slow-flying 97’s, the enemy had sighted them and
were spreading out.
 The three P–40’s went into the formation with a slashing dive.
There were twelve bombers and they scattered in twelve directions.
Stan rolled over and got on the tail of a killer. His Brownings
spattered lead and the bomber billowed smoke. Up he went and
around and down on another bomber.

The air above the rice fields outside the city was filled with the
scream of motors as the three fighters battled to keep a single
bomber from getting through. They were losing the fight, even
though they had shot down four bombers, when Munson and his
ships came down in a screaming dive to join them. That ended the
fight. The Tigers did not let a single 97 get away.

One by one, they drifted in and landed. Twelve of them came in.
Not one ship was missing. Stan crawled out and stood waiting for
Allison and O’Malley.

The lank Irishman waddled over to his pals. He was grinning

broadly. Allison jerked off his helmet. There was a cold, icy look in
his eyes. Stan knew Allison was finally jarred out of his half-amused
attitude.

“Sure, an’ ’twas one grand party,” O’Malley beamed. “It fair gave
me a huge appetite.”

Allison turned toward the briefing shack and they walked in to

report. A sour group of pilots greeted them. The six fliers who had
stayed with Munson were thoroughly ruffled. One of them turned to
Stan as the three R.A.F. men reached the desk. He spoke so that
everyone, even Munson, who was making out his report at the end
of the desk, could hear.

“Lucky for this outfit you birds put brains before orders.”

“We fly by feel, me bye,” O’Malley answered cheerfully as he

barged in to the desk and grabbed a report blank.
 “I’m putting in for a transfer,” the pilot said with disgust. “This
outfit stinks.”

Stan grinned at the angry young man. The flier was four inches
taller than Stan and he had a bushy mop of black hair. His cheeks
were soft and pink. His black eyes blazed.

“You’re from Texas?” Stan asked.

“I’m from Texas and we don’t take anything from anyone in my

country,” the youth answered.

Nick Munson scowled but said nothing.

“I’m from Waco, Texas, myself,” Stan said to the pilot. “But I
migrated to Colorado and flew up there.”

The youngster stepped close to Stan. “I’m with you,” his voice had
dropped below the murmur of the other men, “when Munson opens
up on you like he will.”

“Thanks,” Stan said gratefully.

Nick Munson shoved over his report and his voice cracked out,
brittle and hard.

“I’ll see all of you men in the mess, right away.”

The fliers turned away and moved outside in a group. O’Malley

growled loudly as he walked with Stan and Allison toward the
barracks.

“I need food, not jawbone. I hope he makes it snappy.”

“He will,” Allison said and smiled thinly.

“You better keep your shirt on,” Stan said to Allison. “I’d like to
have a couple of nights free to do a bit of snooping before you get
us all tossed into a guardhouse.”

“It all depends on what he says,” Allison answered coolly.

“You see, Munson is about to blow up the squadron. That’s just

what he wants to do. If we start trouble, he’ll wreck the flying
strength of this outfit. In that case, he’ll have us grounded and this
sector will be wide open.” Stan pressed his point home hard. “He has
a reason. I think he’s being paid off. I think his credentials are faked.
It’s not hard to get into an outfit like this. The Chinese need trained
pilots so bad they are not apt to go deep into their past records.”

Allison swung around. “You’re right, old man. Sorry I acted like a
silly goat. Let’s talk to the men.”

They entered the mess. The men stood around waiting restlessly
for Munson to appear. None of the fliers seemed to want to sit down.
There was a tenseness in the air and many faces showed grim
anger.

Stan and Allison split up and began talking to the men. They had
to make it snappy and they did. The Flying Tigers were bright boys
and they were already suspicious of Munson. By the time the colonel
came stamping in, the group was silently waiting and there were no
mutterings.

Munson strode to the front of the room, clicked his heels and
made a turn to face them. Stan’s eyes narrowed as he watched the
big fellow. Munson looked the men over with a cold eye.

“You fellows put on a lousy show today,” he snapped. Pausing, he

waited for someone to contradict him or argue the point.

Silence filled the room. All eyes were fixed unwaveringly upon the
commander. Munson cleared his throat and went on.
 “Three of you,” he glared at Stan, Allison, and O’Malley, “broke
away from formation and went off on a chase. You intercepted and
broke up a fighter attack on the field, but if that bomber squadron
had been as big as it was reported to me, the docks and the city of
Rangoon would have been blasted.” He paused and his gaze bored
into Allison.

Allison stood staring at him without any expression on his face.

“You, Major Allison, ordered your flight off on that attack.” He

leveled a finger at Allison and shook it threateningly.

“Yes, sir,” Allison said. “Sorry, sir.”

Munson fairly jumped up and down. His face reddened and he bit
off his words savagely.

“You are insubordinate and—and—” He seemed unable to think of

any more words.

“Yes, sir,” Allison said and smiled insolently.

“Wipe that snicker off your face!” Munson bellowed.

Allison’s smile faded. His gaze moved over the colonel very
deliberately. O’Malley began to mutter and scowl at the commander.

“What are you mumbling about?” Munson turned on O’Malley.

“I’m after bein’ near to starved,” O’Malley said humbly.

Munson had his mouth open to shout at O’Malley. He closed it

without uttering a sound. Disgust was written on his beefy face.

“After this, orders are to be carried out,” he snapped. Then with a

shrug of his trimly tailored shoulders, he turned and marched out.
 As soon as his footsteps died away, a laugh burst from the men.
They crowded around Allison and Stan. O’Malley stood back
watching for a minute, then headed for the cook’s galley.

“We got him going,” the tall boy from Texas crowed.

“I have some poking around to do and I’ll get it done as quickly as

I can. But, after this, we’ll fly an attack the way it should be flown
and let him ground us if he dares. I’m thinking he’ll not do that
because, if he did, the commander would investigate.” Stan spoke
eagerly.

“We’re with you,” a number of the men answered. The others

nodded their heads.

Allison and Stan walked to the cook’s galley after talking with the
boys for about fifteen minutes.

“What do you have on your mind?” Allison asked.

“I’m not right sure, so I’ll have to go it alone for awhile,” Stan
replied. “I guess I’ll just be snooping. But you fellows can cover up
for me. I don’t want Munson to know I’m prowling around after
dark.”

“We’ll take care of that,” Allison promised.

They entered the squadron mess hall and found O’Malley

enthroned behind a huge dinner flanked by an apple pie.

“I showed the China boy how to cook that pie,” O’Malley said with
pride. “I got him to make two o’ them so you birds can have some,
too.”

Allison inspected the pie with a forced look of scorn. “Heavy as a

Flying Fortress. Crust tough.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, old
man, but I have my health to protect.”
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