Black and Male in America
On the surface, the storyline can be boiled down to a caper involving a heist which predictably does not go quite as smoothly as the planners dream. Beneath the surface of the crime story, however, is a deeper story about what it means to be a black man in America, especially in the remnants of the Confederacy, even if the setting is the end of that particularly abominable line:
“Listen, when you’re a black man in America you live with the weight of people’s low expectations on your back every day. They can crush you right down to the goddamn ground. Think about it like it’s a race. Everybody else has a head start and you dragging those low expectations behind you. Choices give you freedom from those expectations. Allows you to cut ’em loose. Because that’s what freedom is. Being able to let things go. And nothing is more important than freedom. Nothing.”
A Man with a Good Car
As the legendary British post-punk band Gang of Four once lyrically noted, when one is driving a car, fate is in your hands and in the transmission. At its best, driving becomes an act of synergy between the human behind the steering wheel and the mammoth machine surrounding him. Almost every driver has felt this experience at one time or another; that almost magical moment when it is impossible to tell which is in control: flesh and blood or gas and oil.
“He pushed the van up to 65 and aimed it at the ramp. He felt it then. Felt it for the first time tonight. The high, the juice, the symbiotic relationship between man and machine. The thrumming vibrations that worked their way up from the blacktop through the wheels and suspension system like blood moving through veins until it reached his hands. The engine spoke to him in the language of horsepower and RPMs. It told him it yearned to run.
The thrill had finally arrived.”
Man Versus Nature
The opening of the novel is pure imagery, from the one-sentence paragraph that opens the proceedings right through the much longer second paragraph that pits man versus nature in a contest for supremacy and domination. This might just possibly foreshadow a thematic concern to be pursued in the subsequent narrative:
“Laughter filled the air only to be drowned out by a cacophony of revving engines as the moon slid from behind the clouds. The bass from the sound system in a nearby Chevelle was hitting him in his chest so hard, it felt like someone was performing CPR on him…The air was cool and filled with the scent of gas and oil. The rich, acrid smell of exhaust fumes and burnt rubber. A choir of crickets and whippoorwills tried in vain to be heard. Beauregard closed his eyes and strained his ears. He could hear them but just barely. They were screaming for love. He thought a lot of people spent a large part of their life doing the same thing.”
Mama’s Home
One of the economic issues pressing down hard on Beauregard is an unexpected five-figure debt suddenly owed to the health care facility taking care of his mother. The fault for this shortfall has been narrowed down to a “discrepancy” with her Medicaid coverage. She and her son disagree. All of which is beside the point, because the real issue is having to call such an environment “home” in the first place:
“The Lake Castor Convalescent Home took great pains to not look like a nursing home. The front of the building had an elaborate brick portico that covered the automatic doors at the entrance. Lush green boxwood shrubs that appeared to have been trimmed with lasers lined the sidewalk like verdant sentries. The brick carport had a pair of flying buttresses at each end. The whole campus seemed more like a small community college with a decent alumni organization than a nursing home. Beauregard stepped through the automatic doors and was smacked in the face by the pungent scent of urine.”
