Sometimes you can hear the wire, hear it reaching out across the miles; whining with its own weight, crying from the cold, panting at the distance, humming with the phantom sounds of someone else's conversation. You cannot always hear it - only sometimes; when the night is deep and the room is dark and the sound of the phone's ringing has come slicing through uneasy sleep.
The opening line of the novel is one of those occasions where an author rises up from the sea of conventionality and announces in a loud, clear booming voice that snaps to attention every reader seriously perusing the words: pay attention! A careful reader better pay attention because this is not the kind of opening line that comes along very often. Or once or twice a year. Or even once a decade. This is one of those opening lines that fifty years from now will still be making the lists of the best opening lines of the 20th century. It is poetry, true, but more importantly it is thematically rich: phone calls in the night are never good and usually lead to less sleep before allowing you to return to more sleep.
For the basis of both seventeenth-century science and seventeenth century history was the same. There was a single, fundamental assumption: that every event has a preceding cause and a proceeding effect.
The protagonist of the story, John Washington, is a history professor and history scholar. He is not, however, a particularly emotional historian. His own personal family history is full of gaps in information, unanswered questions and—more to the point—unasked questions. John is a peculiarly disinterested student of history who must literally be goaded (at least manipulated) by his psychiatrist girlfriend into diving into a past that actually concerns him with the same fulsome purposefulness as his academic study of history. The story that emerges from this trek into the antiquity of his making presents a challenge to the preconceived notions of cause and effect. The real question that John must apply here is whether the cause and effect model is always enough to answer to why things happened rather than just confirming that events did occur in relation to another.
“He did what every white businessman would do with his business: he kept records.”
The “he” is John’s father, Moses. The business in question is bootlegging. And the reason this information is worthwhile to John long after his father’s death is because when a black man sells bootleg liquor to rich white people who do not expect him to do something so outside the norm and—well, let’s just say it—clever, tables tend to get turned. Moses Washington was in the bootleg liquor business to be sure, but he made his fortune by being in the record-keeping business. Records that could be used to blackmail and control those upstanding rich white citizens.
“Everybody thought it was an accident. The Judge thought it was murder. I thought I had discovered it was a suicide. But what it really was was…a hunting trip.”
Why the Judge believes that Moses Washington was murdered should be clear enough: a black man with that much power in a white town isn’t likely to stay alive for too long no matter how smart and lucky he is. Why everybody thought was an accident is because that was the story of the coverup by those who didn’t want it getting out that he had been murdered. The suicide angle covers the other half of the mystery at the heart of the story because Moses was found dead at the gravesite of his grandfather, a runaway slave who committed mass suicide with others rather than going back into bondage. So if it wasn’t murder, or an accident or a suicide…what happened on that hunting trip? What was the effect of going on that hunt? And what was the cause?
