[As part of this
summer’s
beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis
Lehane’s The Given Day (2008),
one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this
series, I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better
remember; share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a boundary-blurring
crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the problem
with historical happy endings, and why we still need them.
According to the
ever-reliable internet, filmmaker
Orson Welles once said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of
course, on where you stop your story.” Whether big O actually said that or not,
the sentiment certainly holds true, as reflected in and commented on by such
literary texts as Anne
Sexton’s poem “Cinderella” and Margaret
Atwood’s short short story “Happy Endings.” But while of course most creative
writers have more or less absolute authority about where they stop their
stories, and thus of what kind of ending they create, those working in a genre
like historical fiction have another layer of complexity to the question: no
matter where a historical novelist chooses to end his or her book, after all,
history continued to unfold after that point, and our knowledge of those
unfolding histories might well shift the happiness (along with every other aspect)
of the book’s ending.
[SPOILERS FOR GIVEN DAY FOLLOW:] This dilemma is
particularly acute for the happiest ending to Lehane’s multi-faceted novel. In
that ending, African American protagonist Luther Laurence returns to Tulsa,
where he had left behind his pregnant wife Lila years before; not only is
Luther reunited with and welcomed back by Lila, not only does he meet his son
for the first time, but he also makes peace with the local criminal from whom
he had been fleeing when he moved to Boston. That’s a particularly powerful
scene, in which Luther has the jump on this man but chooses not to kill him,
telling him he’s seen too many African Americans killed and doesn’t want to add
another body to the mix; given the chance to kill Luther instead, the man
returns the favor and lets him go. All of this takes place in Greenwood, the neighborhood
in Tulsa that came to be known as “Black Wall Street” and that represented a space of especial possibility
and promise for African Americans around the country—and the neighborhood
that, less than two years after this happy ending, would be burned to the
ground by a rampaging white mob, in one of the worst racial massacres
in the nation’s long
history of such events.
It’s hard to
know exactly what to make of Lehane’s Tulsa ending to Luther’s story, in light
of this historical aftermath. Certainly Lehane (whose research
for The Given Day seems
impeccable) must have known about the massacre, so it’s possible that he
intends the juxtaposition as one more reflection of the novel’s themes of the
cycle of violence and its horrific effects. (Although in that case, even a brief
mention of the massacre in his afterword would help make that link more
apparent for his audience, many of whom I believe will never have heard of the
massacre.) But on the other hand, it’s important not to let our knowledge of
history become its own self-fulfilling prophecy, to read African American lives
and communities solely through a teleology of the acts of individual and
communal violence that have been directed against them throughout our past (and
present). To put it simply: Luther has earned his happy ending, and then
some (as has Lila to be sure); since Lehane chose to stop his story here, to
give this character and us this deserved happiness, then there’s something to
be said for embracing and enjoying that choice on its own terms.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: historical fictions you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!
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