The Chaneysville Incident
What does one learn from history? Does one merely learn dates and facts with no understanding of what they mean, or does one learn the tortuous chain of events and complex motivations that result in war, genocide, racism, and all the other atrocities in which humanity revels? If one does learn the causes and effects of the long haul of history, is that enough to explain why a black man who has manipulated the white power structure of a racist town to his advantage through the sale of bootleg whiskey suddenly kills himself with a shotgun in a forgotten graveyard?
These are the questions that confront and haunt John Washington, a thirty-one-year-old black historian and teacher who has been obsessed since he was eleven with finding out why his moonshiner father, Moses Washington, committed suicide in the hills of Chaneysville in Raystown, Pennsylvania. His mentor and his father’s closest friend, a bootblack named Jack Crawley, has always felt that Moses Washington had a deeply rooted death wish and finally succeeded in getting that wish. Washington, however, is convinced that there were deeper, more complex reasons for the suicide, that a chain of events which began nearly two hundred years earlier led to the Chaneysville incident.
This is the premise that gradually emerges from David Bradley’s extraordinary narrative, that determining what people are and why they act as they do is far more involved than merely tracing genealogy. In the case of John Washington, there is a long and complicated history of racism and slavery to be sorted out, and even then he can never know for sure what made his father pull the trigger.
Bradley’s approach in compiling this exceptional, multileveled work (the result of ten years’ research) is a boldly unconventional one. Instead of a straight-ahead storyline with a clear-cut conflict, he offers an indirect narrative steeped in large chunks of historical exposition and lengthy folktales that do not seem to have any relevance at first, but which build into a pattern and converge on the reader so that eventually almost all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. This approach has all the built-in risks of an essentially plotless story, but Bradley has the stylish genius to make it work. His flashbacks regarding America’s contemptible racial history are so fascinatingly informative and so packed with polemical wit, irony, and anger that he keeps the reader hooked despite the lack of a conventional narrative.
The fact that Bradley is a black historian reared in Pennsylvania indicates that John Washington is clearly a stand-in for a lifetime of pent-up fury at American racism. How much of the narrative beyond that is autobiographical, only Bradley can say. What gradually becomes clear about Washington is that he is a product of his environment, of his father’s strange, moody behavior and mysterious goings-on in the family attic, and of the woodcraft and pride in black culture taught him by Jack Crawley, his surrogate father. These factors make him conscious of his inability to fit into the elitist white society of Raystown, yet, the same factors drive him to ask questions, especially after his father’s death. It turns out that Moses Washington had been doing some sort of research in the attic, rummaging through and making notes on historical documents and history books—but why?
John Washington’s own research at age eleven, using the materials available to his father, leads him to a dead end, but this, he discovers years later, is because he was expecting mere facts to yield a man’s thoughts, and they can never do that. Still, his interest in history...
(This entire section contains 1791 words.)
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as a result of his research is fired into a lifelong passion, especially as it relates to his own oppressed people, and he dedicates his life to uncovering and recording the sordid causes and effects that led to a minority race achieving dominance over a majority one.
Thus, Bradley’s narrative, though set in Pennsylvania, takes in not only all of America but Africa and parts of Europe as well; his protagonist discusses, at seemingly random points, the financial, political, and human causes of slavery. Because this is not an “objective” book, the character of John Washington is free to imbue his wide-ranging historical discourse with sardonic anger and humor, offering a far more probing, vivid and eye-opening lesson in American history than most school texts provide. In fact, Bradley makes one wish that most history books had this much flavor, fire, and courage to tell the truth, however subjectively. History, after all, is more a matter of interpreting and speculating on the facts at hand than merely offering a dry recitation of those facts. The historian has to be able to make bold psychological leaps in hope of fleshing out the individuals who make up history into living, complex beings instead of offering them as a gathering of illustrious or esoteric but distant names.
This is the sort of history John Washington pieces together as he runs down the life-stories of the men and women he has researched. It is a roundabout but effective way of showing how various people from disparate backgrounds seemed fated to converge to make slavery profitable, abolitionism possible, the Civil War inevitable, and a society so permeated with racial prejudice and cultural clashes as a result of that prejudice that there is not a state or county in the United States that is not tainted by it to some degree to this day, even and especially in the so-called liberal North.
For all the interesting sidelights he uncovers, John Washington is concerned primarily with the ambiguous doings of his father, who, it turns out, kept a ledger in which he recorded every bootleg whiskey sale he ever made to the white leaders of upright Raystown. Because Moses Washington had a knack for making superior liquor—passed down from his grandfather, C. K. Washington—he was able to insinuate himself into the white power structure of Raystown, thereby making himself rich and influential, though discreetly so. As John Washington aptly notes, excellent whiskey is a powerful commodity, even if the man selling it is a “nigger.” Nor should one gloss over the use of the word “nigger,” because Washington uses it repeatedly as a sarcastic means of commenting on the denigrating attitude expressed by such a slur and of venting his considerable hatred toward a white society that dares to place itself above all others solely on the basis of color. It is well to keep this point in mind considering the current antagonism toward Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) based on its repeated use of the word “nigger.” Just as Twain was using the word to reflect and satirize his times, so John Washington uses it to reflect the anger of his own time.
For all his mature knowledge, though, Washington is a flawed character. Wrapped up in his identity as a historian—he repeatedly incants praises to his profession—and the detachment that goes with that identity, he is incapable of emotional intimacy. His relationship with a white psychiatrist named Judith Powell bears this out. He can talk to her for hours on end about all sorts of things, but when it comes to feelings, he backs off, partly because she is white and would therefore “not understand,” but mainly because personal closeness would violate the defenses he has carefully built through his trained detachment. Like Sherlock Holmes, Washington prefers the solitude and logic of facts to the distractions of emotion. It is a decidedly unhealthy attitude and only toward the end of the book does Washington take a chance on revealing himself to Powell. By then, he has gone as far as he can in his research and must rely on his imagination to re-create what really happened more than a hundred years earlier to cause his father’s death.
This is where Bradley takes his biggest risk: substituting historical exposition and speculation for conventional character development. Concluding with 170 pages of straightforward history and fanciful storytelling, Bradley shows the reader the forces that combined to make John Washington who he is or thinks he is. It is here that the preliminaries of the first half of the book fall into place and make sense.
Regrettably, the adventure story that closes the book and reveals as much as possible about the link between the deaths of C. K. and Moses Washington is flawed by a major discrepancy: in the objective exposition, C. K.’s lover and compatriot, Harriet Brewer, leaves him forever but, in the subjective narrative, she dies with him. How could she possibly leave C. K. for good yet perish with him later on? Either Bradley or his editor should have caught this significant inconsistency before the book was published.
In the end, the reader is left to imagine why Moses Washington blew his brains out: did he have a compulsion to join his ancestors upon discovering their gravesite after twenty years of doggedly searching for it, or was there some other, darker motive that died with him? Neither the reader nor John Washington will ever know. This purposely ambiguous ending not only compels the reader to take part in the story, but also implies that history is often a dead-end street, that facts will take one only so far, that one can only imagine the motives of the dead when they have left no clear indication. Indeed, even if John Washington could go back in time to just before his father shot himself and ask him why, there is no assurance that Moses Washington could put his reason into words, or that even if he could, it would be the real one. At the conclusion, John Washington is left with a rotting wooden shack in the hills of Raystown and a pile of index cards that reveal everything and nothing. The best he can do is to burn the cards in a funeral pyre outside the shack—a gesture intended to expunge the past—and resume his life with nagging suspicions that will haunt him to his grave.
The Chaneysville Incident was awarded the PEN/Faulkner award for outstanding literary achievement, an award richly deserved. Bradley has not only followed in William Faulkner’s tradition of literary experimentation, but also has poured a library of knowledge, insight, and unique perceptions into a work of art that realizes its author’s monumental ambition. David Bradley has achieved no less than a mind-twisting, nonconformist saga on the themes of racism, obsession, and history. It is a book to be read, reread and savored, as much for what it tells about human behavior—black and white—as for its style and nuances.
