LIVING INSIDE THE LAYERS OF ONE KIND FAVOR (12/13/22)
(NOTE: I’m no book reviewer, but feel so strongly about the late Kevin McIlvoy’s beautiful novel, One Kind Favor, WTAW Press, 2021, his beautiful life, I just started writing. And I can’t wait to read the rest of his works!)
How to explain this story, this One Kind Favor.
Well, on one level it’s a story about a Black teen, name of Lincoln, murdered in a small town in rural North Carolina, lynched, actually, lynched on the town’s playground swing-set, his body left purposefully where growing minds gather.
It’s about the cover up of this young boy’s murder and the maybe not-so-atypical coroner’s report claiming Lincoln’s rope burns circling his neck were “consistent with ant injuries.”
Ant injuries.
And it’s a story based on a true story, a lynching taking place “way back” in 2014—and there’s no need to sort way back through our cerebrums to understand this is a story based on many, many true stories.
Ah, unfortunately we know this story.
Let’s drop down another layer: though based on a true story, this story takes place in an imagined small southern town, name of Cord (of course), which has lost its once not-so-ugly soul. A town voting Obama in 2008 then swinging Trump in 2016. So it’s about our country, “Merika”, told from the tribal omniscient point-of-view, which lashes together kindness and hate within the same throbbing heart.
“By June 2009 we hated Obama, who was beyond us in his patient and decent and compassionate nature; his resistance to corruption was beyond our tolerance; his resilience was beyond our comprehension: a seeming-tame, sleeves-rolled-up street organizer but a not-your-negro-pushover. We hated his darkasdarkestAfrica wife for her stare-right-through-you eyes and her muscled arms and her fierce, authentic love for her husband; we hated their undimmed, bright children unmistakenly happier than our white-bright but dimming children.”
Of course, since it’s written by Kevin McIlvoy, this story cuts all kinds of ways.
There’s Shakespeare and Second Corinthians and Walt Whitman and North Carolina state history and politics reaching back to at least 1781. There’s NASA’s explorations of Mars and grieving mothers’ explorations of the underworld. For sure there’s ghosts, Presences, and other Remnants of former living beings. There’s even a talking ghost-dog.
Look, here’s your warning: Sentences jump out at you from nowhere and in their beauty and brutality scare you into listening. McIlvoy said in Mitzi Rapkin’s First Draft podcast that One Kind Favor is not a book where you can “push and glide” your way through. Instead, he says, “you are asked to live inside each sentence.”
Let’s live inside this one: “You could not discount the beauty of the bound young couple, their linkage very definitely a poem, that is, a communion of like and unalike that cannot and must not and must and will join, and at the places of joining will and must and must not and must fall away instantaneously, the heart of the person inside the poem plummeting.”
OK, just one more: “We talked in the way a young man and an older man in nine feet of darkness will who are digging farther down, leaving the most crucial talking to the shovels.”
That’s just the town’s narrative voice.
Let’s take a look at one of his teaming cast of alive and not-so-dead characters, animate and inanimate characters. Let’s try Acker, who…
“… could be confusing. Thirty or so, or fifty or sixty or so, or undefinably epochal, she had a punk thing going from the white face makeup to the blue lipstick (black sometimes) to the white fingernails to the bright white boots so bright you could not really see her feet … . … Her exposed belly button, circled by the tattoo words, Discuss Rules Beforehand, was pierced with a metal tuning fork embossed with the ratio 3:2. Tiny, but real, the thing could be struck and sounded, a severe-true-serene tone… .”
That’s the brief, tamer-saner version of her description.
A smattering of McIlvoy’s made-up (or revised) (or extrapolated) (or reconstituted) always playful vocab might help put One Kind Favor in perspective: evanglitrumper, sorrymomsorry, cryptbreaths, fairydawnlight, sleepdribble, gringringy, and of course, poeticoital and vagenius.
That’s about as far down into the deep pools of this story I’m capable of dropping. Can we agree you’ll just have to read the book?
On more warning: One Kind Favor is not for the faint-of-heart—but the novel may work wonders on the heart-of-faint and the heart-of-sigh and the heart-of-outraged-and-race-haunted. It’s a story that haunts because it’s so familiar. It’s a story that’s unforgettable because it’s so strange. Can there be a better recommendation?
Go ahead then. You writers out there might come away with a few thoughts on how to create more playfully, yet in a deadly sort of way (or more deadly in a playful sort of way). You readers? If you’re burdened with my samesorryhabit (as McIlvoy might say) of dog-earing favorite passages, you’ll come away with a thoroughly chewed-up book.
Chewed up mind? Well, that’s possible too.
Just know this: the ghosts are not just for your entertainment. And neither is this book, this One Kind Favor.
OK, you’re on your own now.
WHO IS EARLY RACHEL? (May 22, 2022)
My Mom (1927-2022)!
She started painting as she transitioned into retirement from her stellar career as a math professor. There’s a math endowment in her name for aspiring young mathematician women at Brevard College where she taught for 37 years. (If you’d like to support these young women, go to the Brevard College Endowment Page, choose Named Scholarship/Project and input “Rachel Daniels Endowment Scholarship for Mathematics”.)
As a painter, my mom signed her first works “Early Rachel”—then continued signing this way for the next 30 years. Won several awards for her water colors. As you can probably tell from the art, her heart was happiest in the Western North Carolina mountains. She frequently joked that she would paint the ocean—if she could only find a way to work a mountain into the waves.
Once Live Caught was complete, I realized many of my scenes, at least in my head, came right out of her artwork. Not sure whether I first saw the art, then created the scenes, or if her imaginings became such strong characters in my own life, in my own heart, that they simply inserted themselves onto my pages.
Either way, I just love perusing her paintings, and I hope you do too.
