Stormy Weather
An interesting thing happened the other day. I re-read the first few chapters of my novel The Blues Don’t Care. I liked it, of course, I wrote it. And I knew what to expect. But at the same time, I was uncomfortable reading it. It’s a mystery-thriller set on the Los Angeles home front during World War II in the 1940s.
And, while I want it to be an entertaining read, it also deals with some heavy issues such as racism and identity. I think it’s honest and the characters are true to the times. I wouldn’t change anything, but it did make me uncomfortable to see how things were back then and read them in print.
My first goal is always to entertain. To get the reader involved with the characters and the plot. To want to turn the page to see what happens next. But I also like setting many of my stories in real situations, sometimes historical. For example, my book White Heat takes place in the 1990s, during and after the events surrounding the Rodney King incident. The sequel, Broken Windows, takes place a couple of years later during the heated anti-illegal alien Proposition 187 controversy in California. And now The Blues Don’t Care during the turmoil of the World War II home front.
In The Blues Don’t Care, Bobby Saxon wants to play with the house band at the famous Club Alabam on Central Avenue in L.A. If he gets the gig he would be the only white player in the all African-American band. But in order to get the gig with the band the leader asks Bobby to play detective and help clear one of the band members of a murder he is falsely accused of.
Bobby also has his own secrets that give him a special empathy for the discrimination faced by his bandmates. The band members are outsiders in their way, being black men in a white society, but Bobby is also an outsider in many ways as well, in a society that doesn’t deal well with people outside the mainstream.
The question becomes do we write things the way they were or do we clean them up for our era? As a writer you sometimes have to deal with things that are hard to think about, difficult to write about and unpleasant. But you do it because you want your writing to be truthful and authentic. You don’t want to paint a picture that isn’t realistic. This is especially true in writing a historical novel. Sometimes that means a character might say or do something even you, as the author, don’t like because that’s the way things were and to portray them any other way would be phony. There is a temptation to give your characters a 21st century view of the world, but to do that weakens the story. Sure, you can have characters that are ahead of their time, and that’s a good thing, but overall the society and other characters need to be true to that time period.
Imagine Walter Mosley writing about Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s without showing any racial tensions. Imagine Tolstoy writing about Anna Karenina having the freedom to marry or not marry whomever she chooses. Writers have to write about unpleasant things and things that we wish didn’t exist in the world.
Attitudes have changed a lot since the 1940s and when we look back at the way things were it can seem shocking to us. For starters, society in the 40s was racially segregated. For the most part, blacks and whites didn’t mix. Some hotels and restaurants wouldn’t serve blacks. Even world-renowned black musicians weren’t allowed to stay in “white hotels” and had to stay at the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, next door to the Alabam. It was common for whites to call a black man “boy.” Blacks were harassed by the police and were suspect if they entered a white neighborhood.
All men were denigrated if they weren’t “man enough.” And during WWII if a man wasn’t in uniform he was suspected of being a traitor, or worse than that, a “sissy.” Before the war, when they became Rosie the Riveters, women were expected to marry and become housewives and not have careers.
So, because reading my book made me uncomfortable—and might do the same to others—does it mean I shouldn’t have written it? Does it mean I shouldn’t have brought up things that are offensive and disturbing? I don’t think so. We need to be able to look at the past, to deal with uncomfortable things. These days a lot of people want to ban uncomfortable or offensive things. But I disagree and think we need to know our own history if we are to avoid repeating it (to paraphrase a famous quote).
At the same time, I’m not putting down people who are sensitive. No one wants to pick up a book expecting one thing and then be subjected to something they find distasteful or upsetting. And everyone has different tolerance thresholds. So in this book, as well as others, I have an Author’s Note in the beginning, or what others might call a Trigger Warning. It says in part, “This book contains offensive language, but please consider this in the context and idioms of the era in which it takes place.”
I have mixed feelings about trigger warnings. But I’m not out to offend anyone and if they’re sensitive about certain things then I think they should know what they’re getting into ahead of time.
As writers we should observe and portray society as we see it and as it was. Even when that is something unpleasant that might offend someone. Because sometimes what is offensive is what we need to open our eyes.
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