Our Eyes Couldn’t Stop Opening by Megan Abbott, 2007
The magic trick:
A racially prejudiced narrator – but not one whose overt racism is the point of the story but one whose prejudice is more subtle or incidental
We close our week of Megan Abbott and the Akashic Books Noir series with her entry in the Detroit Noir collection. In it, a bunch of high school girls from the nice side of town venture across Alter Road (evidently the unofficial boundary between Grosse Pointe and Detroit proper). The city and its half-vacant streets and rows of rundown trailers is alluring to them for its mystery. It’s forbidden and dangerous. And race is a big part of this. The white, upper-middle-class narrator doesn’t even use coded language much in discussing the situation. And this is where our magic trick lies. You’ve probably read many short stories over the years with racist narrators. In most cases, I’m willing guess, it’s an overt technique. The author almost undoubtedly is making an obvious point against racism.
But here, the racism is far more subtle. At least I read it as such. It’s not the dominant characteristic of the narrator. I’m sure she would be appalled to hear her described as racist. But she demonstrates plenty of prejudice and racist fear throughout her telling of this story.
It’s an interesting thing. I think Abbott – a white woman from Detroit, by the way – deserves a lot of credit here. It’s very easy to read such fundamental prejudice in a narrator as being representative of the author. So Abbott is putting herself on the line here. It would be far less risky, in my opinion, for her to push further and make the narrator’s racism more obvious or a more obvious driver of the plot. Leaving it sit there in the story on a simmer in the background is a bold choice and it makes the story work brilliantly.
And that’s quite a trick on Abbott’s part.
The selection:
His voice was low and rippled and yeah, I’ll say it, his skin was dark as black velvet, with a blue glow under the streetlamp, and he was talking to his friends from the sidewalk and we could almost hear them and God we wanted to and there was Keri and she had her hands curled around the edges of the top of the car door, window down, and he was looking at her like he knew her, and how could he? He didn’t, but he couldn’t miss that long spray of hair tumbling out the window as she craned to get a better look, to hear, to get meaning.
“You lost, honey?” is what he said, and it was like glass shattering, or something stretched tight for a thousand miles suddenly letting loose, releasing, releasing.
“Yes,” was all she managed to whisper back before Joni had dropped her foot down on the gas hard and we all charged away, our hearts hammering …
… and Keri still saying, Yes, yes, yes …
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