Sarang's latest effort, We Are Not Afraid, is one of the hardest to read of all his books. I admit I put it down several times, and only the need to generate blog content compelled me to pick it back up.
To a large extent this is attributable to the book's subject matter, which is unrelentingly dark and sharp-edged. Afraid is set in Louisiana in the period leading up to the 50th anniversary of a major civil rights march. The governor's office, mostly represented in the book by the governor's oleaginous chief of staff, Blake Stenner, is planning a series of corporate-sponsored events to commemorate the march. But civil rights activists feel that the governor, a white conservative Republican, is trying to co-opt the movement's symbols, paper over the state's abysmal record on civil rights, and draw attention away from how little progress has been made. The activists are organizing their own independent commemoration of the march and are energetically vying for media attention.
Meanwhile, living in a poorly-insulated mobile home in a run-down trailer park, slowly dying of kidney disease, and minimally employed, Robert Percy Johnson seems at first like an unlikely object of attention for the governor's office and the civil rights activists. But as a young man, Johnson took part in the march and, crucially, appeared in its most iconic photograph. Recreating that photograph fifty years later has become a fixation for the media, and so Johnson's loyalties will help determine which camp, if any, scores the coup.
But where do Johnson's loyalties lie? A white man, he is not much of a civil rights activist anymore, as we are reminded by his casual and frequently expressed (albeit fairly mild) racism. Actually, we learn, he was never exactly a true believer. At the time of the march he was dating a black woman, Sarah Hadley, and he went along to the march to be with her. In the iconic photograph, he is on one side of a large sign, and she is on the other, and they are looking into each other's eyes. In between, behind the waist-high sign, the marchers look straight ahead toward the camera, their black faces solemn and their jaws set. The contrasting spontaneity and joy in the faces of Robert Percy and Sarah lighten the picture and make it the classic that it has become.
At first, as both camps reach out to Johnson, we don't understand why their approaches are so oblique and guarded, and his reactions so unpredictable and volatile. Soon we learn, though, that Sarah broke up with Johnson years ago, and that he has never dated since. Nevertheless, he gradually lowers his guard and begins to bond with Sarah's daughter Chloe, a New Orleans lawyer and civil rights activist who is helping to organize the counter-commemoration.
But we eventually learn that it wasn't only the breakup of his relationship that embittered Robert Percy. A few weeks after the march, probably motivated by the famous picture (which was splashed across the front pages of local and national newspapers), the KKK abducted and castrated him. His attackers were never caught, and while Sarah went on to bigger and better things, Johnson never left town and never really regained control of his life. He dropped out of school and worked minimum-wage jobs, becoming obese and veering toward alcoholism. He has experienced life as a series of humiliations and setbacks, brief moments of hope always dashed by his limits and his self-destructive behavior.
The book's title (drawn from the hymn and civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome") comes to seem sarcastic. After all, Johnson is afraid of everything. He's afraid of his not-too-distant death. He's afraid his tormentors will never be brought to justice. He's afraid Sarah was his only chance at love, and he's afraid that he would have lost her even if he hadn't been castrated.
Sarang has plenty of surprises in store for us, but they don't include redemption for Robert Percy, and to make matters worse, we steadily lose sympathy for Chloe as her controlling, selfish impulses drive the plot forward. By the time Sarang is finished, life feels pervasively squalid and corrupt, and the end of the book brings finality but not closure, answers but not justice. And so maybe in all its ugliness and inconclusiveness Afraid faithfully tells the story of race and class in America, leaving the reader with a bitter pill to swallow.
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