Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin


When people not of an oppressed group write of the oppressed (White people writing about Black people, straight people writing about gay people, men writing about women, etc.), a certain level of nuance and understanding is required. Too often, people write as if they are owed the benefit of the doubt. Sorry, stranger, but the benefit of the doubt must be earned, not assumed. In Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Tom Franklin made that more difficult with these two sentences: “Larry had been chubby as a kid but now his face was lean, his brown hair short but choppy as he cut it himself, had been doing so even before his mother had gone into River Acres, a nursing home nowhere near a river and mostly bull of blacks, both the attendants and attended. He’d have preferred somewhere better, but it was all he could afford.” Maybe Franklin didn’t mean it like that, but he hadn’t earned the benefit of the doubt yet. That was in Chapter One. He never really helped himself from there.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is the story of a Black boy and a White boy who grew up in southern Mississippi in the 1970s. The two had been friends once, but never as adults. The White boy, Larry Ott, had been accused of kidnapping a killing a girl in 1982. In the present day, he is now accused of doing the same to a college student. The Black boy, Silas Jones, is now the county constable. Through a series of not-so-surprising twists, we learn the truth of why Silas and Larry’s friendship died, what really happened in 1982, and how they led to the present day predicament.

As I neared the end of the book, I thought about the absurdity of the plot. At its core, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is about Silas Jones’ attempts to redeem himself in the eyes of Larry Ott because he failed to stand up for Larry as a friend in high school even though their friendship died when Larry called Silas “nigger.” Yes, it is realistic, but that reality of part of the ugly side of America. Franklin wrote the novel in such a way that Larry is the hero; the reader is supposed to root for him. I cannot support that.

Yes, Silas is a contemptible character, but he is stereotypically so. As both a young man and an old one, his eyes are swayed by the White female temptress. He is so athletically gifted that he earned a Division I college baseball scholarship as a left-handed shortstop (but he doesn’t get drafted in the 1980s?). When he first met Larry, he gave the boy a “quick soul shake.” Then again, all of the Black people of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter are stereotypes. For example, when Larry first went to seventh grade in a school that was mostly Black, he discovered, “Everything Larry couldn’t do—spike a volleyball, throw a football or catch one, field a grounder, fire a dodgeball—these black boys could. Did. They manipulated balls as if by magic, basketballs swishing impossibly, baseballs swiped out of the air, fierceeyed boys hurling and curving through their lives as smoothly as boomerangs. None read, though, or understood Larry’s love for books.” Really?

That’s what this book was to me. I don’t like that, and I didn’t like this book. It was written well, though.

D+