The Novel I’m Not Going To Write

Full disclosure:  I am distantly related to Thomas Dixon Jr., author of The Clansman, the novel D.W. Griffith turned into the movie The Birth Of A Nation.

Dixon, feeling he had been shortchanged by Griffith, took his money from the movie sale and invested it in his own studio to make his own movies.  He went bankrupt and lost his shirt in the process, so that part of the story has a happy ending.

. . .

In the mid-1970s, while still in the Army, I began my first serious attempts at writing novels.

They sucked; don’t ask to see ‘em.  I wrote highly derivative works of the Ace Doubles school of sci-fi and, while I like Ace Doubles for a variety of reasons, looking back I see little point in trying to emulate a form and sub-genre that already became passe’ by the time I reached my early 20s.

I did have one idea I thought possessed a lot of potential, one that would comfortably fit in the horror genre, and since at that time Stephen King’s books started selling briskly among mainstream audiences, I figured that might be worth a shot.

Here’s the premise:
A spectral KKK horseman is attacking a contemporary African-American community.  The killings, while gruesome, appear to be the work of a human being, but being spectral the klansman leaves no physical evidence behind.

In the course of investigating the murders, the protagonist leans the killer is a demonic entity that preys off human fear; it’s linked to massacres and atrocities stretching back all the way from Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Hitler’s holocaust to prehistoric times.  The protagonist defeats it by facing it down without succumbing to fear, and the entity leaves the African-American community to look for victims elsewhere.

I planned to call it The Klansman in an effort to reclaim the title from my long dead relative and repudiate his work.

Luckily for all of us, 20-something Spec. 4 Dixon possessed enough self-awareness to realize he’d need to do a lot of research -- a lot of research! -- to make the community and characters sound authentic, and so this project got pushed to the back of the queue time and again as other work proved more urgent.

But I never gave up on it…

…until now.

. . .

If I could write as adequately then as I do now, I might have gotten away with it…for a time.

Eventually, however, someone would fairly ask, “Why are you, a white guy, writing a story set among African-Americans about an issue that has long been a concern among African-Americans?”

Maybe I could generate some good will -- “Well, he’s trying.” -- but the bottom line would remain.

It’s a story -- supernatural entity or no -- about how African-Americans respond to racist terrorism in their midst.

I could write a generic thriller about a town that fights off a gang of desperadoes that attacks them because specific racial content could easily be sidestepped.

But the whole point of this story is that the spectral klansman specifically targets African-Americans.

I think I could get away with writing a story set in whole or in part in an African-American community that deals with some universal issue, but the bigger and more specific an issue is to African-Americans, the more challenging it would be to not come across as a dumb “white savior”.

A monster motivated by fear in a non-specific community?  Sure, fine, absolutely.  I can do that.  

Focusing said motivation on race in the context of American race relations?

That’s a minefield.

Fools rush in, as they say…

. . .

In recent days, as events unfold around the country, it becomes increasingly obvious to me that The Klansman is not my story to tell.

As sincere as I think my intentions are, it’s not something I could ever write with enough authenticity to do it justice.

Anybody out there want to take the idea and run with it, go ahead, be my guest: I release it into the wild. 

If you sell it, send me a copy.

© Buzz Dixon