He bought a package of typing paper and wrote straight through the stack, then he turned it over and wrote on the backsides of the pages.
Only Beto knew the reason for his writing.
For years, he had saved his Christmas present from Naomi, that red notebook he’d found in the bag Jim Fuller had lifted from the car’s trunk and pressed into his arms along with the guitar case. For years, he had waited to be ready for it.
He knew the story would not be easy to tell. By the time he began, it had been buried under the lime of falsehood for a decade. The March 23, 1937, newspaper article from the San Antonio Express, which he carried in the inside pocket of his wallet, was proof of that.
The piece was entitled “Backwoods Bloodbath Shocks East Texas Town Already Shattered by School Blast.” It informed the reader of the following facts:
Just days after the tragic New London school explosion that claimed nearly 300 lives, a survivor of the blast, Naomi Smith, was abducted, beaten, and raped by a Negro youth by the name James Washington Fuller. When the girl’s stepfather, Henry Smith, noticed her disappearance, he suspected foul play and set out to search for her in the woods near the Negro community of Egypt Town just outside of New London. He found her in the midst of the most terrible indignity a woman could suffer, and he struggled to rescue his stepdaughter from the clutches of the assailant. At some point, a gun was drawn, and an accidental discharge of the weapon killed both Naomi and Fuller. While there were no witnesses, police determined from evidence at the scene that Smith, crazed with grief and rage, then turned the gun on himself. Police have indicated that no further investigation will be conducted.
Beto knew each word of the article by heart. He knew the article because it was the ugly obverse of the real story, the one that lived inside him. It was the distorted black space around what had really been. Some nights, when he couldn’t sleep, Beto went over in his mind the many details that must have been ignored to come to the conclusions reported in the article. Among them were the presence of two different guns, the bloody rope discarded by the tree, and the near physical impossibility of shooting oneself in the head with a shotgun.
Yet no one had asked any questions. The case was closed, another burden Beto had survived to carry.
It wasn’t that Beto wanted to tell the story. It was that he had to. He hoped that, after, he could begin to dream of the fragile joy of the months before the explosion and of the family that they had made for themselves in the woods. They had been happy, for a time, before the rules found them. Before the terrible price was exacted for their transgressions. For the crossing of lines. For friendship, for love.
And so he worked. Piecing together memories. Imagining what he could not have known. Writing out the ruins of his former life. He wrote until the story was there, outside him, terrible in its truth.
He needs you, reader. All he asks is that you take the story up and carry it for a while.
This strange song, gathered out of darkness.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The 1937 New London school explosion ravaged a community about ten miles from my hometown; it is still on record as the deadliest school disaster in the United States. With the exception of the explosion, the tragedies that unfold in the novel are products of my imagination. Still, they are generally consistent with documented occurrences in other parts of Texas and the South during the 1930s. There is considerable historical precedent for the racism, sexual abuse, violence against minorities, and other distressing facets of life portrayed in the novel.
An understandable protective impulse sometimes inspires efforts to conceal, diminish, or disavow such painful histories. The work of this book, however, was to bring to light experiences and narratives that might otherwise go unacknowledged. I have tried to balance the heartbreak, cruelty, and ignorance of my characters’ world with a profound attention to the forms of kindness and connection that are also possible in it.
All characters in Out of Darkness are fictional; any resemblance to actual persons is coincidental. Despite my interest in the history of the New London school explosion, I’ve also taken many liberties with details, circumstances, dates, and local geography. For example, I placed Beto and Cari’s classroom in the building that exploded when in fact this part of the school did not house the lower elementary grades. The scene at Wash’s home and the tragic outcome of Wash and Naomi’s romance are not based on any events in the New London area, although comparably gruesome events did occur elsewhere in the South. Lynchings and vigilante acts were especially likely in periods of economic difficulty or following a major community disruption like the explosion.
Factual details catalyzed some of my imaginings. For example, I learned that mounted Texas Rangers were sent to the homes of school board members, where they succeeded at diffusing threats of violence. This information caused me to consider what might have happened to a potential scapegoat not afforded this kind of protection.
The relative absence of historical information about the African American community in East Texas during the oil boom left me wondering: how might the school explosion have been felt by families whose children were spared precisely because they had been denied access to the state-of-the-art New London school? Similarly, when I discovered that at least one of the children killed in the New London explosion was likely Hispanic (although her family may well have downplayed this background, as the twins and Naomi are encouraged to), I began to consider what might have brought a Latino family to the primarily black and white community of 1930s East Texas. The educational experiences of Naomi, Wash, and the twins allowed me to incorporate glimpses of the tripartite segregation system present in Texas before the Civil Rights Movement, a system that separated children into “white,” “colored,” and “Mexican” schools.
In researching this novel, I was struck by the many ways in which whole swaths of lived experience have been largely excluded from historical accounts, in part because certain communities were not deemed worthy of note in newspapers and other sources considered authoritative and reliable. These silences need to be amended; I hope my fiction gives readers an appetite for stories lived in the margins of spotlit scenes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much gratitude to my editor, Andrew Karre, for sharing my vision for this novel and deepening it. Thanks also to my agent, Steven Chudney, and to the excellent professionals at Carolrhoda Lab and Lerner. Special thanks to Alisa Alering, who read the manuscript multiple times and offered many insights and suggestions. Thanks to Tanita Davis for encouragement at a crucial juncture and to Terry Ray and Wayne Ray for insights on historical detail and oil field experience. Passages from Out of Darkness were initially published in the October 2013 issue of the Texas Observer under the title “3:17”; thanks to the magazine for permission to reprint the material here.
The curators and volunteers at the London Museum in New London, Texas, shared personal stories and provided me with generous access to the museum’s archival materials. Two recent historical accounts of the explosion, David Brown and Michael Wereschagin’s Gone at 3:17: The Untold Story of the Worst School Disaster in American History (Potomac Books, 2012) and Ron Rozelle’s My Boys and Girls Are in There: The 1937 New London School Explosion (Texas A&M University Press, 2012), were also indispensable to me in the writing of this book. Gone at 3:17 makes for especially fascinating reading in its own right. In addition to many histories of African American experience in the 1910s through the 1930s, Koritha Mitchell’s Living with Lynching (Illinois University Press, 2012) helped me reckon with the ethical stakes of portraying lynching in fiction. The interviews, studies, and books I consulted regarding Mexican American life in San Antonio, school segregation in Texas, and the particulars of the East Texas oil field are too numerous to name here; for this important body of research, I am grateful. Any remaining errors or anachronisms in the novel are my doing.
Great thanks to my family and friends in Kilgore, El Paso, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Bloomington, Den
ver, Des Moines, and beyond. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my parents who, among their many other virtues, never stopped showing me the beauty of East Texas. And there would be no novel without the patience and support of my husband, Arnulfo, and our son, Liam Miguel. I hope that Liam Miguel will show his sequel how it’s done.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ashley Hope Pérez grew up in Texas and taught high school in Houston before pursuing a PhD in comparative literature. She is now a visiting assistant professor of comparative studies at The Ohio State University and spends most of her time reading, writing, and teaching on topics from global youth narratives to Latin American and Latina/o fiction. She is also the author of the YA novels What Can’t Wait (Carolrhoda Lab, 2011) and The Knife and the Butterfly (Carolrhoda Lab, 2012). Her debut novel What Can’t Wait won a spot on the 2012 YALSA Best Fiction for YA list, and The Knife and the Butterfly was included in the 2015 YALSA Popular Paperbacks list. Ashley lives in Ohio with her husband, Arnulfo, and their son, Liam Miguel. Visit her online at http://www.ashleyperez.com/.
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