Dining with Serial Killers

Sundays

Welcome back to “Sundays.” Please consider joining me tonight at 7PM Eastern for my first live Q&A, which I’m doing for the paid supporters in our community.

At the beginning of the year, I embarked on a mission to re-read all of Henry James’ novels. I’d become disconnected from literature over the last couple of years, despite the fact that it had been a staple of my life, one that brought me the greatest solace, for most of my life.

During the Onslaught (which is how I sometimes refer to the almost daily waves of bad news and trauma we’ve all been subjected to – if not directly been affected by) since November 2016, it’s become difficult for me to concentrate for long stretches of time; something that had never been an issue before. So, I took refuge in more accessible books, like murder mysteries (this is not a diss—I love murder mysteries, but they do not feed my soul).

It wasn’t enough. It felt like parts of my brain were atrophying. I had lost enough brain cells and I didn’t want to lose more.

I wasn’t quite ready for William Faulkner or Toni Morrison, so I started with James. It’s not that his dense prose is necessarily an easy read, but his style is more narratively straightforward and his stories farther removed from our troubled history.

I never studied James in school, but I fell in love with his writing after I read The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl when I was in college. With the exception of a few earlier novels (Roderick Hudson, The Princess Cassamassima, and The Bostonians) I read everything he wrote, including every single one of his short stories, his collected letters, and Leon Edel’s five-volume biography (while it’s true I’m a science fiction nerd, this is the kind of nerd I really am underneath it all).

After getting through the seven novels that preceded it (the last being the sublime The Portrait of a Lady), I started The Bostonians. On the surface, it’s a story about a love triangle with Basil Ransom, a southern conservative, and his cousin Olive Chancellor, a Bostonian feminist in a battle over the affections of (and control over) Verena Tarrant.

The problem, however, is that Ransom fought on the wrong side of the Civil War. He believed that secession was a good cause, because his family enslaved people and wanted to continue being able to do so.

Ransom comes north to jump-start his career as a lawyer, but he can’t get any articles published in legal journals because, as one editor writes in a rejection letter, “his doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some magazine of the sixteenth century would be happy to print them” 

Basil Ransom, one of the two protagonists in this novel fighting for the love of the heroine, is, basically, an unreconstructed racist.

I love Henry James’ work in part because of his innate understanding of the complexities and limits of human relationships (including our relationships to ourselves), but mostly because of the glorious, luxurious density of his prose. As soon as it became clear, however, that Basil Ransom, as distasteful as his northern counterparts might find his politics, was going to be welcome into their drawing rooms and at their dinner parties, I had to put the book down.

This man is an unrepentant monster who believes thoroughly in his lost cause — and The Lost Cause. He regrets the war not because he has an epiphany about the egregiousness of what he willingly participated in with eyes wide open, but because he and his family were ruined by it. The failures of Reconstruction are legion — or, more accurately, the failure of white mostly Republican northerners to fulfill the vast promise of Reconstruction are legion — and one seed of those failures was the ostensibly simple act of allowing these serial killers a place at the table without question or consequence.

I grew up with my own serial killers (using the term metaphorically, of course), and even if I didn’t know that’s who they were, I had inklings from a very young age. Eventually, I saw the racism, and the homophobia, and the misogyny, but I said nothing. I ate at the same tables; I pretended it was all just fine because, although I was from them I was not of them. I even allowed myself to become close with a couple of them, long after I should have known better.

And that’s how the accommodation starts. We grow up with the unacceptable and the unbearable and accommodation is a tool that can make our lives easier. Accommodating the unbearable and the unacceptable is easier than doing the right thing—and then it becomes habitual. Eventually, we use it to let ourselves off the hook, because that’s easier, too.

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Maya Angelou made it look easy to do the right thing. When a guest in her house said something discriminatory, she asked them to leave. She would not allow, “poison and vulgarity” in her house. Any racial or sexual pejorative is designed to make a person less than, she said, and that kind of hateful disregard seeps in, leaps from one person to the next.

Angelou counseled us to “do one courageous thing in a small way.” From there, do another, and then another until, finally, you can say, without hesitation,

no, not in my house you don’t, you do not paint my walls with poison and vulgarity….

I'm convinced that the negative has power. It lives. And if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over. So, when the rude or cruel thing is said—the lambasting, the gay bashing, the hate—I say, “Take it all out of my house!” Those negative words climb into the woodwork and into the furniture, and the next thing you know they'll be on my skin.

This country is our shared home, and we’re not just letting the serial killers sit at the table. Some of us are actually delivering the invitation for them to do so.

We need to start saying, "Take it all out of my house!"

– Mary