Damn Pinko Wants Morality in Books, by Josh Stallings

 Q: Do you often/sometimes weave a moral message into your writing, or do you think that's awful, and something that should never be attempted? Can you recommend good examples of books that do one or the other? 

 

A: Social commentary is one of the grand traditions of crime fiction going all the way back to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. When the first people sat around the fire telling tales I’m sure they had a moral component. It is near impossible to write without a personal point-of-view, it is equally impossible to have a point-of-view — excluding sociopaths — that has no moral stance. Even writing an amoral world is in itself a moral stance.

Where do we get one of these moral stances you speak of?

Our lives inform the causes we are attracted to investigate. And once we investigate them it is impossible to unsee that which we have discovered. 

I was a small child when my father was arrested. He served less than a year for disobeying a court order and sailing a trimaran that he along with other Quakers built to take them to the Christmas islands as a protest against nuclear testing*. This must have planted a seed that grew into my interest in prisons. Many folks in the peace and freedom movement saw the inside of jails. It made them heroes not “bad” people. Growing up I never saw prisoners as the other, or less than human. 

I grew up wild. As a teen I broke into homes, stole, sold pot and hash. At fifteen I was arrested for driving drunk without a license. A year later I was arrested for breaking and entering. I knew firsthand that criminals aren’t the other. I did community service for both these crimes. I was given second and third chances based solely on my whiteness. This affected my world view as well.  

As a child of the counter-culture I grew up believing humans are judged on their actions not on what society deems to label them. Profiteers who got wealthy making napalm designed to burn the flesh off villagers in Vietnam are worse than cats serving fifty years for stealing a car, or selling a pound of weed. Charles Manson is worse than a white-collar crook who fudged on his income taxes. If we allow the state to dictate who is and who isn’t labeled a criminal, then we are forced to agree that German citizens who refused to do as told by the Nazis are criminals. Or a less inflammatory example, people who drive 9 MPH over the speed limit are criminals. In the eyes of the state both are. My father was a criminal for acting out of his conscience. 

Com’on ya damn pinko, start talking about writing. 

Okay, right… Here’s the deal, it isn’t my job to convince readers to think one way or another, that would be propaganda, and lord knows we have enough of that bull crap flying around. It is my job to get truth — convenient or not — out into the world. 

When I wrote TRICKY I wanted to help readers see the diversity inside the intellectually disabled community. I also wanted to tell some truth about policing and justice in modern LA. A central question in TRICKY was, is a person with a record of heinous acts redeemable? When building Cisco’s character I had him at fourteen sentenced as an adult. He spent his formative years in adult prison. Part of that was to show what caused his hardness. And I wanted to expose the fact that we as a nation were punishing kids as if they were adults. And this isn’t old history, in 2001 in Florida a thirteen year old Black child was sentenced to life in prison. 

To have Cisco do time this way, it showed why the police didn’t believe they could trust him. That was the story motivation. My personal motivation was this was a truth about our justice system we needed to think about.

Mushrooms and injustice grow in the dark. It is part of our job to shed light on it. But it must always be in the context of the narrative. I don’t plan these things they come naturally out in the writing.    

Here are two different but good examples of writers who have written about the US prison system.

Chain Gang All Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, is a near future story where for profit prisons pit inmates against each other in gladiator battles. If they survive a certain number of death matches they can win their freedom. It is violent and action packed, filled with desperate passionate characters that had me up late into the night. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah also ends every chapter with a footnote, some that build and enrich the fictional world and others highlight injustices in our world. 

Here is a footnote from a chapter titled “Electric.”

“On June 16, 1944, fourteen-year-old George Stinney, Jr., became the youngest person ever executed by the United States. Young, Black in South Carolina. Of course, of course. He was charged with the murder of two young white girls who’d been killed by a railroad spike to the head. Seventy years after electricity pulled his life apart, he was exonerated. Since 1973, at least 186 who were wrongly convicted have been sentenced to death.”

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room weaves past lives with the current life of multiple characters in a woman's prison in central California. 

Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, is our guide through a hard life that began in a poor section of San Francisco, migrated to LA and ends up in prison with two consecutive life sentences. She is both innocent and jaded. Rachel Kushner handles her characters with respect and care but never hides their darker hard sides. Exposing what happens when you can’t afford real legal help, as public defenders are overworked and underpaid. They often haven’t the time to meet with the accused until the time of their trial. Maybe we let this slide because we believe “if they didn’t do anything, they wouldn’t be in court in the first place.” Often the only crime committed was to defend yourself, or show up in the wrong place at the wrong time while being poor.

She subtly slips in facts about prisons without judgement.

“How many of you are dyslexic?” Jones asked our group of sixty. Every person raised their hand except me.

We dyslexics hold a disproportionate number of jail cells, I was glad to see this confirmed. 

No one can read either of these books without coming away thinking we need complete prison reform.

Terry Shames is a great writer to read for moral content that is never preachy. A Reckoning in the Back Country: A Samuel Craddock Mystery, deals with illegal dog fights. A subject that is clearly upsetting, but in Shames’ hands you can look at it without needing to turn away.

We all have subjects that matter to us. As a reaction to gun violence, Eric Beetner edited two volumes of the anthology Unloaded: Crime Writers Writing Without Guns. Proceeds go to the non-profit States United To Prevent Gun Violence. He proved that guns weren’t necessary to tell good stories. And I know it made a lot of writers think about whether or not guns were important or necessary to our stories.  

Bottom line is, as a reader I don’t need or want a moral at the end of a story. I do want a story to have a moral point-of-view. I want to feel that the writer has done some thinking about the world they chose to show me. 

As a writer I will keep struggling to grow in my world view and sharing what I find with my readers.

* Family myths live larger than the truth. I just read the account of the Everyman in The Nation December 1962, it states that Hal Stallings and the other two crew members were given light sentences of 30 days. The facts that there were protesters and news coverage of the trial and all the defendants were white must have had a lot to do with this. In our family myth Pops went to San Quentin (seems like a leap but I have yet to confirm where he served) for a long time (30 days may have seemed long for us kids.) The four of us siblings were aged between two and eight so we will be forgiven if we got the facts wrong. Our activist parents didn’t need their stories embellished, they remain heroes by seeing social problems and struggling to end them, regardless of the possibility of personal cost. The danger of taking a stand will always be far less than the danger of not standing up. 

*****

What I’m reading: 

Hurricane Season (Sezonul uraganelor) by Fernanda Melchor, Translation by Sophie Hughes.