Horror Premises: White People are You Kidding Me?
So the other day, Chesya and I got in an argument (How many blogs need to begin "So me and Chesya got in an argument"?). As is common among writers, we spend a lot of time reading each other’s manuscripts before they’re sent them out (I’ve mentioned a couple of my own first readers). Well, this friend of ours had a novel whose premise we had issue with. A single guy inherits a house from someone, though he has no idea who. He enters the 100+ year old house and, after looking around, a door materializes in front of him. He then goes through it.
He goes through it.
Our issue was a matter of believability. Who would actually go through that door? It’s the same sort of question we have to ask ourselves as writers: what would characters believably do in a given situation. But let me tell you, I just ain’t that curious (I know what you’re asking, if we’re in agreement, how was there an argument? Well, that’s just me and Chesya). She began an informal survey of her friends and family. A disturbing pattern began to emerge.
Her white friends would go through the door and her black friends/family would not.
Her white friends would go through the door and her black friends/family would not.
I found that hard to believe. So I decided to do my own part in researching this racial divide. To my shock and horror, I found similar results. My family, well, we’re selling the house and pocketing the money. I asked my white co-worker ("Of course you go through it"). I called some white friends of mine. To a person, they were going through the door. Flabbergasted (and it’s not often a brotha gets flabbergasted), I turned to my white people voices of reason. First, my message board moderator, Lauren David:
Lauren: I’m torn.
Me: I’m one of your best friends, right?
Lauren: Right.
Me: My sister is one of your dearest friends, right?
Lauren: Right.
Me: Has NONE of this rubbed off on you?
Lauren: I said I’m torn.
Second, I then ask my wife of seven plus years. Seven plus years of living with black folk. She comes back with "you at least have to open it." (For the record, she spent the rest of the evening trying to justify it. "If you’re trying to sell the place, you don’t want the door just popping up." "It’s okay, honey, cling to your whiteness. It’s your cultural imperative.")
White people, are you kidding me?
The other day I was out with some volunteers from Outreach, Inc. looking to help some homeless teenagers. At one point, they start running. So I ran, passed them, then asked what they were running for. They said the hill we were walking down got muddy so they tried to get through it quickly. They asked why I ran. I said "black reflex": folks start running, I run and ask questions later. You can believe we didn’t do a Wrong Turn 2 and decide to split up (much less the only black guy in the party deciding to go investigate any strange sounds all by himself).
I even got to wondering how soon would some horror movies end if it had an all black cast:
-What’s that dude in the hockey mask doing? Am I the only person simply not that curious? How many black folks do you see at a hockey game? Credits start rolling.
-The Haunting of Hill House? I ain’t gonna lie: noisy houses, doors that don’t shut right, plumbing don’t work, and the super can’t be found? Someone tweaks and then freaks out? That’s just a day in the life. Credits start rolling.
-I just buried my cat in this hidden graveyard and it came back to life. For sale sign goes up and the credits start rolling.
White people are you kidding me?
White people are you kidding me?
How did you ever end up colonizing the world? Will someone explain this to me? I guess it pays to know your audience. Consider this the flip side to the writing the other dilemma.
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posted by Maurice Broaddus at 10/15/2007 09:06:00 PM
2 Comments:
I'm a mostly white guy (a vague and uncertain mix of various European and assorted American Indian ancestry). And, yes: not only would I open the mysterious door, I have opened it at every opportunity. It's the way I'm wired or programmed, I guess - I couldn't possibly keep from exploring the other side of that phantom door.
When my family moved from the city to a run-down farm in the country, I was delighted to discover the creepy barn loft I didn't know existed - I couldn't find a ladder, but that didn't stop me from climbing up there to see what I could find. (This is where the kid some farmer didn't want to talk about should have been locked up. Instead, nothing but some bats, rats, and old junk.)
And then there was the door in the back of the barn, boarded over, discovered after moving an old truck hood and hot water heater. (Should have been a door into another dimension... instead, it lead out of the back of the barn, into an impenetrable thicket of brier bushes.)
My favorite was the steel door that was buried under the floor of another outbuilding. I spent all day with half a broken, rusty shovel uncovering the thing. It was too heavy for me to open myself, so I talked some of my friends into helping me to pry the thing open as it started getting dark. We used levers to pry the thing up... to our surprise, the door was several inches thick. There was nothing underneath. So I spent all night prying the sheet metal covering off the door to see what was underneath - wood... I hacked into the wood to see if there was anything inside that... just solid wood. I figure in retrospect the door came off an industrial freezer. No idea why it was buried. (Should have been a door sealing off some ancient, unspeakable secret or a bound chest locking some shocking horror inside.)
In our old house, after years of living there, I finally started pacing off the length of various rooms and hallways on the second floor to prove something that had been bugging me: there was a space where a room should be, but no door into that area. I waited until my parents were gone, and chopped my way through the wall... only to find an unfinished, empty space back there. (Boy, were my parents mad. I was disappointed - there should have been something fantastic, scary, or at least interesting back there.)
I remember a trip to my great-grandfather's foul-smelling old house... he used only two rooms in the house, the living room (which doubled as his bedroom) and the adjacent kitchen. I was delighted to find on this particular trip that there was more to the house than I thought after I slipped away from the rest of the family to explore. The place was much bigger than it looked - I went from room to room, one after another, until I got lost. There weren't really any hallways - the rooms were all just sort of interconnected like a maze or something. The place was unsettling... for example, I'd walk into a room, see something moving, and jump a mile, only to realize that the room was full of broken mirrors. There was a room containing the most gigantic, ancient cast-iron oven I've ever seen, with all sorts of antique oddities stuffed into its drawers and little chambers. Rooms with severely dry-rotted holes in the walls and through the floors - my grandparents caught up with me in one of the rooms with holes in the floor, where I was peering down into the darkness to see if I could see anything down there, and they scolded me for wandering off... the rest of the house was dangerous and all that (but nice and creepy!) Outside was a rotten old door into a brick structure in the hillside which I discovered and tried to explore on a subsequent visit - apparently an old bomb shelter where I was sure to get bit by snakes, and which I was prevented from entering and exploring on that or any other visit, to my frustration.
I was always watched like a hawk while in a graveyard: those mausoleums and crypts would have been impossible for me to resist on my own.
Ruined farm houses, decrepit factories, burned-out school buildings, rusting trucks and train cars, rotting outbuildings and barns, filthy, reeking, cobwebbed bomb shelters and storm cellars, caves with entrances so narrow I had to squeeze inside (while wondering if I would be able to get back out again)... I would climb into these and explore them at every opportunity.
I'm not kidding - surely it must seem stupid and baffling, but I have no willpower against the irresistible force of a mysterious door in a place I did not expect to see one! I would (and have) risk life, limb, health, and sanity to find out what's beyond.
And I can't believe you really wouldn't go through such a door... are you kidding me? How could you resist it?
ladies and gentlemen of the jury, i rest my case. :-)
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