Children of Dust: A Review by J. Michael White
“When people look at racial history, they want to dismiss the paradoxes, or don’t even see them. But maybe it’s in those paradoxes where truth really lies.” Marlin Barton
Author, Marlin Barton, is one of those artists delving into an unexplored terrain, exploring, and defining its geography. His latest book, Children of Dust, charts the mysteries that haunt the South. He has written a new kind of Southern fiction, a fiction that is more real than many in the South want to acknowledge. Southern writers like to think there is something special about growing up in the South, something that forges a special kind of literary artist who can plumb the depths of language in ways writers in the other parts of the country just can’t fathom. There are wonderful examples who make their point starting with Faulkner and in our time Cormac McCarthy and William Gay. Marlin Barton’s book adds a special twist that these other artists didn’t portray but was there like a shadow flitting around the room.
Children of Dust is an artistic tour-de-force about how our generation struggles to find a redemption that continues to elude the South and about the legacy of race relations that are still seeking reconciliation. This novel shows us clearly how far we have to go, and how the process has hardly begun. It is a pointer, a guide, a compass, that points to a truth still far off. Written as both a work of historical fiction and a murder mystery, when a series of murders occurs the characters try to figure out what happened with the mystery being examined from multiple points of view reflecting different characters of different races at different times.
As historical fiction, the narrative illustrates how the wounds of war reverberate generation after generation. It is the story of a man, Rafe, who fought in the American Civil War and carried home all the racial animosity and righteous indignation of a person who believes in racial superiority and suffers a terrible defeat. But what adds a twist and elevates the whole enterprise is the other side of the story, that of his offspring. Rafe returns home to his wife, and they begin having children. However, and in addition to his White children, he takes in a half Choctaw Black mistress as part of his household and begins fathering children with her. Simultaneously across town, he is fathering more mixed-race children with yet another Black mistress.
"Maybe belief without some tiny portion of doubt at its edge was not really belief but blindness to the nature of truth and its vagaries."
It is their side of the story—these children of dust—which unfolds in the novel as they live under the tyranny of a former slave owner who is bitter and unreconciled after the loss of the war. The first-person perspective of the mixed blood members of the household changes the tenure of the story; it adds a part of the picture that writers in the southern genre have feared to explore.
The story moves from the 1870s, after the wake of the war, to the present when the two sides of this family, White and Black, are finally able to meet. They can’t help but see their family resemblances and they share their two sides of the family history including the story of the terror the mixed-race children had to endure. Through them, we see how their horrific experiences have reverberated down through the generations. It is until only now that they can even begin to recognize their brotherhood.
Children of Dust is a story inside a story, a family history combined with a murder mystery about the death of three children in a family. Much is lost in human terms in this bloody history; the children of dust are those children who were lost and buried without a name or place in history. They returned to the dust, back to the earth which bore them, without recognition. When we see both sides of the family, the white and the black, the story takes one a whole other dimension. As Barton points out so vividly pain inflicted by tyranny turns to rage and when you dehumanize another person it dehumanizes yourself.
"How true can any simple answer ever be? What was true was always at least as complicated as any lie."
When the self-righteousness of those who believe they are superior provokes the rage of those they also seek to enslave we have the story of the South. This novel illustrates how this plays out on both sides of the racial divide. The author takes the story to places where few novelists have ventured, showing that the truth is not on one side or the other and that truth is not the same depending on which way you see it. Doubt can begin to creep in on both sides. Truth is always more complicated than any one side of the story.
The novel is a legend, almost mythic or biblical in ways that reverberate in ancient sacred texts. Generations later the repercussions of Rafe’s life continued to affect his great, great, great grandchildren on both sides of the racial divide. In this novel we watch the psychic results of his beliefs echo down the corridors of time as seen in the “clouded, silvered glass of time.”
Marlin Barton is the first recipient of the Capote Prize for short fiction. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He also teaches creative writing in a program for juvenile offenders called Writing Our Stories, created by the Alabama Writers’ Forum. For publications, events and more visit: Author Marlin Barton
TO PURCHASE: Children of Dust
J.M. (Michael) White is a dues-paying member of the underground; he is a literary outlaw who is hardheaded, incorrigible, contentious, cantankerous, and contrary and guilty of everything. A patently anti-authoritarian, anti-religious anti-establishment immoralist, He did graduate study in Phenomenology at Duquesne University and holds an M.A. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. His poems, interviews, essays and book reviews have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Sewanee Review, Parabola, Janus Head and The Mirror as well as in magazines and journals in Canada, England, Romania, Italy, Japan, and India. He has thirteen books in print and has compiled and edited two books: Safe in Heaven Dead: Interviews with Jack Kerouac and Opening to Our Primordial Nature by Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche. He is currently hiding out on the back roads of rural Tennessee.
