Red Shirts, Dragons, and Killing A Mockingbird

My writers’ critiquing circle companions are starting to accuse me of mimicking George R Martin, author of the Game of Thrones. I’ve probably invested hundreds of hours reading the lengthy Game of Thrones novels and watching and re-watching the forty episodes of the Game of Thrones TV series. Therefore, I’m taking my friends’ comparisons to Martin as a compliment, even though Game of Thrones is medieval fantasy with dragons, and my novels are Civil War tales without dragons.

This is a good place to mention that dragons appear to have a long abiding place in genre fiction. I fondly remember Anne McCaffrey’s fantasy dragon book series, Dragons of Pern, from three or four decades ago, and more recently I’ve been hooked on the Temeraire Napoleonic War novel series by Naomi Novik. Temeraire is a Chinese-bred war dragon in the service of the British army, a part of the Brits’ “dragon air force,” if you will.

Temeraire speaks and thinks and is quite personable, and is one of the main characters, not just a prized flying horse. It takes a lot of bravado to write an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars to include dragons on both sides, but dang if Ms. Novik doesn’t pull it off well enough to make the series widely popular. I suspect more of my books would be “flying” off the virtual shelves at Amazon if I had included dragons in my Civil War tales, instead of the expected sex, slaves and intrigue-as personified by Faith, Levi, and the evil Lieutenant Samuelson.

Nonetheless, the comparison with George R. Martin wasn’t about dragons, sex, slaves, or intrigue, but was noting that Martin and I both kill off characters with regularity. To which I reply, gosh, I’m writing about the American Civil War, not the American Civil Peace, and lots of people die in wars and war zones. It seems to me that the anguish of killing and dying is an essential element in a good war story. Along with sex, slaves, and, alas, no dragons.

Last week I learned a new literary term that addresses the phenomenon of killing off stock characters to underline the danger of the environment in which the main characters are engaged: Red shirts. The Red Shirts were the security guys in the original Star Trek TV series, the big guys who wore red uniform blouses and often got zapped by the bad guys when they accompanied Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Doctor McCoy to some newly discovered planet. We in the audience generally didn’t even learn the poor guys’ names, as their purpose was just to die near the show’s main characters, to stress that someone has to die, and but it couldn’t be our heroes.

All serial novelists, like I’m working at becoming, have to protect their main character. I still remember as a teenager who read every James Bond paperback as soon as it came out, being shocked when Ian Fleming killed Bond’s new wife – but notably, not Bond himself. Then came George R. Martin, who holds no character sacred. When Eddard Stark’s head tumbled off the chopping block, I probably had to put the book down for a while.

What about the Red Shirts in Whittled Away and the McBee books? I think I’ve at least put names to the poor guys who die early and often. I’ve been through the rosters of the real companies of Confederate infantrymen that are featured in the books and culled names of men that died. I’ve sometimes killed them in the same battle where they died historically. Other times, I need a name for a fictitious scene and pick a fellow who died in the hospital of disease or wounds, and plug his name in.

If someday an old Reb’s descendent writes me all indignant that I maligned his ancestor in my book, I’ll apologize and thank him for buying a copy and reading it so closely.

Unrelated, except that my novels are set in time of open racism, yesterday I watched the movie To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time. I grew up in northeast Texas, which was part of the old south, for sure. Harper Lee, a southern girl who had moved to New York City, won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1962, while I was in junior high school. It was a segregated junior high school, as was the rest of the culture of my youth.

While To Kill A Mockingbird grew to be a staple for classroom reading and study, that was after my years in school, and I’ve never read the novel. No teacher in the schools of Longview, Texas from 1961 when the book was published to immediate national acclaim, until my high school graduation in 1967, used the novel to instruct us on the evils of racism.  I suppose the theme was just too close to home at that time and place.

Therefore, I shouldn’t have been surprised yesterday as I watched the film to think that Harper Lee could just as easily have set the story in 1961, contemporary to when she wrote it, instead of setting the scene in 1931, thirty years earlier. I saw the same unapologetic, pervasive racism in the film that I grew up with in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

That was over fifty years ago, and things are better now, mostly. With lots of bumps in the road we are moving in the right direction. We’ve left behind most open racist practices that were commonly accepted in fifty years ago, but we aren’t there yet. Not yet.

I’m hoping that young Jackson, my new grandson, will grow up in a culture that looks back in disbelief and disgust at the racism of my growing-up days of the 1950’s and ‘60’s.