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Summary
Summary
In a near-future Southern city, everyone is talking about a new experimental medical procedure that boasts unprecedented success rates. In a society plagued by racism, segregation, and private prisons, this operation saves lives with a controversial method--by turning people white. Like any father, our unnamed narrator just wants the best for his son Nigel, a biracial boy whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day. But in order to afford Nigel's whiteness operation, our narrator must make partner as one of the few black associates at his law firm, jumping through a series of increasingly absurd hoops--from diversity committees to plantation tours to equality activist groups--in a tragicomic quest to protect his son. This electrifying, suspenseful novel is at once a razor-sharp satire of surviving racism in America and a profoundly moving family story. In the tradition ofRalph Ellison's Invisible Man, We Cast a Shadow fearlessly shines a light on the violence we inherit, and on the desperate things we do for the ones we love.
Author Notes
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction and was the winner of the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition for Novel-in-Progress. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City- A New Orleans Atlas. A native of New Orleans, he is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ruffin's brilliant, semisatirical debut stars an unnamed narrator who's all but consumed by his blackness. Forced to become the "committed to diversity" face of his law firm and the pawn of an insidious ad campaign headed by powerful, flirtatious shareholder Octavia Whitmore, the narrator suffers through one indignity after another. He endures a routinely racist police stop and learns that Octavia "fantasized about wearing blackface" and then there's the historical revisionism at the school his mixed-race teenage son Nigel attends, where teachers insist that "every schoolboy knows the Civil War didn't start because of slavery." The narrator only wants Nigel to be spared the dread of being young and black in America. In fact, he's been forcing Nigel to apply skin-lightening cream over the objections of his wife, Penny, and is planning to submit Nigel to an experimental plastic surgery procedure that he hopes will visibly erase his heritage and break the long chain of prisons, prejudice, and limited career options that characterize the narrator's own forebears (his father is incarcerated, a fact that brings the narrator nothing but shame). And yet this is only the setup for a story that suddenly incorporates the violent interventions of a militarized cell of protesters, and hastens the narrator, Nigel, Penny, and Octavia toward a set of separate fates that are both harrowing and inevitable. Though Ruffin's novel is in the vein of satires like Paul Beatty's The Sellout and the film Get Out, it is more bracingly realistic in rendering the divisive policies of contemporary America, making for a singular and unforgettable work of political art. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* I liked my java so black, the police planted evidence on it, says the wry, self-aware, yet ultimately self-defeating narrator of this trenchant satire. Hired (after a humiliating competition) as the black face of a racist corporation, he embarks on a relentless, single-minded quest to medically demelanize his biracial son, Nigel. Nothing, not the contempt of his wife and mother nor the physical and psychological anguish of his child, will deter him from rescuing the teenager from life as a black man. Set in a disturbingly familiar near future, where entire black neighborhoods are imprisoned in the name of security and the bad blacks can be denuded and deported under the Dreadlock Ordinance, Ruffin's debut novel is a harsh indictment of a society that views blackness as a disorder and that forces black men to choose between self-respect and survival. Nigel's demel procedure may be poisonous, but no more so than the radioactive white folk . . . who can't help but hurt you like what made cancer. Unlike his well-meaning white wife, Nigel's father is under no illusions, for after all, what was equality other than a typographical error in the Constitution? Brilliant and devastating.--Lesley Williams Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GOOD QUESTIONS breathe life into the world. "We Cast a Shadow," Maurice Carlos Ruffin's debut novel, asks some of the most important questions fiction can ask, and it does so with energetic and acrobatic prose, hilarious wordplay and great heart. "We Cast a Shadow" is the story of a black lawyer in a version of the American South. We are dropped into a future where the country is even more willing than now to follow its worst, most racist inclinations. The unnamed narrator describes how, in the next state over, black people must wear tracking devices. The novel draws its power from this unnamed man's love for his family, particularly for his biracial son, Nigel. The narrator loves his son so much it seems he can't even see him. What he does see is the boy's figure outlined and defined by all the lurking dangers to his person and his potential. Our narrator is especially worried because of the metastasizing birthmarks that cover his son's body: differently sized tokens of color that remind the world that Nigel is black, a fate as unfortunate as any in the mind of his father. As the novel begins, it is focused on the father's struggle to do well in a prominent law firm so that he can pay for his son to have an expensive and increasingly popular medical procedure called "demelanization," which effectively eliminates any physical trace of blackness. As the novel progresses, however, it evolves from an account of political compromise into one of protest and radicalization. In trying to describe a book like this, it's easy to imagine settling on "satire that guts American racism" or something along those lines. And it certainly is that. What must not be lost, as is often the case with the reductive labels we stitch to such works, is how love is at the core of this funny, beautiful novel - a father's love situated firmly in the jaws of a racist society that threatens to swallow everyone in different ways. And yet what is fascinating about the narrator - who forces hats on his son out of fear that sunlight will darken his birthmarks and who lathers whitening creams on his skin that burn even as they "fix" it- is how carefully and precisely he defends his behavior. Speaking about his position as a lawyer, he says: "I'm lucky, and I know it. Somehow the grinding effects of a world built to hurt me have not yet eliminated my every opportunity for a happy life, as is the case for so many of my brethren. The world is a centrifuge that patiently waits to separate my Nigel from basic human dignity. I don't have to tell you that this is an unjust planet." Who gets to have a chance? Ruffin asks. In the world of the novel, violence, humiliation and indignity might spark up from anywhere at any time. While the narrator is visiting the home of one of his best friends, Jo Jo, for example, the doorbell rings. "I opened the door," the narrator recounts, "and a man in fatigues stood there, a shotgun slung from his hip. I raised my hands. He shoved me into the wall, choking my windpipe with his forearm. " 'Hey, hey, hey,' Jo Jo said. 'Easy, officer. The good brother is with me.' " 'Why'd you do that, man?' Jo Jo said. I gasped and coughed. " T did it for his safety.' " 'My safety?' I asked. 'How is that possible?' " T had to make sure you weren't a danger to me or yourself,' the officer said." Immediately after this exchange, we learn that the "officer" is not a police officer but a member of a group that runs tactical maneuvers in the nearby swamps - just for fun. Who gets to feel safe? "I'm not used to seeing black guys around here," the officer says. "You can't be too careful these days." The novel is rife with these kind of moments - when the racism feels satirical in its intensity. The narrative then quickly moves on; this is just a thing that happens. While many of these moments are crafted to be funny in their absurdity, they are not handled flippantly; these instances when we meet yet another head of the hydra that is racism ultimately accrue to humanize a narrator who has decided there is no honor in fighting the beast. For the narrator, the world is what it is and he will do anything to protect his son from it. Not everyone in his life agrees with him. His wife, a white woman who believes Nigel should learn to love himself the way he is, and his mother, who tells him, "You losing yourself. Your heart. Your roots," create a necessary counterpoint. And yet, through a careful marrying of desperation, love and awareness of the world as the narrator sees it, Ruffin makes us understand how it is that this man might have become broken this way. Who gets to be traumatized? At any moment, Ruffin can summon the kind of magic that makes you want to slow down, reread and experience the pleasure of him crystallizing an image again. The narrator's intellectual style also allows for a lot of sentence-level fun. We're never far from an alliterative flourish ("flaky fried fowl fingers") or a stroke of sudden beauty ("I grabbed the knob with both hands, a transparent crystal bulb, a dollop of frozen light") that makes us pause and say, damn, as we realize just how closely the narrator is paying attention to the world around him. The fluidity of the narrator's mind keeps us on our toes; we race to keep up with him as his thoughts wind and bend across the pages. He might suddenly remember some grim fact about the state of racial politics as he's driving in the family car with his son. He is unable to rest, to let his mind wander. Who gets a break? Who gets to relax? Through his characters, Ruffin reminds us that human rights don't have a season. That you don't compromise on your humanity. That if you do, you risk becoming an agent of oppression. The narrator shows us over and over again what happens when love is pushed out into the world from a source that does not love itself. That kind of love looks and feels a lot like violence. How does racism shape our ability to love? "We Cast a Shadow" churns fresh beauty from old ugliness. What injustices have we as a culture come to accept as normal? What are the pitfalls of our complacency? And how can anyone survive this? These questions are essential to America's growth, but rarely do we see them posed so sharply. Read this book, and ask yourself: Is this the world you want? NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH IS the author of "Friday Black," a collection of stories.
Kirkus Review
As with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the black narrator of this rakishly funny and distressingly up-to-the-minute debut novel doesn't disclose his name, because, he says, "I'm a phantom, [and] a figment."In a near-future America where racial divisions have become, if anything, deeper and bleaker than they are now, our nameless narrator has, through guile, pluck, spit, and polish, worked his way to associate attorney with Seasons, Ustis Malveaux, a powerful law firm with tentacles reaching to every stratum of a city known here only as the City. Though wound tight from having to look over his shoulder at every potential office competitor, the narrator is determined to do whatever he can to ingratiate himself with his bosses and secure a full partnership, whether by enduring cornball plantation tours, struggling to overcome courtroom jitters, or agreeing to be chairman and sole African-American member of the firm's "diversity committee." It's all for the sake of his biracial son, Nigel, who has a black birthmark on his face that's grown so large over time that the narrator will try anything to make it fade, from oversized baseball caps for blocking the sun to skin-lightening creams whose application bewilders Nigel and enrages his white mother, Penny. The narrator is desperate for his son to avoid the fate of many other black men who have been consigned either to substandard neighborhoods or, as is the case with the narrator's estranged father, prison. ("The world is a centrifuge that patiently waits to separate my Nigel from his basic human dignity," the narrator laments.) But a bigger paycheck from his firm would enable the narrator to pay for what promises to be the ultimate solution: an experimental medical procedure that will not only remove Nigel's birthmark, but make him look totally Caucasian. Whether they're caused by delusion, naivet, dread, rage, or some combination thereof, the narrator's excesses sometimes make him as hard for the reader to endure as he is for those who either love or barely tolerate him. But his intensely rhythmic and colorful voice lifts you along with him on his frenetic odyssey.Ruffin's surrealist take on racism owes much to Invisible Man and George S. Schuyler's similarly themed 1931 satire, Black No More. Yet the ominous resurgence of white supremacy during the Trump era enhances this novel's resonance and urgency. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 My name doesn't matter. All you need to know is that I'm a phantom, a figment, a man who was mistaken for waitstaff twice that night--odd, given my outfit. I managed to avoid additional embarrassments by wallflowering in the shadow of the grand staircase. Their cheeks pink from Southern Comfort, the partners--or shareholders, as the firm called them--stood chatting in clusters around the dining room. I had been invited by my law firm's leaders to attend their annual party at Octavia Whitmore's mansion on the Avenue of Streetcars. It was a highlight of my life, an honor for a lowly associate just to be invited, although I was surprised to be told to show up in a costume. Rough fabric chafed against my collarbone. I was dressed as a Roman centurion. I had rented the mega-deluxe option, no expense spared: full tunic of lamb's wool, leather sandals, and five--count 'em, five--Hollywood-prop-grade weapons: a sword, a javelin, a bow and arrow, a shield, and a dagger. I never knew that Roman soldiers used daggers. But the costume guy assured me that they did too use daggers, the dagger being the preferred weapon of choice for when shit got real, which apparently it did from time to time. The first floor of Octavia's mansion was a series of large rooms. Playful notes of sandalwood and jasmine lingered in the foyer. I spotted my fellow black associate Franklin beyond that entryway. Franklin, who got white-girl drunk at every firm function, karaoked "I Feel Pretty" into a microphone. Franklin had come wearing the perfect icebreaker. He wore a white smock and a black bow tie, the uniform of every black busboy and waiter at every old-line restaurant in the City. Café de Réfugiés, Carnation Room, Pierre's--no, not Pierre's; there were no brothers at Pierre's. I wasn't sure what must have been more mortifying for Franklin: that he was singing so poorly or that no one paid him any mind. It couldn't have helped that he was too black to be pretty. My frenemy, good ol' back-slapping Riley, was bent over a table giving the managing shareholder, Jack Armbruster, a foot massage. Sweat made Riley's bald head glow. He looked like a scoop of chocolate ice cream melting under the parlor lights. Riley was dressed as a parish prison inmate, which rankled my sense of propriety. They saw enough of us dressed that way in news reports. However, I had to admit it was an impressive getup. He wore a Day-Glo orange jumpsuit, and even a fake chest tattoo. He carried clinking leg shackles slung over his shoulder, as if ready to reincarcerate himself on request. Riley was working the old fart's feet, feet so gnarly they seemed like roots ripped from the field behind the mansion. He dabbed his dome with a handkerchief. Was a promotion and bonus worth the kind of humiliation Franklin and Riley were undergoing? Confetti rained down on the junior shareholders in the adjacent parlor. You betcha. My son Nigel's procedure would be expensive. After feeding the snarling, three-headed beast of mortgage, utilities, and private school tuition, I only managed to pocket a few copper coins each month. But if I were promoted, I would earn a fat bonus, and Nigel would finally get a normal face, over his mother's objections. I idled on the sidelines, nursing a rum and Coke, which, in turn, nursed my ever-present migraine (thankfully, almost down for the night). I had lost count of how many drinks I'd had over the last few hours, which meant by now my blood was probably 75 percent alcohol by volume. And that was on top of the dissipating effects of the Plum I took that morning. I told myself on each awakening that I didn't need Plums anymore. I told myself I could quit anytime I chose. But I knew better. Those petite purple pills, which turned my nervous system into a tangle of pleasurably twinkling Christmas lights, had become a constant companion. Riley ambled over. He exaggeratedly wiped his palms on his jumpsuit pants. Smiling, he jabbed his hand out for a handshake. I shook my head. "Where is the love?" Riley glanced at his hand and sniffed. "I don't blame you actually. I think Armbruster's been on his feet all day." He grabbed the sleeve of my tunic, tossed his head back, and chuckled. "You don't think you're going to win in this, do you?" "I like my look," I said, taken aback. "Check out this hand-stitching--wait. Win what?" "Win this hazing ceremony. Tonight is a competition, after all. There's three of us, but only one promotion. You knew that." Riley raised his eyebrow. "You didn't know that." "But this is just a party." "And one of us will have something to celebrate." Riley always seemed to have inside knowledge about the firm's workings. But he was also the kind of person to say things just to get a reaction from me. Still, he wouldn't joke about this. The stakes were too high. "What happens to the losers?" He leaned in to whisper. "You know how it works. It's up or out." Riley adjusted my breastplate. "I didn't mean to mess with your confidence. You're right. This is a great look." He straightened up and nodded. "Really authentic." Riley patted my shoulder and trotted off, his manacles clattering against the back of his jumpsuit. He shook the hands of a couple of shareholders and laughed. I suddenly realized I had made a serious miscalculation. Riley's costume was a great way to get attention and spread good cheer. Mine, on the other hand, was the sartorial equivalent of a glower. Centurions were badasses who killed anyone who crossed them. The only way I could have made this group any more nervous was if I showed up as Nat Turner, but I knew better. Or I should have. There were many unknowns in my pursuit of happiness, but one thing I understood: law firms like Seasons, Ustis & Malveaux didn't hire, let alone promote, angry black men. If this was a competition, I needed a new strategy. The shareholders wanted entertainment. They wanted a good time. They also wanted subservience. They did not want to feel threatened. If I was going to win, I would have to demonstrate I was willing to give them exactly what they wanted. I quickly moved from room to room searching for anything that could help me. In the back den, I spotted Octavia Whitmore in a gingham dress, carrying a terrier in the crook of her elbow and a drink in each of her hands. If anyone could help me find an advantage, she could. After all, she was a senior shareholder, and I her legal footman. I was the associate who did the grunt work that was beneath her valets. She needed me. "You look just like Judy Garland," I said. Octavia hadn't noticed me, so her face momentarily lit up in surprise as I approached. I kissed her cheek. "Well, aren't you sweet?" she said. I liked Octavia. She was one of the good ones, even if, as she once drunkenly admitted to me in a stalled elevator, she sometimes fantasized about wearing blackface and going on a crime spree. After shattering storefront windows and mugging tourists by the Cathedral, she would wash the makeup from her face, content in the knowledge that the authorities would pin her deeds on some thug who actually had it coming. That was when I realized that the Toto in her arm was a cat-- a Ragamuffin cat wearing a wig. I'd never seen a cat wearing a wig. It was a night of wonders. "Why you off to the side like this, sugar?" Octavia licked her thumb and polished the foot of a gilt bronze cherub. "Someone has to stand watch over these rabble-rousers." I puffed my chest out and stamped my javelin on the marble floor. "But who's guarding you? Here, this will freshen you right up." She took the javelin and handed me another glass. I gave my empty rum glass to one of the waiters, an onyx-skinned man who would have otherwise eluded my attention if not for the fact that he'd clearly undergone enthusiastic rhinoplasty, his broad-winged brother's nose replaced by a narrow, upturned pointer. Such procedures had become much more common among black folk lately. I couldn't tell if he'd only had his schnoz done because he was too poor to afford the full procedure or because he was afraid. Half measures were such a waste of effort. If you were going to skydive into whiteness, aim for the town square, not the outskirts. "What's this?" I said. "A Sazerac," Octavia said with a wink. Her hair's silver streak glinted. "But you know I don't drink," I said, drinking. She chuckled. "I don't think I'm a fan favorite in this." I gestured to my clothing. Toto growled at me. That cat took its role seriously. Handling my javelin as if it were a pool cue, Octavia leveled it at the crowd, but I couldn't tell who she was shooting at. She leaned it against the stairwell banister. I reached for it, but she stopped me. "Leave it," she said. "I have something for you upstairs." We climbed the stairs until we reached a side gallery that looked down on the atrium. Powder-blue shapes shimmered from the aquarium and formed waves across the checkerboard floor. Riley passed behind the bars of the staircase, dragging his chain. I was glad to be away from the scrum of shareholders with their plastic smiles, the smiles of sharks before a feeding frenzy. You really shouldn't be able to see a person's molars when they grin. The whole situation made me jumpy, as if a squid were twitching around in my tunic. I should have worn underwear. Octavia led me into a long room. Every wall was covered with leather-bound books. Eyes Without a Face. The Hip Hop Ontologist's View of Leda and the Swan. Blackstone's Law. I pulled that book from the shelf and opened the cover. Dust motes pirouetted into the air. I sneezed. "You read all these?" I asked, wiping my nose with the back of my Sazerac hand. "Shit, no." She ran a French-tipped nail along the rim of my glass. "Neither did my father. They're real, but mainly for effect." "Oh." She pointed past me, and I followed her line of sight. Statues lined the back wall. Just like me to notice books but not creepy wax men lurking in the shadows. One mannequin was Chinese, I guessed. He wore a fulvous robe and had long tufts of hair along his chin. Another looked like a Jack Kirby Thor, square jaw, blond hair, and Mjolnir, the magic hammer. I caught the theme even though there were no placards. Gods of the Human World. "What do you think of this one?" she said. It was a black man. He wore a headdress, face paint, and a bone necklace. I had no idea which African deity he was supposed to be, but I'd read enough to know there were more black deities than anyone could possibly keep track of, so many, in fact, that it cheapened the idea of godliness. If everyone was a god, no one was a god. Whoever made the statue apparently believed the myth that all us black men were hung like Clydesdales, a myth that led to plenty of awkward dating experiences since I was only average in the Joe department. The African god's loincloth did little to obscure his bulge. It was a safety hazard. Someone could poke their eye out. As for my overall opinion of the statue, whenever a white person asked me any question just because I was the onliest black guy in the room, the possible responses rattled around my brain like dice in cup: one, answer with anger; two, answer with humor; or three, answer with a question. The first, I practically never used. Anger, of course, could get you killed. The second, humor, was fine in most situations, but it was only something I deployed in safe environments. This was not a safe environment. Octavia was up to something. Something dangerous, or brilliant, or both. "Is this a museum?" I asked. "My father's private collection." She trailed her index finger down my bare arm. She walked behind the African god. From its perch on Octavia's arm, Toto sniffed the statue's butt. "These were sculpted by the same man who did the original Madame Tussauds. The hair is real human hair. Even the eyelashes. Even the eyeballs, I think." She squatted by a low drawer and rummaged through it. She pulled out a gong. "There are accessories all around the room. You can upgrade your look to something more . . . appropriate." She struck the gong with her glass, producing a hollow sound. "Why are you helping me?" I asked. Excerpted from We Cast a Shadow: A Novel by Maurice Carlos Ruffin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
