A Watery Grave Book

[Even a writer as bad as Druett should know enough to stay away from a topic as dicey as race. Were an unknown free man of color in the 1830s to be caught dragging the body of a dead white woman around the tidewater South only seven years after the Turner Rebellion, I doubt that there would be time for accusations before the rope would be over the tree limb. The immediate assumption would be that he wanted to violate the corpse even if he wasn't involved in her murder, and since he was no one's property they could kill him just to be safe and be rid of him without any consequences. At the time, random violence against defenseless black men was known as "Setting an example". In addition, there is the issue of an unaccompanied man of color wandering around without a pass, this matter alone would (at best) land him in jail just long enough for eventual retail to a local slave owner, if he avoided the lynch mob that would form outside the jail doors. Because this incident is the founding premise of the series, I am furious with Druett. I am furious because the softened and rational racism of this book exists only to ennoble Wiki and demonstrate his forbearance and native goodness. To give you a sense of the tone, Wiki might as well be a man of color walking around midtown Manhattan today; people look at him sideways and suspect him vaguely, but the consequences are inconveniences on the scale of stop-and-frisk. Every time Wiki faces a racist he is able to appeal to the inner good soul in these fine people and wins them over with his Yankee accent (so unexpected in a blackamoor!) and work ethic. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is crap. Racist views are not rational assessments of another man as an individual that change when confronted with a man who defies expectations. Racism is a pervasive and intractable measure of persons as a group that is applied to individuals, and Wiki's encounters with the 19th century culture of the United States would be defined almost entirely by assessments moderated by his skin color: Wiki would be smart for a darkie; Wiki would be refused a cabin of his own aboard a navy ship because of his skin color; Wiki's best friend ever (the commander) would be shunned from polite Southern society and be denied a command in the US Navy because his best friend is colored; The man Wiki challenges to a duel would be insulted, and the other crew members would kill Wiki because a Negro was presumptuous enough to think he was the equal of any white man; Wiki would be the victim of immediate and unthinking violence within the first pages of this book because he is a strange BLACK MAN alone in the presence of a WHITE WOMAN. These are facts of America's past that are absolutely ugly and shameful, but also incredibly well documented and examples abound that prove that Wiki's ridiculous story could never have happened outside of a Disney past. In short Wiki would never have the chance to define the perceptions of him by others, he would be defined by what they already know of him from the color of his skin, and had he been stupid enough to do what Drugett describes he would have been dead by page 20. Wiki is an impossible character who would never have existed in the 1830s, because any man as intelligent as he is supposed to be would have been painfully aware of these realities, would have acted very differently, and so would have never been in a position to do what happens in these pages.

Now this bestial history of racism is something that the United States shamefully shares with Druett's home nation of New Zealand, so ignorance of facts is a weak excuse. Druett's portrayal of how race complicates Wiki's life is childishly sanitized and is deployed only at the service of the plot. At no time is Wiki treated as anything less than an equal member of any group, unless it is needed to move the plot another stumbling step. This simplistic and cartoonish deployment of racism as a plot device to gain sympathy in a book written by an adult (Druett wrote this book when she was 65, so she is old enough to remember) anytime in the past fifty years is simply infuriating. (hide spoiler)]