These Dreams of You

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As the dying man lies in the street, a black teenage girl emerges from the shadows where she’s hidden while the incident took place. She recognizes the members of the Pale Flame as men who would do to her something worse than what’s being done to the man, which is to say worse than murder. It may be hard for Zan’s reader to imagine something worse than murder, but Zan believes there’s such a thing, and the girl believes it too.

Zan knows that a novel keeps secrets from its author, and the first secret this novel keeps from him is that, like his own daughter, the teenage girl in the story is a transmitter, broadcasting from parts unknown. Like Sheba, her body perspires in song. Once the skinheads have left, the girl approaches the man in the street; clearly he’s dead but she feels obligated to make sure. By his side she kneels, clutching to her all of her papers and books, when she hears herself rise in volume — and then when he stirs, she’s so startled that she flees, dropping by his side an old battered paperback she’s had since she was a child, before she could read.

Why is she black? Zan wonders, annoyed with himself for asking. Can I make her a black girl? When he sees her in his head, she’s black, so that should be the end of it, but do I have the right to make her black? She’s not a major character at all, rather someone who sets in motion a plot, so is it exploitative to make her black when there’s no point to it?

Or is it wrong to think there has to be a point to it? Characters are black only because they need to be? But what do I know about being black? Isn’t any white person who writes about race asking for trouble? Of course I don’t know anything about being a teenage girl, either. For that matter I don’t know anything about being anyone else, other than who I am.