Southern Spaces

Throughout Wolf Whistle, magical realism appears at moments of extreme tension or outright horror. When Bobo utters his hubba-hubba to Lady Sally Anne Montberclair and pushes his own tragedy into motion, pigeons perching in the rafters begin to speak to one another, reacting with some incredulity on the action down below (36). When Bobo is shot, "the eye that Solon's bullet had knocked from its socket… saw the world as if his seeing were accompanied by an eternal music... saw what Bobo could not see in life, transformation, angels and devils, worlds invisible to him before death" (175). When Roy Dale finds himself ashamed of lacking the courage that Smoky Viner showed in declaring himself "for the nigger" (204), his magical arrow bears "his emptiness and loss, outward, outward, forever away from his heart" (208). And when the tension mounts to a fever pitch in a courtroom already "hot as blue blazes" (224), where a black man is just on the verge of raising his hand in accusation of a white man, a great, green African parrot soars airborne to weave a spell on the courtroom and to deliver judgment on a murderer who himself "knew nothing of magic or of metaphor" (250).

While providing a cathartic release from tension and terror, the most effective examples of magical realism in Wolf Whistle do not limit themselves to this function, but provide a greater significance and even thematic commentary. A black man raising his hand and pointing "Thar he" in accusation of a white murderer requires a summoning of courage that draws on the affirming pride of an entire race and a history that stretches back to the possibilities of a "wide, endless, hopeful, and magical canopy of the African sky" (249) — made real by the "wild and magical ascent of the African parrot, generations closer to their shared homeland than Uncle himself, brother to bright plumage and courageous heart" (250). And in a scene with more than a passing allusion to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, Smoky Viner pays the price for having had the "courage to speak words that [others] had not had courage even to think" (210) — for asserting a truth that sets into motion events with the power to topple the very foundations of southern society and change the seemingly inalterable realities of everyday life:

In chapter nine of Wolf Whistle, Bobo's "demon eye" does more than just narrate Solon Gregg's disposal of the body and its discovery by Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin — does more than just offer a lyrical respite from the brutality of the murder that closed chapter eight. It gives voice to the unvoiced and asserts the powers Emmett Till gained in death that he lacked in life. It projects him into a world of fantasy that ultimately, ironically, serves to ground his death more completely in the realm of historical importance.

Throughout the course of the novel, Bobo rarely speaks, and during Bobo's abduction by Solon Gregg and the drive to the spillway, Bobo's voice is completely absent from the conversation. But in chapter nine, Bobo's becomes the privileged point of view, and even more than privileged, it becomes powerful, achieving omniscience in its description of all that follows the killing — peering into the heart of Solon Gregg, into the lives of Glenn Gregg, Alice Conroy, Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin (people he has never personally encountered) and even into the future. Now graced with patience and full of pity, Bobo sees the world anew "through the demon eye upon his cheek, without fear or anger, or even a sense of injustice, but only with an appreciation of the dark and magical and evil world in which he had been killed" (177-178).

In scenes throughout the book, Nordan has established the white southerner as divided from the lives of the black community; for example, Runt speaks to a disembodied voice through the closed door of a house in the Belgian Congo (45-47), and later, during the parrot's courtroom ascent, Alice is unable to travel in her mind, "as the ebony-colored women and men around her may have done, to dark Africa, Kilimanjaro, and the Ivory Coast" (251). But at the same time, Nordan has also attempted to bridge this divide, with the narrative voice at times moving back and forth among standard English, southern dialect and the cadences of African American vernacular English. Elevating Bobo's voice to a place of privilege not only allows Nordan the opportunity of further bridging that divide and of speaking on Bobo's behalf, but also helps to transform the butt of a high school locker-room joke into an entity both transcendent and redemptive, in the process assuaging Nordan's admitted feelings of "guilt by association" for the killing.

But even with such a reading, there remains something disturbing about Nordan's presentation of what Bobo sees in his magical omniscience - something that may be specifically located in Nordan's use of the word appreciation when he writes of Bobo's "appreciation of the dark and magical and evil world in which he had been killed" (178). And more troubling perhaps is the next paragraph, in which Nordan describes the gin fan as "both the weight to hide Bobo's body and an object of Bobo's love," and states: "In death, [Bobo's] hands reached across the Delta flatscape and touched the fan, where Solon struggled in the rain. Across the distance, Bobo helped buoy it and ease its weight as Solon lifted it into the bed of the pickup" (178).

At their basest level, these sentences represent a literal rewriting of history: The killers' confession published in Look magazine revealed that "Bryant and Big Milam stood aside while Bobo loaded the fan. Weight: 74 pounds" (Huie 240), while in Nordan's retelling, Bobo effectively chooses to aid his killer in lifting the fan after his death. Rewriting Bobo's death in the moment of his dying, Nordan imbues it with the importance that it would ultimately achieve only in years to come. His essential beatification of Bobo — both granting Bobo inner peace and elevating his status to one deserving veneration — suggests all the good that came from this horrible episode in southern history. One hundred days after Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to rise from her seat for a white man. Soon, the Montgomery bus boycott began. Martin Luther King Jr. quickly rose to prominence. And within a year, a white southerner by the name of Robert Penn Warren would revisit his views on race in Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South, a text punctuated repeatedly with references to the Till murder. Till's death finally spoke louder and said more — to an entire nation of African Americans and to the white population as well — than the words any fourteen-year-old boy could have simply voiced. Implicit in Nordan's beatification of Bobo is the transformation of the murder from something senseless to something which ultimately earns a purpose, the transformation of this boy from mere victim to martyr — if not even, in Nordan's revisioning of the story, an ultimately willing martyr, who understands just moments too late his place in history and who recognizes and even participates in completing his destiny by reaching out and easing the weight of that gin fan which is the object of his love: "Bobo saw a crystal ball… light up with blue light and an image of things to come. He saw a mojo waving good-bye, one tiny black finger at a time, good-bye, dear Bobo, we'll never forget you, you'll live forever in our hearts" (181).