Southern Spaces

Throughout Wolf Whistle, Nordan has used moments of magical realism to play with the contours of narrative time, to place the events of this novel within a historical continuum, and to establish them as integral to that history both by looking back toward the origins of modern southern society and by peering forward toward the region's future. The "heavy-lidded" buzzards which look down over the communities of Balance Due and the Belgian Congo are "descendents and remnants of an ancient flock" dating back to the Civil War, part of a "glorious history of the South" (67-68); they possess the "blood memories" of the "glorious Festival of Dead Rebels long ago" and are "content for now with roadkill" (70). Alice's several visions provide her not only with a glimpse of Bobo's impending murder (80) but also with a cascade of images from the coming civil rights movement:

She saw children holding hands with grown-ups, black and white, singing 'We Shall Overcome' in long lines and in churches. She saw a church bombed in Montgomery, dead children, marchers in Selma, freedom riders in Jackson…. Emmett Till dead, Medgar Evers dead, Martin King…. (17)

As Bobo sinks beneath the "black water," he too sees the past — "a trace of slave death from a century before" (181) — balanced against the "image of things to come" which appeared in the crystal ball. And it's ultimately that same crystal ball, magic again, which offers the final, uncertain glimpse of hope at the book's close: "Nobody but Bobo knows for sure what happened next, but maybe, behind Alice and Sally Anne, the crystal ball in Swami Don's Elegant Junk shone with the bright blue light of empty interiors and of faraway and friendly stars and all their hopeful planets and golden moons" (290).

As quoted in the opening of this paper, Lewis Nordan described Wolf Whistle as a "complete surprise" to him. As we consider his use of magical realism and his explicit indebtedness to Latin America in this regard, it's perhaps fitting to discover that Nordan's "surprise" about the book he had produced echoes the ruminations of Alejo Carpentier, the writer who first understood the potentials of magical realism as a literary device and who himself explained, decades earlier, that "our reality will appear new to our own eyes" ("Baroque" 106). More than a generation earlier and a world apart, Carpentier's words nonetheless provide a keen perspective on Nordan's ambitions and accomplishments:

But faced with strange events that await us in that world of the marvelous real....We have forged a language appropriate to the expression of our realities, and the events that await us will find that we, the novelists of Latin America, are the witnesses, historians, and interpreters of our great Latin American reality. ("Baroque" 106-107)

In the magical realism that emerged from far south of Mississippi's geographical borders, Nordan discovered a means of understanding and expressing his own history, both his personal history and his region's history. Confronted with unbelievable events to which he himself stood witness, Nordan reimagined a despairing past in a manner that preserves and even encourages some hope for the future. And if the product of that reenvisioning was indeed "a complete surprise" to him, that surprise only reinforces the extraordinary power of the magic he has struggled to master as witness, historian and interpreter of his own great southern reality.