Editor’s note: Unfortunately, the original audio recording of this event contained a significant amount of echo picking up from the multiple microphones. We have done our best to diminish the echo interference while still maintaining listenable audio quality.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a world-renowned racial justice, labor, and international activist, scholar, and author; he has served in leadership positions with many prominent labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union; he is the former president of TransAfrica Forum and the author of numerous books, including “They’re Bankrupting Us!” And 20 Other Myths about Unions. He is also the author of two works of fiction: The Man Who Fell from the Sky and a new novel, The Man Who Changed Colors. At a book-launch event hosted by Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and cafe in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sat down with Fletcher, Jr. to talk about his new novel, what fiction gives us that other realms of writing and thinking don’t, why the right is so much better than the left at harnessing the political power of storytelling—and what we can do to change that.
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, well welcome everyone to the great Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Cafe here in Baltimore. It is so great to see all of you, and it is such an honor to be here with our guests for tonight, Bill Fletcher Jr. We are of course, here to talk about and celebrate the publication of Bill’s second novel length work of fiction entitled The Man Who Changed Colors. And of course, we’re not going to be able to do full justice to this book in the next 45, 50 minutes. So I want to just be upfront with everyone that our goal is to get you interested, and to go buy the book and read it yourself. So if you’re open, we’re going to give you a full SparkNotes synopsis. I’m letting you know now, we’re going to disappoint you, but there’s so much rich stuff here to discuss, which we’re going to do over the course of the next 45 minutes.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief at the Real News Network where Bill is one of our new board members and it has been an honor to get to work with Bill in my capacity as editor-in-chief at the Real News Network. But… you’re a fascinating guy, Bill. I feel like because I knew about you before we ever met, obviously since season 1 of doing my show Working People where I interview workers and we talk about their lives, their jobs, the labor movement. From season 1, people were like, “Oh, you should talk to this guy, Bill Fletcher Jr.” And they kept asking me about it and then eventually I had to have you on the show. And it’s like, I mean the bio on the back of your book reads, quote, “Bill Fetcher Jr. Is the author of Their Bankrupting Us from Beacon Press 2012. He is a longtime racial justice, labor and international activist, scholar and author. He has been involved in the labor movement for decades and is a widely known speaker and writer, on print, and on radio, television, and the web. He has served in leadership positions with many prominent union and labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, and the AFGE. He’s the author of The Man Who Fell from the Sky, a murder mystery.”
That barely scratches the surface, right? ‘Cause we’re here at Red Emma’s, we’re honored to be joined by another of my colleagues and one of your close collaborators, the great Mark Steiner. I have an ongoing joke with Mark that he’s like the Forrest Gump of the left because just like with Forrest Gump, every time I’m researching like a period of American history where there was leftist activity, whether that was people fighting for underground abortion access, fighting for civil rights in the South, I always see Mark there in the background. He’s somehow always there and was somehow always involved. You’re very much the same way. I feel like your name comes up more than anyone else’s, when I’m talking to people organizing unions in Mexico, they’re like, “Oh, do you know Bill Fletcher?” It’s like, “Yeah, how do you know Bill Fletcher?” Or minor league baseball players who are like, “Oh, Bill Fletcher, he helped us organize a union.” I was like, “Yeah, I guess I know him too.”
The work that you’ve done lifting up the struggle for self-determination in West Sahara, right? I mean, you’re all over the place. And then I learned that you also write fiction. And so this is what I mean when I say you’re a fascinating guy. And this is by way of leading into the first question. ‘Cause I want to ask, with all of that going on in your background, all of that going on in your life, and all of that shaping your politics, I’m curious to know when and how fiction came into your life and what it has done for you? And this is something that really hits home for me because I think that the worker side of me, the person who has worked in restaurants, retail, factories, warehouses, so on and so forth, the labor activist side of me. That informs the literary side of me and vice versa. But there are also parts of me that are kind of unintelligible to each other or they can only speak in their own unique language. And I feel like there were experiences that I had working in an industrial laundry factory in Southern California about 11, 12 years ago that were very hard for me to communicate to people until I found a way to write about it in a creative genre.
And so that’s been rattling in my head as I’ve been reading your latest novel. And I’m sure everyone would expect me to ask the obvious question, which is like, how does your labor organizing work and your social justice work inform your literary work? But instead, I want to ask what literature allows you to do and say that you couldn’t say or do in any other realm but literature?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
So well, let me first start by thanking you, the Real News Network, thanking John Duda, the family of Red Emma’s. I’ve been really looking forward to this evening. So I want to thank you all. Thank you who have come here. I am honored.
Fiction allows you to paint a picture. And as we may get to this, I might read a section from the very beginning when I’m describing the shipyard. I was a former shipyard worker, I was a welder, and for almost four years at the Quincy Shipyard in Massachusetts. And I could write about that in a non-fiction way. But what I try to do in the beginning of this book is to paint a picture so that you the reader walk away with this idea of how miserable it is to be in a shipyard, right? It’s like someone can say, “Well, you’re working around these chemicals and this chemical.” But when you use fiction to describe the smoke that’s coming, it leaves an imprint.
The second, the other thing I would say about this Max is that I have found that everybody has a story. Everybody has a story that they want to tell, a fictional story, but most of us are discouraged from writing fiction because we’re told that we’re not that good. We’re not good enough. It’s very complicated. And part of what I decided to do is go to war with that, and to encourage people. I am on an active campaign to encourage people to write fiction because there are so many things that need to be said that can be best said through fiction.
Just one final thing about this. In a lot of the speeches I give, I make reference to movies and television shows. So I’m a Star Trek fanatic. Every Star Trek, I figure out ways of working Star Trek into my speeches and some people start laughing except when they walk away they’re thinking about the reference. So I’m trying to pull it all together.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I have another question in that vein, but since you mentioned it like let’s… Like I told y’all, there’s no way we’re going to be able to do full justice to the richness of the story that Bill weaves in this novel in a 45 to 50 minute discussion. So our ultimate goal is to get folks interested enough that they go out by the book for themselves, read it, and let us know what they think. But let’s give people a taste.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s do a little bit of a reading and just sort of center people in that scene that you were describing.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
I will do that. So this is from the beginning, the not exact beginning, but pretty much the beginning of the book.
It starts July 1978, Quincy, Massachusetts, the Quincy Shipyard. “Alberto Perez returned to his position on the starboard side of the liquefied natural gas tanker under construction. Already covered in sweat, he had just taken his 9:00 AM break. It was one of those Massachusetts summer days where the heat and the humidity were off the charts, even this early in the morning. Like most welders in the shipyard pits had gotten used to the heat and humidity, hated it, but gotten used to it. Pedez climbed through the partially completed hatch to enter the compartment where he and his partner Alice Love had been working. Looking around, he realized that he was alone Alice had gone on break, slowly climbed up the ladder 15 feet to get to his position on the wooden planks, resting on metal stiffness.
He sat on the upturned can he used while welding or when taking a break. Pedez, took a quick look at Alice’s position and the can on which she was sitting. Her electric arc welding line, holder, and shield were lying next to her can. He hated working with women, even women as gorgeous as Alice. The shipyard was no place for them and he could not believe, at least until he’d met Alice, that women could make good welders. But sure enough, she was not just good, she was great. Even with half the men in the shipyard hitting on her, she ignored them and kept working. Maybe she was [foreign language 00:10:31] he did not know. Pedez felt his undershirt cling into his soaked body. He hated this work, but at least he had a job. When Pedez arrived in Massachusetts from Portugal, the welding job was the only work he could find.
It did not help to remember that once he had been a big man, an important man, but wasn’t that the story for so many immigrants? Pedez pulled his mask over his mouth and nose, making sure to cover his mustache and short beard to protect them from the fumes and dirt. He refitted the earplugs, muffling the sounds around them and donned his helmet. The hammering and drilling had picked up in tempo as more of the workers returned from morning break. The smell from the welding wasn’t too bad in his compartment because there were only two of them, and there was a blower making a sound like a persistent moaning, constantly pushing the smoke out of their hole. He stood up, attached a welding rod to the holder and locked it into position and pulled the shield down, closing the visor and looking through the darkened lens. In the darkness, he struck the arc, watching it glowing golden creating what looked like lava. The lava turned into a welding bead, which he lay horizontally across the top of the compartment. He heard a noise below, not stopping to check, but assuming that Alice was returning to her position, he felt the vibration of someone climbing the ladder and then heard someone probably Alice climbing up to their position. He kept welding, focused on the bead and the golden molten metal being put into place with a welding rod burned down to about an inch.
Pedez has stopped, lifted a shield and disconnected the remnant of the rod from a holder throwing the remnant down. He turned around expecting to see Alice, but there was no one there. Curious, Pedez standing nearly six feet tall, rose and walked over to the ladder, situated against the planks. He leaned over to take a look, but lost his balance and fell forward. Suddenly everything went black.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Like I said, our point is to get you to go read the rest. And that’s just a taste. I mean, there’s so much going on in this story that is really captivating. I mean, it’s got mysterious shipyard deaths, it’s got labor unions, it’s got shadowy white supremacists organizations, right? I mean, it’s got a lot of really fascinating and captivating kind of storytelling elements that I want to kind of dig into more in a minute. But even before that passage that you read, in fact at the very beginning of the book, there is something else that you wrote on the dedication page which reads one sentence. And I quote, “To Danny Glover, who pushed me to enter the realm of fiction.”
Expand on that. Where’s the story behind that?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
The story behind that is actually a wonderful story. I met Danny Glover in January 1999. I was on the delegation to Cuba and it was organized by TransAfrica Forum before I became the president. And Danny and the author of Walter Mosley, Janetta Cole, a number of people who won this delegation. I was a small fry, I was working at the AFL-CIO. So I got to meet Danny and I was in complete awe until I realized that Danny was like a regular guy. He was just a really wonderful human being, very down to earth. So one day we were on a bus and we were talking, and he was telling me about his hope to eventually make a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led much of the Haitian revolution against France, and Spain actually. And he was telling me about this, and I told him I had this idea for a story and it wasn’t this and it wasn’t my prior, it was another story.
And I told him about it. And he said to me, “That sounds interesting. Why don’t you write a treatment and send it to my company and we’ll see what we might be able to do.” Now I have to confess, I had not a clue as to what a treatment was. I mean, I know how you treat Turkey and all that. I didn’t know what a treatment was. And I said, “Okay.” But I didn’t actually take it seriously, Max. I thought it was a throwaway line. And until I mentioned it to a friend of mine who said, “What are you an idiot? He said, write a treatment. So go write the treatment.” So I had to first look up what a treatment is, and I don’t know whether you know what treatment is. Treatment is like a detailed summary of a story for purposes of production into a film. And so I wrote it up and sent it, but they rejected it, which I didn’t take offense to, but it triggered something in me so that after I completed Solidarity Divided, I decided to try to turn it into a novel. And that failed. I went to an agent who ridiculed me. I mean, it was the worst possible thing that can happen. And her final words to me were, “When you return to writing non-fiction, call me.”
But in part because I was inspired by Danny and to a great extent Walter Mosley, I kept going. And I had this story in mind that became The Man Who Fell from the Sky. I tell you Max, if it hadn’t been for Danny, I’m not sure that I would’ve done anything. I think it would’ve been just another story that rolled around in my head.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, it’s fascinating that you mentioned that, right? Because I can think back in my life to many people, more than I guess I realized people who had also expressed an interest in writing fiction or making art of some other kind. And I can remember seeing that flame crushed in them when someone was just needlessly cruel to them about it. And I faced it myself. I’ve had close friends just be needlessly mean when I shared something that made me feel vulnerable, and that I wanted genuine feedback on, or at least genuine engagement with. It’s a very crushing thing to be met instead, with coldness, with them kind of shrugging it off, or worse, actively trying to stamp out that inspiration that you talked about. I think it’s a very, very cruel thing. So I don’t imagine this is anything anyone here at the great Red Emma’s needs to hear, but just put it in your back pocket, don’t be that cruel to anyone if they ever show you their work. Not everyone’s going to be a great master of their art, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot of value and meaning in it.
And I wanted to sort of pick up on that before we kind of dive deeper into this book in particular. You said that you are currently on a mission to get as many people to write fiction as possible, and it feels like there’s a political kind of weight behind that. I wanted to ask, as someone who has been deeply embedded in politics, and especially left politics for so long, what role you think fiction, fiction reading, fiction writing, discussing fiction, thinking in the way that fiction allows us and engenders us to think, what role do you think that has to play in left politics? And what do you think we’re losing by not taking fiction as seriously as we should?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
People think through stories. We often don’t want to admit that, but you think about, you go to church and there’s a sermon, and what do they do in a sermon? They tell a story. And they use that story to make a point. And you walk away from that thinking about that particular story. Or you read the Koran, or you read the Torah, and it’s stories. And whether you believe that they actually happened or not is secondary because there’s a point in there. I think we on the left often think that we only need to talk in terms of facts. That the facts speak for themselves or they throw enough facts at people and they’ll get it. They’ll come to the right conclusions. That doesn’t happen. The right-wing understands that. And the right-wing uses stories much, much more effectively. And one of the most important right-wing stories is directly related to the whole notion of the great replacement theory.
The idea that white people and particularly white men are being replaced by others. And the story is very compelling because it connects with the myth of the United States. And it basically is that once upon a time, if you worked hard, you did well, you’d be rewarded. And the lives of your children would improve over your own. And then something happens. And then depending on what right-wing group you’re talking about, it might be that Jews started doing this or there were too many Black folks coming forward or women were getting out of control or whatever. But the idea of stories, they put it together and people remember those stories and they fit facts in to those stories. So I think that we have to use stories now, we on the left are encumbered by the problem that we have to tell the truth, now the right wing doesn’t. So they’re not encumbered by it, they don’t have to worry about that. But we have to deal with the truth. But the truth is actually very compelling.
And so I think what we have to do is utilize fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson in his latest book, the Ministry of the Future, which is all about the environmental catastrophe, is a work you could call a semi-fiction, but it’s a very compelling story that leaves you thinking about what to do about the environmental catastrophe. And what it doesn’t do is lead you to commit suicide, which is what unfortunately happens with a lot of discussions about the environment. You finish reading and say, “Oh my God, either I’m going to get high and stay high or I’m going to kill myself.” And this doesn’t, it leaves you with hope. That’s why it really is compelling.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just to build off that really quick, I would even go further and say that there’s a great, and rich, and necessary discussion to have about what leftist fiction looks like, or what storytelling with a leftist politics looks like, and why it’s important, which you just spoke beautifully about. But on top of that, I would also advocate for reading as much as you possibly can, and engaging with the sort of deep questions about your own existence, and about other people and their interior lives, and the world that you inhabit and what your place in that world is. All of that stuff may feel somehow it’s separate from politics, but it’s not. I mean, I would argue that for the real, true, human to human connection, and empathy, and assuredness that life is beautiful, and valuable, and rich, and complex, and worth fighting for. Fiction helped me realize that in a way that I never had before or in a stronger way than before.
I always tell people, and I love seeing the look on their faces when I say, “My path to leftist politics ran through Fyodor Dostoevsk, I would not be the proud lefty nut job you see today. If as a young conservative I had not gotten obsessed with Fyodor Dostoevsk’s work and he’s not a leftist by kind of today’s standards, he’s a much more complex person than that. But the attention that he gave to building the interior worlds of people who were so different from me, and yet spoke to so many things that I thought only I had ever thought and felt, right? There’s a great James Baldwin quote that I’m going to butcher, but it’s something to the effect of, “When you’re young, you think that yours is the greatest loss that has ever been felt, or the greatest love that has ever been loved.” And then you read. And that’s both a humbling experience but also an incredibly eye-opening one because how lonely must it be if that were true? If in fact no one had ever felt the kind of heartbreak that you’re feeling when you know you lose a loved one, or you know lose a relationship.
But then when you read in fiction, someone going through the same thing and you connect with it and you expand your heart and your brain in different ways, there is something essential there to I think building a left political vision of what the world can be.
Okay. Enough of that. So building on that, let’s dig a little more into The Man Who Changed Colors, right? Specifically. And I want to sort of complicate the write what you know cliche. ‘Cause I think there’s a lot to it. And there is a lot of you in this book, just like your previous novel.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right? I mean the passage you just read, guys working on a shipyard, working as a welder. This is stuff that you know firsthand, but I also feel like you’re using and writing what in this book as a means of figuring something else out. Am I right about that? And if so, what are you trying to figure out in the writing of this book?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
With this book, and the first novel, the Man Fell from the Sky. The books are about race, justice, revenge, and Cape Verdeans. That’s the overarching thing. And one of the things that I have always found intriguing is, where is the line between revenge and justice? And at what point does it matter?
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s a Raskolnikov question, if ever there was one.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
And so that’s part of what I’m grappling with. Now in the first book Max, part of what I was also grappling with is commitment.
So the main character is a guy named David Gomes, who in the first book is in his mid to late twenties. He’s Cape Verdean American. He’s single, but he has a main relationship. But he’s trying to decide really whether he wants to be committed. ‘Cause there’s all these attractive women all over the place who are paying attention to him and there’s all these opportunities. And also does he want to get in the way of his girlfriend’s advance? And I kind of stumbled into that Max. I felt like in many ways what I wanted to do was remind people of the sexuality of your twenties. Not that when you’re in your sixties, your not sexual, but the sexuality when you’re in your twenties. And the struggle for commitment. And so that was one of the things I was trying to work through.
In a second book, I’m both trying to tie up some loose ends from the first one, but also deal with what my father would’ve called the consequences of conduct, that there are consequences and in basically making choices. And I wanted to work that through and show to the reader that contrary to fairy tales, there are no ideal solutions. And you have to weigh certain things. So there were a number of issues that I was trying to work through, as well as introduce politics constantly, and particularly discussing in the first book, especially, Cape Verdeans, because Max, most people in the United States have not a clue who Cape Verdeans are. I mean, really, I go all over the country and I say something about Cape Verdeans and it’s like, “What? Cape what? You mean Cape Harris?” Right? And they have no idea that Cape Verdeans were the first post 1492 African population to come to the US voluntarily.
And that they have this incredible history. And I wanted to talk about race by using a population that did not come here through slavery. And that was part of my political objectives.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and building on that, and I guess this hooks into the previous questions about how and why you got into fiction writing itself? Because I had thought to myself, I was like, “Is it because Bill got into fiction writing at an older age that he didn’t go through the same process that immediately jumps to my mind when you start writing?” Or is there something else going on? And what I mean by that is that I have notebooks and notebooks full of my old writing, my half finished novel, my old Schultz stories, my old poems and stuff like that. And the funny thing to me is that I can flip through any one of those notebooks and I can immediately tell who I was reading at the time because I was consciously or subconsciously emulating their style or I was cribbing from their style.
And that showed up mainly in the ways that I would try to play with language. And I started to think at an earlier age that the artistry of fiction writing had more to do with that, with what one could do with one’s language that they were writing in and how they could bend it, how they could use it to engender different feelings in people, to add greater depth to characters and plots and expand our imagination, so on and so forth. And it wasn’t until I did a lot of writing myself, and became a bit more self-possessed that I realized that there’s just as much artistry in playing with language as such as there is in mastering the different components of good storytelling.
And your art feels more in line with the latter. And I was going to highlight that by reading a passage, but I think the passage you read kind of shows that as well.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
That’s an interesting observation. I think that, that’s correct. That’s me. And I’ve been thinking of stories since I was a kid and I would put these stories together as if they were films in my head that I was shooting with a camera, but I did not get the encouragement to do anything with them. When I was in middle school, I wrote a short story for the school newspaper, but after that I didn’t. And part of that Max, was that because I was a political activist, I became active when I was 15. People expected me to write nonfiction, to write about history, to write about strategy, tactics, all that stuff, and not expecting me or wanting me to go in the realm of fiction and treating it as if it was frivolous. In fact, when I started with The Man Who Fell from the Sky, and some people, they looked at me and many people looked at me as if I was nuts. Ironically, they looked at me the same way as when I told people I was organizing minor league baseball players.
But I stuck with it and I stuck with it, part of, I have to say that were it not from my wife and daughter, I wouldn’t have gone down this road because I spoke with them about the basic idea for The Man Who Fell from the Sky and my daughter was looking at the floor, we’re in a restaurant and she said, “Dad, I think you got at least one story and maybe two.” And I looked at my wife and she said, “Yes.” And that’s all I needed. That was the kind of encouragement that I needed. But with both stories I had to think them through. So people say, “Well, how long did it take you to write it?” Well, there’s two answers to that. I had to film this in my head for a couple of years and then the writing took several months, but it only took several months because I had this thing in my head. And so I made an outline, a very brief outline, but then utilized this, and then with the helpful editing from my wife, my daughter, from my publisher, and some other people, I was able to start crafting it.
Because writing fiction is so different from writing nonfiction. The assumptions that go into it that you have to remember that the reader doesn’t see the story in their head unless you have the right words. But if you have too many of the right words, then you chase the reader away. So it’s walking that line.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I want to, and this is maybe a great way for us to round out our conversation, then I’m dying to know what folks in the audience think, so we’ll open things up to Q&A in a second, but I want to sort of end by talking about the process of shaping, crafting, and telling this story the way that you do.
And if we could, keep mining some of those specifics for folks who haven’t yet read the book or for folks who have read the book, because it got me thinking more again about how there are a lot of different authors whose work I appreciate for those different sides of what they do. Some who are just, when they’re working with language, it’s like they’re weaving silk. And I just want to roll around in it, it’s like just keep writing and let me see what you do with language. I kind of don’t care about the story at this point. I get that that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But there’s something about it that I appreciate, watching anyone who’s working with a material and knows what they’re doing with it, could be a welder, could be someone who’s making tapestries. If they’re good at what they’re do, I want to sit there and enjoy it and think about it.
But then there are also folks who are very, very good and very honed with the practice of storytelling. And that comes down to a lot of basic things that you don’t really realize unless you’re reading a book that you can’t get into or you’re trying to write one that you’re struggling to make compelling. So there’s basic stuff. One, the chapters are very short.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s a very good, I mean, Dan Brown was not the first one to figure this out. I mean, I loved Kurt Vonnegut’s books for many of the same reasons. He’s very pared down. It’s all about the imagination. And you read in such a way that you feel like you are in that mind movie, like you said.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And you’re so kind of swept up in it. And that’s how I felt reading your book as opposed to army crawling my way through the dense Tosltoyan language and stuff like that. Each has its own merits.
And I think that as you mentioned, one of the biggest pitfalls that so many of us who try to write fiction fall into, is that we can get so caught up in knowing the feeling that we want to engender in a reader, or we know the point that we want to get across with the plot with the characters. And so we can get so bogged down in what we want the end result to be, that we totally become disconnected from the practice of a very, I think, tender and empathetic practice of connecting with a reader, and making a story compelling, and drawing out emotions of fear, suspense, love loss, anticipation. All of that is also part of the art of fiction writing. So talk to me about the process of working that into a novel that does have a lot of different characters, a lot of twists and turns. Just talk me through that process a little bit.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
So before I do that, anybody else that leaves and doesn’t buy a book, I’m coming after you, I’m just alerting everybody.
So first of all, Max, my wife was the first person when I started writing and it was non-fiction, that said, “The chapters need to be shorter. And the reason is you want something that someone can read on the subway and they can read a chapter and get off in and feel like, okay, I got part of this.” My publisher went further and forced me to shorten the chapters even more. And I love it. For exactly the reasons that you said. So part of it is that, but let me say something about more general. There is a balance that a writer has to pay attention to between the final goal and the tactics to get there. It’s like struggle where people either obsess on the final goal, and don’t pay attention to the tactics, or they obsess on the tactics and they forget about the final goal and you got to work this, right?
And it’s very, very important. So one of the problems that you can fall into is forgetting what is the point that you’re trying to make. So you get into telling a story and a story may be very good, but like, but what’s the point? What do you want the reader to walk away with?
On the other hand, you can be very heavy-handed and it’s like, “I must remind people of all of these things.” So one of the things that I try to do in both books is to be subtle. There’s a whole discussion in this book about some Portuguese fascists and I don’t have to go through a whole thing defining what fascism is, and what section of the Bourgeoisie is on… You pull from a moment in history and you raised some issues with the hope that the reader, if they’re curious, may explore some more.
Same thing with Cape Verdeans. I’m not beating people over the head with this is what happened in 15 som… So it’s like there’s things, and then in the first book, there’s a scene at a Labor Day party that tells you all you need to know about Cape Verdeans in 1970. It just puts it all together. And then afterwards the reader can say, “I never knew who these people were, so let me look into this. Let me study.” That’s what you want to do. That’s what I want to do. And so it’s working.
I was recently reading a manuscript, very, very good manuscript. But in the course of reading it, I was trying to figure out what does the author want the reader to walk away with? ‘Cause you can have a really good manuscript, but if the reader is not clear, then you fail, and you’re walking that line.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just a final thought on that because I think that this sort of brings us all the way full circle back to how and why the practice of writing fiction is connected to the art of organizing people and mobilizing people. We are recording this here in Baltimore at Red Emma’s just two months after the passing of our brother Eddie Conway. And what really struck me at the memorial service that was held for Eddie were so many people came out and talked about the impact that Eddie had on them both organizing in prison and organizing outside of prison. You started to get a composite picture of what made Eddie, and what makes anyone a true and effective organizer. And it’s almost not what people would expect, right? Because when you hear organizer, you think it’s someone who can control people. It’s someone who can get people to do things the way that they want them to and herd them effectively. And it’s almost the opposite. It’s like you have to respect people’s agency.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
That’s right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You have to respect that people have to get there themselves. They have to walk through that door. They have to be motivated to do the thing that you know you hope that they do. But you can’t force them. You can’t control them. In the same way that as an author, you can’t control what your reader’s going to think. You can try, by adding sentence, after sentence, after sentence to say, “Now you got it, you got what Cape Verde’s about?” But then they put the book down.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
That’s right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Then it’s not fun to read.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Right? No, exactly. And people, it’s interesting, I’ve had people come up to me after reading both books, but particularly after the first one, and they would tell me, what’s the next story they want me to write, seriously.
And they had come to certain conclusions about the book and things that they wanted to see happen next. And that’s when you know you got people you, that you did the right thing. When people are taking the story and they’re almost making it their own. And I found this within my family. We had Thanksgiving dinner, I think it was right after the first one came out. And to my surprise, because my family on my father’s side can be very critical, and they took the book and I mean just all of their thoughts about what happened, and their conclusions, and sometimes they came to the conclusions that I couldn’t figure out how they came to them, but it didn’t matter, because they had taken ownership. That’s what you want as a writer.
Speaker 3:
Let’s give it up for Bill Fletcher Jr.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Thank You. Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, well, so it is 8:06. We got about 25 minutes for Q&A again, [inaudible 00:46:11] here has a floating microphone. Please do get your question on the mic so we can get it on the recording. But if you want to ask your question afterwards, there’ll be time for that as well. So anyone got any questions for Bill?
Speaker 4:
You said in the beginning that one of the benefits of writing fiction is that allows you to paint a picture. And I was thinking about one of the other ways that people have painted affective pictures of socially relevant things is oral history. I was thinking about this one book in particular called The Order Has Been Carried Out by Alessandra Portelli, who is a communist writer. I’m pretty sure he wrote for Il manifesto or whatever in Italy.
But he was writing in that book about a very particular fascist reprisal. And the book was about how people memoir, how memory throughout Italian history had related to that event. Anyway, that’s not important. The important thing is that he had to acknowledge the fact of false memory.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Yes.
Speaker 4:
People remembering things wrong, people having false, what you could call false consciousness of events and whatnot. And he had to accept those things in that book as social facts that those memories were real, even if those memories were not empirically correct. So there’s a big, big, large degree of empathy that one has to have for the affective experience of people who might hold very repugnant ideas. So I was curious how in your book you talk about people who clearly have very different political views than yourself, how you bridge that empathy gap and think about people who commit themselves fervently to some kind of reactionary politics and how they effectively clinging to those ideas. I was just wondering about empathy in that regard for evil or something like that?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
That’s an interesting question. So I’m not sure I’m going to give you the best answer. Let me start with the first part of what you’re saying because I think it’s a critical observation that people can remember incorrectly and they can remember incorrectly for a variety of reasons. And one thing that relates to this very famous Aesop fable about the man in the lion that I regularly reference, where a man in the lion are walking through the jungle, they come across each other and they decide since they’re going the same direction, they’ll walk together and they start talking and they get into this argument about who’s superior humans or lions. And they come into a clearing where there’s a statue of Hercules on top of a lion. So the man says, “That proves it.” The lion says, “What does that prove?” And the man says, “That proves humans are superior to lions.” And the lion says, “Ah. But if it had been lions building the statues, there’d be a lion on top of Hercules.” That’s point number one, that whoever creates the statues can influence the way people remember things.
Now, in real terms, the 1934 textile strike in the United States, massive strike mainly in the South. How many of you knew that concentration camps were set up in 1934 for the strikers and the families? Right? Concentration camps were set up in order to detain the families in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, right? Now, what happened when the strike was effectively crushed, was that there was a retelling of the story of the strike from the standpoint of capital, so that you have workers to this day who will say, “The union screwed us. The union was the problem.” The union didn’t put people in concentration camps, but the memory got changed.
So part of my response to you is that in those contexts, we do have to work with people about the facts and it necessitates a struggle. And sometimes that struggle won’t succeed because the false memory, I don’t want to call it false consciousness, but the false memory is too hardwired.
Now, in this, I can tell you without giving away much, there is no empathy for the fascists in this book. As a matter of fact, there there’s no empathy, except in one sense, in the very beginning of the book, you’ll get a sense of the long term impact of what happened to one of the fascists. But you don’t know in the beginning that he’s one… I’m giving away part of story, but you don’t know in the beginning that he’s one of the fascists, but by the end of the book you’ll understand exactly what I mean. And that some of the stuff that he went through has destroyed him. So to the extent that I have empathy, that’s where it would be. Thanks for that question.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just to kind of piggyback on to that, if I may, because this is something that I think about obsessively and I kind of have to doing the work that I do at the Real News because, and I’ve given talks about this very question where I try to explain why I have always been uncomfortable calling myself a journalist. That doesn’t mean that I don’t see value in the work that I do, I just don’t know if that’s what I would call it, because I deal with this very question every day. The work that I do is interviewing working people in the US, and beyond about their lives and their pasts, how they came to be the people they are, and the path that led them to doing the work that they do.
Or I talk to working people about major events that are being covered in the mainstream media from the vantage point of CEOs, politicians, and pundits. For example, we just published my interview with three women living in or around East Palestine, Ohio, they gave their accounts of the Norfolk Southern train derailment on February 3rd. They talk about what they and their families and their communities have been going through.
Like the great Studs Terkel said, “There’s a difference between fact and truth.” A person may misremember a significant event in their life, maybe they said it happened on a Wednesday, but it really happened on a Thursday. Maybe they said they remember it as being sunny, but it was raining. But there is an essential unquestionable truth that they’re trying to convey, and for me, that’s the story. And so I have to accept that unlike my past life as an academic historian, I’m looking for truth more than I’m looking for fact.
But I think that each has a whole hell of a lot to tell us. And the other thing I would just say, is that imagination, people’s imaginations are real. They create reality, right? I often get lost in thought, wondering about what it was like to live in, I don’t know, the 13 colonies and believing in witches, and monsters, and acting as if they were real. I mean, for all intents and purposes. And everyone in your village believes that there’s a monster in the outskirts of your village and acts as if it’s real. It’s real. I mean, people got crushed under boulders and hanged for being witches. That was a real world impact on a factually incorrect belief. But the belief itself was the fundament of their reality. And so it’s like, it’s hard to, it’s like how do you parse that out? You can’t just go back and say, “You guys are all mistaken. This thing doesn’t exist.” And then they burn you as a witch. Who gets the last laugh there? Do we have other questions for Bill?
Mark:
Want my credit card now so I can get a book before he beats me up? I’ll get you a check.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
That’s right.
Mark:
So I’m curious about the, well this is the first of your books I have not read, but will read obviously, the Man Who Changed Colors. Can you give us a little insight into what that title means? Since you weave through fascists and different cultures and missing people in the shipyards?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
I’ll give you a hint. So let me tell you a little bit about the beginning of the book. So just as a side note, this worker falls to his death a week after I fell 20 feet, in the shipyard. I actually did fall 20 feet and I fell 20 feet a week after someone fell nine feet and died.
And so this is situated for that reason that this was not uncommon. So this welder falls to his death and the main character, David Gomes, the journalist, is asked to write a story about why shipyards were so dangerous. And in the 1970s, they were the second most dangerous industry in the country, after mining.
And so he goes about doing this and in the process he starts to have questions about whether this was an accident or whether it was murder. And then he ultimately ends up having a question as to who the deceased really was. And so Mark, that’s one part of the answer.
Another part of the answer, which is related, is using the term colors to reflect politics. And that, I’m not going to answer, I’m just going to say that’s there and you’ll get a kick out of it when you read it. That’s part of the mystery here.
John:
So I got a question for you, Bill, and this is a giant literary criticism can of worms. So I don’t want to pose it generally, but I want to pose it specifically. And the question is, there’s a sense in which, or at least what made the case that certain kinds of genres of literature do specific kinds of political work, irrespective of the contents. Like science fiction for instance. You can make the argument that there’s inherent political work being done in science fiction. I think you mentioned Star Trek, that doesn’t matter if it’s a utopia, dystopian future, it doesn’t matter anything about the actual story, but just that the fact that you are asked as a reader to imagine a future that is a material extension of our own present gives you a certain way of thinking about history that you didn’t have before.
And then I think about this book, I think, you know you mentioned Walter Mosley kind of in the background here. I’m curious, what resources or resistance did you find in genre for the political work you are trying to do in writing these stories?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Interesting, John. So I agree with you. I mean, first of all, science fiction is really ideological and murder mysteries can be. I’m not sure that they’re inherently, but they can be. And so although I was inspired by Danny Glover, I learned from reading Walter Mosley how to introduce a murder mystery and introduce politics in a way that’s not hitting people over the head. And so I owe him a lot on that.
So that’s the main source. But I also, drew from science fiction, Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and the way that they dealt with politics and political issues. And then I just dreamed. A lot of these books, people have asked me, “Well, what kind of research did you do?” And part of the answer is that I lived, do you know what I mean? It’s like I grew up in New York vacationing on Cape Cod, Massachusetts and coming across these Black people with these very strange names that sounded almost Spanish but weren’t, and who didn’t necessarily identify as Black, but sometimes they did, and were almost always darker than me, but I identified as Black and I couldn’t figure this shit out.
And so it’s living that and asking questions, who are these folks? What was their experience? And getting the answers, getting answers through some level of actual direct research, and through discussions.
I’ll give you an example, I wrote something called the Indispensable Ally about Black workers in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. And back around 19… I wrote it in ’86, but I was doing some research for it in ’85. In 1984, I was working on the Jesse Jackson Presidential campaign, and I was in Massachusetts, and I heard that there was this local union of Black dock workers in New Bedford, and I was supposed to be one of the labor people on the campaign. I said, “Damn Black dock workers, I got to go down and interview them.” So I contacted the business manager of The Local, was very nice guy, and he arranged to set up meetings for veterans from the thirties and forties to come and talk with me.
So I went down there and these older men came, most of them were dressed in suits, all the complexions of the rainbow. And I’m asking them about what it was like to be on the docks and everything. And then I said something like, “So how’d get along with the white folks?” And they looked at each other and they looked back as if I had asked them a question in Aramaic. And that was the language that Jesus spoke. And it was like, “Get along with the white folks?” “Did you have any problems?” “No, no problem.” “No problems?” “No, no.” Okay. So I walked away scratching my head, something’s wrong here. So a few months later, by coincidence, I met this iconic figure in the Cape Verdean community named Jack GuStudio, this wonderful guy who lived into his nineties and very progressive as a leftist basically. And I told him this story and Jack burst out laughing. Because the other part I told him is that when I asked that question, one of the guys said something about, well, the Greenwood Boys, but that was it. But they never explained anything about the Greenwood boys. Jack just laughed. And he said, “Bill, the Greenwood boys were the Portuguese. They did not want to admit that they weren’t Portuguese.”
So they weren’t, and they didn’t want to admit that they weren’t white. I’m talking about people that were, you see how light-skinned I am. I’m talking about most of these veterans came in and they were darker than me and did not want to, that got integrated in one way or another. That was part of the research that went into The Man Who Fell from the Sky and The Man Who Changed Colors. And it’s like you sort of accumulate this stuff and it’s like, how do you turn it, how do you take the essence of that story and not just fictionalize that example, but take the essence of that story and integrate it into something else? And that’s what I played with. Had fun playing with it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I want to, oh, sorry, was there another question? ‘Cause I don’t want to jump the line.
Speaker 7:
No, I was just going to say one kind of common, perhaps more than question going back to, and what you just talked about is part of what you said earlier in terms of power of story. Now, I was very struck when you said, and I agree, that the right knows how to use the story and the left sometimes comes up short on that. We drop the ball as a left in terms of using story in the many ways and to the extent that we can.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
That’s right.
Speaker 7:
And it takes me back to the ’04 election and I was in my denominational office, national church office, and we were all scratching our heads. So like W could not possibly have won again. How did he pull that off? And eventually, and there’s a book around that time guy named George Lakoff, And know, talked about don’t think of an elephant and all of that. And one of the things that he was saying and that we had to come from to grips with is that, we think that we could show people that 2+3= 4, and they’re going to take that fact, the difference between fact and truth, but that they’re going to take that fact and run with it. Oh, okay. I understand now. And that does not happen in this country, especially so many working class people on the right and what have you.
And that the left did not, even aggressive Democrats did not tell the story enough-
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
That’s right.
Speaker 7:
… In that election cycle.
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
Exactly.
Speaker 7:
So forth and so on. I mean, I’m just glad you highlighted that. ‘Cause also it makes me think in terms of me as a poet is one of the things that hopefully justice poetry does, is illuminate the story and then where another head in terms of ministry, in terms of homiletics and preaching, again, going back to what you were talking about Max, you want to get the story out there, even if journalistically, it has already been uncovered, but it’s your task to get it out there so that people actually receive it. Preaching should do that, progressive preaching. Poetry should do that.
So I just wonder, especially coming into the next election cycle, do you even see the left understanding the lesson you just taught in terms of story is important? Or are we going to make the mistake again of thinking that people should just understand logically that the right is stupid and why it is important?
Bill Fletcher Jr.:
I think both. We’re going to see both. I think that there’s a lot of people that think that the right is so blatantly evil that all you have to do is just sort of remind people. It’s sort of like putting snapshots on and that people will get that, and they won’t necessarily, because there really is a story. And see, part of the problem that we’re up against is that we are actually saying to the people in the United States, “The story that you’ve been brought up with was wrong, they lied to you.” Now that’s really hard because no one likes to be thought of as played.
It’s like when I remember as a kid when if people were poking fun at me and other people were laughing, I would be furious of the people that were laughing. And I would often vent my anger at the people were laughing as opposed to kicking the ass of the person who was poking fun at me. That we’ve got a lot of people in this country that are really upset, that we’re pointing out that they were played, white people have been played. I mean, let’s be real. For 500 years they have been given a song and dance and they accepted it no matter how poor they were. Not everybody. And it’s hard when people realize, and this goes back to the 1934 thing, when you realize you got played, when you realize that you got played as a sucker, you can either be angry with the person who played you, or you can be angry with the person who’s telling you, you got played. And so that’s part of what we’re up against, but we have to be much better at creating the right kind of stories that people will remember and putting things together.
For instance, there’s an interesting story we got to deal with. We got these fascists running around and when some of them have last names like Gonzalez, like wait a minute now, I mean, hold your hor… What are you thinking about? They’re driven by a certain story. Or when you have some of these fascists and there’s a Black person, right? A non-Latino Black, right? It’s like, have you lost your mind? Well, in one sense, yes, the answer is yes, they have, right? But the other part of the answer is that they are moving based on a certain story. They’re moving based on a story that they wish to believe. They want to believe it. And that can be more powerful than any facts. And some people can’t break from that.
And that’s one of the reasons that, going back to the issue of empathy, I’ll say something very cruel. For some people, it’s cruel. There’s a lot of zombies walking around. There are people, I’d say at least a quarter of the population that has lost their humanity. And with a doctorate in Zombism, which I have, I can tell you that once you become a zombie, you can’t become a human again. It just doesn’t happen. Just watch any movie, and you’ll see that, right? You don’t become human again. And that’s what happened. About a quarter of the population, they’ve lost the humanity. And you can’t argue them out of their zombie. We cannot afford to spend a lot of time with them. It’s the people that are on the edge, that are hearing the songs, that the zombies, the mixed metaphors are singing, right? We’ve got to get them, and we’ve got to have a convincing story and the story that speaks to their reality, that people are being crushed by this system, and let’s talk about that. And even if the economy has improved under Biden, which it has, it’s not enough. Millions of people are still being crushed. That’s got to be it, right?
That’s our story.
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