After a failure to secure a library book for further Alice readings, I remembered that I had an Alice-related book on my shelves that I'd never read. Problem solved. I've had this book for about twenty years, and picked it up mainly for the cover, but since I've been exploring Wonderland related materials this summer, I decided to go for it, and I'm glad I did.
 |
Black Alice by Thomas M. Disch and John Sladek
(Doubleday, 1968)
Alice is most certainly not in Wonderland...but Virginia in the late '60s holds a lot of parallels.
Alice is 12 year old heiress who is kidnapped and held for a $1,000,000 ransom. Her kidnappers drug her and feed her pills that change her, they don't make her smaller or grow larger, but they die her pale skin a coffee brown. They dye her blond hair black and use a curling iron to burn it into tight kinks. When she comes out of her daze, Alice isn't entirely sure who she is anymore. Is proper little Alice, or just another little 'Negro' girl that nobody will ever notice?
This is one of those rare crime thrillers that transcends into literature, beyond just the clever Alice's Adventures in Wonderland elements. Below the main kidnapping plot, this book is about race relations and tensions between the KKK and Civil Rights activists. What's really refreshing about this being a subtext of the book, instead of the main drive, is that it doesn't seem to take a position on the subject...at least not obviously (through Alice's actions, we know where the author's stand).
What we get is picture of this time and what was going on, through the eyes of an observer who has little vested interest in the outcome. It's a snapshot of contemporary social unrest from the past. Any story written today that would be set in that time would inevitably be a revisionist portrait.
No comments:
Post a Comment