David Bradley’s award-winning novel The Chaneysville Incident is one of those rare works of fiction in which form and content is sublimely integrated in such a way that he way the story is told lends depth and perspective to the story it is telling. At its most elemental level, the novel is a penetration into the nature of history and truth and the way the relationship between the two can be more complex than is usual thought. The novel actually had its genesis in one of the offshoots of historical fact: legend. It was the author’s pursuit of a legendary tale thirteen runaway slaves which he’d heard growing up in his hometown of Bedford, Pennsylvania.
The novel’s focus on the integral relationship between family and history is also reflected in the novel’s origin story. It was the author’s own mother who found the link between legend and history when her own investigation revealed the discovery of the long-forgotten gravesite of the legendary slaves. The story of African-American history has always been one corrupted by gaps in the official historical record. As a result, much of what is known of black history in this country is comprised of conflicting recollections, forgotten names and dates and places, and even greater than usual conflating of legend, myth, fiction and fact. The result of all that commingling is what we term history and it is even under the best of conditions a gamble and challenge to piece together with certainty.
This reality becomes the narrative structure by which the story is pursued. Parallel stories separated by time are presented: John Washington’s return to his home in Pennsylvania to bury Jack Crawley and his attempts to uncover the mysteries of the past surrounding his great-grandfather’s attempted slave rebellion and, later, his father’s own suicide. By mixing past and present and making the story taking in in the present a kind of detective story that attempts to solve a cold case set well in the past, narrative becomes a fragment, postmodern reflection of the reality at the heart of so many stories of men like John Washington weeding through the evils of the past that still stand in place to obstruct long-forgotten truths. John’s journey backward in time will (metaphorically) inevitably becomes a story about long-held assumptions turning out to be false and preconceived notions of truth being exposed as having been based upon systemic propagation of lies and fear.
The very nature of the way that the author tells his story forces the reader to vicariously experience in microcosm the frustration which plagues the protagonist. And, in turn, the frustration of John Washington is a microcosm reflecting the larger exasperation of African-Americans to parse their way back through history to arrive at the truth.
