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Fiction

In This Ingenious Satire, a Father Goes to Extremes to Protect His Son From Racism

Maurice Carlos Ruffin Credit...Clare Welsh

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WE CAST A SHADOW
By Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Good questions breathe life into the world. “We Cast a Shadow,” Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel, asks some of the most important questions fiction can ask, and it does so with energetic and acrobatic prose, hilarious wordplay and great heart.

“We Cast a Shadow” is the story of a black lawyer in a version of the American South. We are dropped into a future where the country is even more willing than now to follow its worst, most racist inclinations. The unnamed narrator describes how, in the next state over, black people must wear tracking devices.

The novel draws its power from this unnamed man’s love for his family, particularly for his biracial son, Nigel. The narrator loves his son so much it seems he can’t even see him. What he does see is the boy’s figure outlined and defined by all the lurking dangers to his person and his potential. Our narrator is especially worried because of the metastasizing birthmarks that cover his son’s body: differently sized tokens of color that remind the world that Nigel is black, a fate as unfortunate as any in the mind of his father.

As the novel begins, it is focused on the father’s struggle to do well in a prominent law firm so that he can pay for his son to have an expensive and increasingly popular medical procedure called “demelanization,” which effectively eliminates any physical trace of blackness. As the novel progresses, however, it evolves from an account of political compromise into one of protest and radicalization.

In trying to describe a book like this, it’s easy to imagine settling on “satire that guts American racism” or something along those lines. And it certainly is that. What must not be lost, as is often the case with the reductive labels we stitch to such works, is how love is at the core of this funny, beautiful novel — a father’s love situated firmly in the jaws of a racist society that threatens to swallow everyone in different ways.

And yet what is fascinating about the narrator — who forces hats on his son out of fear that sunlight will darken his birthmarks and who lathers whitening creams on his skin that burn even as they “fix” it — is how carefully and precisely he defends his behavior. Speaking about his position as a lawyer, he says: “I’m lucky, and I know it. Somehow the grinding effects of a world built to hurt me have not yet eliminated my every opportunity for a happy life, as is the case for so many of my brethren. The world is a centrifuge that patiently waits to separate my Nigel from basic human dignity. I don’t have to tell you that this is an unjust planet.”

Who gets to have a chance? Ruffin asks. In the world of the novel, violence, humiliation and indignity might spark up from anywhere at any time. While the narrator is visiting the home of one of his best friends, Jo Jo, for example, the doorbell rings. “I opened the door,” the narrator recounts, “and a man in fatigues stood there, a shotgun slung from his hip. I raised my hands. He shoved me into the wall, choking my windpipe with his forearm.

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“‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Jo Jo said. ‘Easy, officer. The good brother is with me.’

“‘Why’d you do that, man?’ Jo Jo said. I gasped and coughed.

“‘I did it for his safety.’

“‘My safety?’ I asked. ‘How is that possible?’

“‘I had to make sure you weren’t a danger to me or yourself,’ the officer said.”

Immediately after this exchange, we learn that the “officer” is not a police officer but a member of a group that runs tactical maneuvers in the nearby swamps — just for fun.

Who gets to feel safe?

“I’m not used to seeing black guys around here,” the officer says. “You can’t be too careful these days.”

The novel is rife with these kind of moments — when the racism feels satirical in its intensity. The narrative then quickly moves on; this is just a thing that happens. While many of these moments are crafted to be funny in their absurdity, they are not handled flippantly; these instances when we meet yet another head of the hydra that is racism ultimately accrue to humanize a narrator who has decided there is no honor in fighting the beast. For the narrator, the world is what it is and he will do anything to protect his son from it. Not everyone in his life agrees with him. His wife, a white woman who believes Nigel should learn to love himself the way he is, and his mother, who tells him, “You losing yourself. Your heart. Your roots,” create a necessary counterpoint. And yet, through a careful marrying of desperation, love and awareness of the world as the narrator sees it, Ruffin makes us understand how it is that this man might have become broken this way.

Who gets to be traumatized?

At any moment, Ruffin can summon the kind of magic that makes you want to slow down, reread and experience the pleasure of him crystallizing an image again. The narrator’s intellectual style also allows for a lot of sentence-level fun. We’re never far from an alliterative flourish (“flaky fried fowl fingers”) or a stroke of sudden beauty (“I grabbed the knob with both hands, a transparent crystal bulb, a dollop of frozen light”) that makes us pause and say, damn, as we realize just how closely the narrator is paying attention to the world around him.

The fluidity of the narrator’s mind keeps us on our toes; we race to keep up with him as his thoughts wind and bend across the pages. He might suddenly remember some grim fact about the state of racial politics as he’s driving in the family car with his son. He is unable to rest, to let his mind wander.

Who gets a break? Who gets to relax?

Through his characters, Ruffin reminds us that human rights don’t have a season. That you don’t compromise on your humanity. That if you do, you risk becoming an agent of oppression. The narrator shows us over and over again what happens when love is pushed out into the world from a source that does not love itself. That kind of love looks and feels a lot like violence.

How does racism shape our ability to love?

“We Cast a Shadow” churns fresh beauty from old ugliness. What injustices have we as a culture come to accept as normal? What are the pitfalls of our complacency? And how can anyone survive this? These questions are essential to America’s growth, but rarely do we see them posed so sharply. Read this book, and ask yourself: Is this the world you want?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the author of “Friday Black,” a collection of stories.

WE CAST A SHADOW
By Maurice Carlos Ruffin
324 pp. One World. $27.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Birthmark. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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