A monster story with a point of view on race, grounded in history

Why I'm writing the Masters

Previously… Marching Upon the Ruins of the World.

In this post… I describe what The Masters is about and why I'm writing it. Also, why people see Jesus in pancakes, how autobiographical reasoning and historical memory are related, a story about a Roman emperor killed by his own brother, a childhood anecdote about the KKK, a comb and an afro pick, and the importance of the Haitian revolution.

Sans-Souci Palace (Haiti) 1836

Big History & Werewolves

The Masters is a story about immortals, werewolves, slavery, evolutionary biology, grief, revenge, and the military industrial complex.

“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world.”

– Umberto Eco

My story begins in October 1950, days before island-wide uprisings in Puerto Rico. Things go a bit bonkers right up front, when a pair of FBI agents have their heads popped open. We learn of a theft at New York Presbyterian hospital, the strange contents of a mysterious wooden crate, then follow developments as they lead from the stone dungeons of la Princessa prison in San Juan, to a state of the art off-the-books interrogation facility on Ramey Air Force base. The FBI station chief, a man by the name of John Spillers, is not who he claims to be.

The story is written in a journalistic style with a bit of magical realism, true crime horror, and a sincere hope to speak a truth that gives sense to the immensity of things that are happening in the actual world.

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What If…

A small number of enslaved people throughout history, in the face of reaching their absolute breaking point, had developed super powers? Perhaps as a result of magic, evolutionary countermeasures – or a bit of both. The Masters begins with the assumption that that’s exactly what happened in the 15th and 16th centuries, then traces what would happen next to the people most closely touched by these transformations, and follows them as they struggle to comprehend this incredible new power, to martial new alliances, and settle old scores. How many of them exist, what would they be like, what do they want, and why did history unfold in the way it did?

A genuine mystery in 1492

New York Times Archive: 8/27/1985 (see link below)

In 1492, Columbus left 39 men at a settlement named La Navidad. When he returned a year later, he found it burned to the ground, and his men dead.
New York Times Archival Article

Most of us know the gist of what happened next, but not the gory details

The Spaniards murdered between 12 and 15 million indigenous people.

“A Spaniard who was out hunting deer or rabbits realized that his dogs were hungry and, not finding anything that they could hunt, took a little boy from his mother, cut his arms and legs into chunks with his knife and distributed them among his dogs. Once they had eaten up these steaks, he threw the rest of the carcass on the ground for them to fight over.”

– Bartolomé de las Casas

Read more here

The Spanish conquest of the Americas is not just a story of annihilating indigenous people and stealing gold

It’s the beginning of a much longer story, one that’s more complicated to tell, and difficult to see, but that unfolds every day in breaking news, viral tweets, and youtube videos. It’s the story of someone’s knee on someone else’s neck.

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The knee on the neck

The Masters introduces you to a group of people who have grown accustomed to having the constant pressure of a knee on their neck, of living with that reality for centuries. They come from places like Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Cuba. It’s a story about them finding out who commands that knee, how it got there, how to connect with others who feel it, and their struggle to rip it away.

Allegorically, it’s a meditation on minoritarian control as it’s practiced in the streets – of broken windows policing, no-knock warrants, voter intimidation, colorism, school safety officers body slamming fifth graders, and even #becky. Yes, Becky. 

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The Importance of History

To tell this story, I need to lengthen the reader’s perspective. And I intend to do this by speaking through characters who have lived hundreds of years. Understanding their point of view, filtered through their lived experiences might give sense to the immensity of things that are happening in [our] actual world.

Autobiographical reasoning

“The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.”

– Howard Zinn

Autobiographical reasoning produces the narrative kernel of our existence. Every conscious person alive engages in an active construction of a coherent narrative totality to encapsulate who they think they are: curated memories, personal aspirations, attitudes about your in-group, other people’s opinions of you – all selectively edited for conformity.

Historical memory

Our understanding of history is a vital piece of autobiographical reasoning because the communities to which we belong aren’t spun out of nothing. They’re the products of long running processes that predate our oldest experienced memories. The better we understand those original causes, the clearer our understanding will be of the pillars that prop up our personal narratives. 

Seeing Jesus in Pancakes

There’s a phenomenon called pareidolia – the tendency to perceive a pattern within a random ambiguous image. Most people don’t realize this, but this epiphenomenon is also present in AI (I quit my job as a software engineer for an AI company just this last Friday to pursue writing full time). Typically, when pareidolia crops up in the news, it’s a story about someone seeing the face of Jesus in pancakes.

Not surprisingly, pareidolia has a lot in common with autobiographical reasoning. When you and I stop to consider a fragment of history, we’re peering into a vast event stream of data. We’re looking for something familiar – stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. In essence, we’re looking for Jesus’ face in an ocean of pancakes.

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Shared Intent

When a group of people can stare at the same ocean of pancakes, and all agree that the same face of Jesus is staring back at them, that is powerful. It puts everyone on the same narrative page. This ability to arrive at consensus on things that only exist in our heads is a killer feature of humans – what Steven Pinker describes as the ability to “shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.” 

There is power in shared intent

“Storytelling represents a key element in the creation and propagation of culture… We propose that the specific adaptive value of storytelling lies in making sense of non‐routine, uncertain, or novel situations, thereby enabling the collaborative development of previously acquired skills and knowledge, but also promoting social cohesion by strengthening intragroup identity and clarifying intergroup relations.

– Bietti, Tilston, and Bangerter (Storytelling as Adaptive Collective Sensemaking)

Killing a different group’s shared intent can also be a shared intent

These people have shared intent.

“…the real conflict is over how American society understands its present inequalities.”

– Adam Serwer (Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project)

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Damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) the story of Emperor Geta

Rome, 211 AD – after the death of Emperor Septimium Severus, his two sons Geta and Caracalla became joint emperors. From the moment the joint rule started, things were tense. Each brother sought to carve out and strengthen his own loyal military faction in anticipation of single rule.

In mid December of 211 AD, a week after the festival of Saturnalia, Caracalla arranged for Geta to meet him at their mother’s residence to hash out details of a workable détente. It was a trap. Geta agreed, let his guard down, dismissed his usual bodyguards and went to meet his brother. Caracalla’s centurions killed him while he was in his mother’s arms.

Shortly afterwards, Caracalla ordered the damnatio memoriae and Geta’s name was expunged from the official record: statuary, walls, doors, documents, even coins bearing his likeness. The act is nothing short of the full and total erasure of a subject from the historical record. Like the person had never existed.

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Why I’m writing The Masters

I grew up in the South in the 1970s. When I was about 4 years old, I watched as the local fire department put out a burning cross that the Klan had attached to a cherry tree out on the front lawn of the house across the street. A young mixed couple lived there.

A little later, when I was 6, I attended the Walnut Hill elementary school in Petersburg, Virginia. They posted racial stats on index cards taped to the door jambs of every classroom. My class had 12 whites, 13 blacks and 1 other.

The comb

On picture day, we all marched to the auditorium, and stood in a long line. Right before we got to go up and sit on the stool in front of the photographer, there was a small curtained off area with a mirror where you could look yourself over and adjust your clothes and hair – kind of like a batter’s box. When it was my turn, I noticed two boxes inside that little area. One was filled with black Ace combs. The other with afro picks. My hair was too thick for combs, but I reached for one anyway. The teeth were so close together, it didn’t even make it a sixteenth of an inch through. I put it back, and picked up the afro pick. It worked better, but also felt… wrong. I heard a grownup call out Next! So I took a quick three point look in the mirror, adjusted the sides of my hair with my hands, and sat on that stool and got my picture taken and went back home.

The comb episode didn’t bother me at the time. Not on a conscious level. But it sat there in me, like an unexploded bomb. 

At the age of 8, my parents sent me to a fancy private school with rich white kids whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy. Some of my friends’ families decorated their kitchens with Jim Crow inspired art. I learned how to fit in and be polite. But I sometimes wondered what the difference was between those nice rich people and the ones who burned the cross in my neighbor’s yard. Maybe just a series of bad days.

In the fourth grade, I built a scale model replica of Jamestown: a miniature fort mounted to a piece of laminate. I used real sticks for fence posts, held together with twine and glue. I added some fake grass and a few trees purchased at a hobby shop, and a few pieces of decorated cardboard for random buildings. I even made a set of stocks in the center, and placed a Dukes of Hazard action figure in there to show how people were punished.

When I turned 48, I took a DNA test. Not only did I confirm my Puerto Rican ancestry, I connected with one of my cousins (Ruthie) with whom I chat regularly. Ruthie, besides being an amazing human being and mom, does genealogical research into her family tree. Among the many things I learned from her was that my paternal grandfather was black, that his wife was mestizo, and that people in our family history were almost certainly slaves on Puerto Rican haciendas.

I thought of picture day. My dark skin, thick wavy hair, big fat lips, and high cheekbones. I thought back on the burning cross. I thought of all the different names I was called when growing up: gypsy, injun, wetback, beaner, spic, lettuce picker, chink, gook, charlie, slope, dog eater, camel jockey, coon, and shine. I thought about the diorama I made in the fourth grade, and how there was not a single trace of slavery in it. That if that project resembled anything real, it was an elaborate hideaway a child would conjure up out of couch cushions.

My narrative kernel of truth – my sense of who I think I am – is moving in the direction of a very large group of people who are right now, struggling to find shared intent. It’s a struggle because of that goddamn knee, and I want to help. That’s why I want to write this story.

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Getting back to Werewolves & Haiti

It’s 2022. You want to explain to a kid why a white doctor would vivisect 14 year old black girls without anesthesia. Also, why a white woman would call the police on a black man birdwatching in Central Park. And why a white 17 year-old would drive across state lines with an assault rifle to protect car dealerships from BLM protestors, subsequently kill two people, then behave like a victim. Good luck. My recommendation: werewolves.

Why Werewolves

Politics

If you want to say something that even obliquely mentions CRT or BLM or the 1619 project, and you’re directing your comments at a general audience, forget it. No one who doesn’t already agree with you will stick around for the 2nd sentence that comes out of your mouth. It’s politically safer to explain the knee-on-neck allegory inside of a monster story, then let people connect the dots for themselves.

Last time I checked, no one was burning books about werewolves. They aren’t a divisive issue. Same goes for immortals. They’re not part of the deep state. So yeah. That’s important.

Werewolves 1.0 needs a little modernizing

I grew up a huge fan of werewolves, but I think the genre could use some sprucing up. Below is a very brief roundup of a few story blueprints I’ve seen in the past:

1. Religious/Societal norms – someone violated a religious norm or a social more. As a result, werewolves spring forth (see The Cursed)

2. Myth/Magic – a god got pissed off, and cursed whoever pissed him off. And this just winds up getting passed along down the ages (see Ovid’s Metamorphoses)

3. Native American folklore – either a wolf-like creature that exists from time immemorial… or one that pops into existence via prayers, or ritually-induced chanting (see Wolfen and Twilight saga: Eclipse)

4. Spontaneous or engineered genetic mutation – some ancestor was born different or was changed, eventually got hungry, and decided that humans taste good (see Underworld or Wer)

5. No explanation given – many things presumed: werewolves have been around for a long time, the full moon brings about werewolf transformations, the condition is transmissible, and (maybe) silver can kill them (see The Howling)

Werewolves 1.x (The Masters)

I’m partial to the 4th variant above☝🏽 (eg: Underworld), but would add a few rules of engagement specific to my project.

• Establish enigmas, not explanations – see The Outsider

• Don’t science it up too much – float a theory, but leave the door open that the theory is just a bunch of bullshit; too much science ruins it

• Decouple werewolves from wolves – we don’t need more of this. My monsters have no need of being wolf-like (hunting in packs, licking their balls, etc.) All that animal baggage unnecessarily complicates things. I’m also not a fan of the full moon thing.

• No f***ing aliens – do not, under any circumstances, do what Highlander 2 did

• Explicitly link the desire to enslave with werewolfism – In my story, slaves don’t turn into werewolves. Masters do, essentially becoming the wretched physical manifestations of the abominations they inflict on others. The slaves are more like optimized versions of themselves, plus immortal. The two groups are definitely linked, but i’m not ready to spill the beans on how.

• Align with history first, then folklore, but not politics – My characters aren’t miniaturized versions of monolithic caricatures trying to get you to vote a specific way or support a cause. They’re just explaining history through their actions.

Why the Haitian revolution

Without saddling you with tons of details, let me recap:

• Haiti is where Columbus landed, the site of la Navidad, and ground zero of the Taino genocide. It’s also the place where, centuries later, enslaved people defeated their masters, expelled them from the land, and formed a government.

• The military defeat of France at the hands of untrained, uneducated Haitian slaves was an unacceptable puncturing of the national identity

• On top of the humiliation, there were the stories of atrocities committed against whites, exponentially amplified by “the realization that white lives could be held as cheap as those of black slaves had been before the insurrection. [and] … the experience of total helplessness” (Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution)

• The Haitian revolution authorized the white world to define blackness as savagery, and the scientific community really stepped up to the challenge. The baron de Beauvois, a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts in Cap Français wrote these words in his Idées sommaires sur quelques règlements à faire par l'assemblée coloniale: “[the blacks are] different from the white race, physically and morally,” their “faculties…, so to speak, nonexistent”. He spelled out the race hierarchy like this:

  • White race => Native Americans => Negroes => Orangutans => Gibbons

• The Haitian revolution established a template for dispensing punishment disguised as charity – sort of an institutionalized form of punching down. For a detailed description of how this played out in Haiti, see this piece published by the New York Times

Haiti trained a particular perception model of blackness

Imagining one black person is benign. Imagining several is frightening (to many people). I encourage you, regardless of your background to take a race-based implicit bias test.

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What are your favorite werewolf / monster movies and books?

Let me know in the comments! I’d also love to know your thoughts about the werewolf genre in general.