Sometimes you have writer's block because there are things you want to be done with but they won't let you go

The letter came when I was thirteen. It was just an ordinary white envelope with a crosshatched blue interior…and seven pages of tightly written words. I suppose if it hadn’t been my job to get the mail, I would have never even seen it. As it was I only got to read it once, and then my grandmother took it away. She said she might need it for the lawyers.

You know in the news how a kidnapped child will be found years after she’s disappeared and the media will rejoice in how she’s finally being reunited with her legal guardians? I’m thankful every day that I was not that child. The letter from my father came, and I read it before my grandmother knew about it.

In the letter, my father said that he was going to be released from prison, and he knew that my grandmother had probably told me a lot of lies. The letter itself was a weird flailing of mismatched rhetoric. It wasn’t disorganized: it flowed smoothly from “you haven’t been told the truth about me” to “here is the father I really was” to “look, I am an intelligent and thoughtful man and I will prove it by explaining Aristotle’s ideas of love to you”. Method One: shove a sliver of doubt into the heart of the stolen child. Method Two: Demonstrate that you deserve a place in said child’s heart. Method Three: assume the child is intelligent: intellectually distract her from her heart with philosophical treaties. Seven pages of carefully structured words, and yet there was only one message I heard when I read it, “As soon as I am free, I am coming to get you.”

You know how people talk about needing to forgive because it’s good for you to let go and not let yourself be consumed by grudges? I’m thankful every day that at thirteen, forgiveness was irrelevant to me. I read the letter, and I knew before I even spoke to my grandmother that my father was a ghost and I wanted him to remain that way.

I was thirteen and consumed by my own struggles with existence, so I did not think about how my grandmother would react to the letter. I gave it to her because I was scared. My father was coming to get me, and there was no greater champion, no more magnificent angel with a flaming sword, no martyr more willing to stand between me and hell than my scarecrow thin, patient and fragile grandmother. I shouldn’t have put it in her hand with a dramatic flourish. I should have laid it gently on the table a suitable distance from her the way I had been taught to hand her sharp scissors or a bottle of caustic fluids. Instead, I silently sailed it through the air into her open palm and watched her flinch when she realized the letter had finally come. She took a moment to pull her pain inward, and then she settled her reading glasses on her nose and quietly sat down to read the letter.

Look, people will tell you that children need fathers, and I’m not going to argue that. Fathers are probably wonderful things. It’s a terrifying thing to look in the mirror and wonder, “How much of who I am comes from a man I do not want to know?” Maybe I would have grown to love my father. I am thankful every day that this was a conflict I refused to inflict upon myself when I was thirteen.

I wrote my own letter and I told my father that I did not care who he was or who he thought my grandmother was or who he thought I was. I told him there is no coming back from killing your child’s mother. I told him to leave me alone. My grandmother let me send the letter, but she did not give me back his words. She did not let me spend years pouring over them, dissecting them and worrying myself over the consequences of my choices. My father thought she spent years whispering poison about him to her. She did not. She barely spoke about him at all, and when she did, we mostly discussed one thing: how foolish she was to believe that he would not really come to her house and kill her daughter.

History and Folk Heroes

Many of the educated people I know who have read or watched Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter seem stunned by its lack of reverence for both history and the life of Abraham Lincoln.  At the core of it seems to be two ideas: one is that Civil War history and the story of slavery is not something to mock by converting it into a horror story(as if it isn’t a horror story already).  The other idea seems to be that Grahame-Smith isn’t getting Abraham Lincoln “right” by depicting him as a vampire hunting hero of the mid-nineteenth century.  To both of these criticisms I say this: there is Abraham Lincoln the historical figure, and Abraham Lincoln the folk hero.  We need both of them to deal with the horrors of slavery and the Civil War.

The Lincoln image we seem to be most comfortable with is Spielberg’s Lincoln: a besieged statesman who simply plugs away at a fight he didn’t pick but is forced to finish.  He’s an inspiring model of the principle of doing right even if it is inconvenient or challenging.  This Lincoln sacrifices his health, his son, his wife’s sanity and eventually his life in the name of doggedly pursuing justice.  I don’t just like him, I love him, which is why more than anything else, I’d like to see him win.

The sad Lincoln is not the only Lincoln in American lore, but his image has completely overrun another image of Lincoln: the folk hero.  Lincoln the folk hero isn’t just about made-up stories, although certainly some elements of Lincoln’s humble beginnings are exaggerated to appeal to an idea of America that modern American see as quaint, silly, and bothersome.  That discarded idea is the myth trope of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Daniel Boone, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Johnny Appleseed: the physically strong, incredibly clever, barely educated poor man who does good deeds and paves the way for a newer, brighter tomorrow.  He is the rugged individualist with a social conscience.  This is the Lincoln Grahame-Smith is summoning up. 

It’s tempting to be intellectually above needing the folk hero Lincoln now that we’re in a post-Howard Zinn era of historical reckoning.  Certainly we do need to be honest about racism among the abolitionists and the problem with some of their solutions for slavery; muddling that leaves us no hope for ever making any progress toward healing the wound that never heals.  But for me, there is something painfully honest in the Grahame-Smith version of Lincoln that is lacking in the Spielberg version: slave owners needed a good ass-kicking. 

That’s right: I need to see Lincoln kick ass.  I need to see slave owners depicted as monsters instead of frustrated and misguided businessman who are merely trying to hold on to their financial solvency and their social status.  I need to see Lincoln as the manifestation of American justice, a nineteenth century Superman in a stovepipe hat with a twirling ax confronting evil as evil with no sugar coating or sympathy for the wrongdoers.  I don’t need to see it in real life, but occasionally I need the catharsis of watching something other than a Lincoln who is prey to jackals and critics and assassins.  I need Lincoln the folk hero, a man who is physically stronger than his peers, a man who is smarter than his more educated colleagues, a man who is more righteous than his world, a man who cannot be beaten down, kicked around, and undermined.  I need the Lincoln who makes me believe there are people who will make the promises of the Declaration of Independence come true.  Frankly, Spielberg’s Lincoln makes me hate America.  Grahame-Smith’s Lincoln makes me feel like I did when I was ten years old and I said the Pledge of Allegiance.  Even if that feeling doesn’t last because I now know the real history, it’s still a nice respite to feel it again once in a while