by Jeffrey Jason Hill

Created on: June 07, 2009

The books I have loved in my life, if I were to live in them, would have been bad for my health. Picture me on the banks of the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn. A third wheel if there ever was one. Even Jim might sell me out. You see, my skin color is the same as Jim's was. Or picture me in The Sound and the Fury, going ballistic on Jason when I overhear him saying a Negro couldn't hardly stand up without a pan of cornbread in their hand to balance them. My fate would have been worse than that of the poor white woman the Indiana Klansman treated like a Charleston Chew in the 1920s.

In Invisible Man, my introverted qualities might have hidden me from the rest of the world successfully. I certainly would not have been egged on to lead an urban movement of malcontents to push for social justice like he did. In Native Son they would have found a way to make me an accomplice to the rape allegedly committed by Bigger Thomas.

Don't get me started on Gone With the Wind. I think we know what would have happened to me in that one. In The Thorn Birds I might have equal status with the Aborigines.

I picture myself as Barney sitting in the upper seats of the opera looking down through opera glasses on a woman in full control of her coral mouth. Barney the orderly from The Silence of the Lambs. Only this book is Hannibal, and three years after the denouement Barney sees a familiar-looking woman with a platinum helmet emerge from a limousine accompanied by a man with an imperious nose like that of a Peron. This is in Buenos Aires. Imagine his shock when he sees her clearly for the first time inside the opera and under his breath utters, 'Starling.' On film, Barney is black, so I assume if it were me, and Dr. Lecter turned his opera glasses in my direction when the house lights went up after the first act, I would have given myself away. I would not have made it to Rio that night with my companion. And I would not have seen the Vermeer in Buenos Aires. The book says it would have been fatal to run into either one of them.

I would have rather been Ardelia. On film, she's my color, too. Only her heart is broken that her best friend and roommate, Clarice Starling, has gone missing inexplicably. To live in the agony of not knowing what happened to her would have been unbearable. And then one day two years later get an emerald ring and a note saying 'I'm fine and better than fine. Don't look for me. Sorry I scared you.' My constitution is too weak for horror like this.

Dr. Lecter would have spotted me in the cheap seats, and then I would have been the Charleston Chew.

To Kill a Mockingbird might have been called To Strangle a Woodpecker if I had been Atticus Finch's client. In The Great Gatsby I would not have been allowed anywhere near East Egg, or the other one for that matter. And in No Country for Old Men I don't like me chances either. Race has nothing to do with it; I just don't like my chances.

There are many more books I could name I've read in which the environs would have been inhospitable, to say the least. But I don't think that it has anything to do with me personally. I think all our favorite books present an element of danger to us were we to live in them. They would not have drawn us into their world had they not. All in all, it is interesting to think about.

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