On the River Down Where They
Found Willy Brown
Theodore
Wheeler. Edition Solitude, $3.50 chapbook (50p) ISBN: 978-3937158877
In
Theodore Wheeler’s debut chapbook, On the
River Down Where They Found Willy Brown, readers are whisked along with the
mob that dictates the racial tensions of Omaha, Nebraska in the early 1900s and
the repercussions that those tensions have on all communities involved.
Willy Brown is the story of both the titular
character, a black man wanted for allegedly committing a rape, as well as Karel
Miihlstein, a 15-year-old German immigrant who loves baseball. Eventually their
paths intersect, though not directly, and Miihlstein watches helplessly as “justice”
is enacted upon Willy Brown by the mob.
Wheeler
begins by painting an almost-mythic portrait of Willy Brown, humanizing yet
idolizing the man who will eventually be arrested for an alleged rape. “Some of
us thought a lot about who that schwarzer Mann was.
That Willy Brown who did those bad things to a girl. Willy Brown
wouldn’t have looked that old, but he would have felt old that year.” You are
then introduced to the baseball-loving Miihlstein, and watch as he takes in the
annual Fourth of July Interrace baseball game before. “Anybody who held steady
in an integrated profession,” Wheeler writes, “lived and died with the
Interrace game.”
Finally,
the two stories begin to intertwine, as someone suggests Brown was the culprit
and the mob captures him. Miihlstein and his crew follow along, watching as the
police are helpless against the power of the mob.
The
distance created by the narrator is the most interesting part of this chapbook.
At once, you are both part of the mob and hovering above them, taking it all
in, watching the chaos that ensues, cringing at their choices and the injustice
that takes place. You know that the narrator is one of the German
immigrants—the prose is speckled with Deutsch—but you never know who it is. At
best, you can guess that it’s one of Miihlstein’s lackeys, though a lackey with
prescience unknown to his comrades. There is little emotional involvement on
the part of the narrator. Very much as Lewis Nordan does in Wolfwhistle, Wheeler shows the thoughts
of the mob in front of you and lets you decide what to make of it.
Willy Brown is over almost as soon as it
starts, and that’s a shame. The prose carries you along until the inevitably
sad end. Like with any good work of literature, you are left wanting more.
On the River Down Where They
Found Willy Brown
manages to take readers back in time while staying incredibly topical for this
day and age. The issues at play in the story are the same
ones igniting protest across the country today. Willy Brown is as much a testament to Wheeler’s prose control as it
is a comment on just how far we haven’t come as a nation in the century since
the story took place. (February 2015)
Purchase On the River Down Where They Found Willy
Brown HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Sam Slaughter is the author of the chapbook When You Cross That Line, the forthcoming short story collection God in Neon, and the forthcoming novel Dogs. He is the Atticus Book Review
Editor and can be found online at www.samslaughterthewriter.com and on Twitter
@slaughterwrites.
