Making gumbo is the way I like to describe my life as a university professor. Being from the Louisiana bayou town of Opelousas, gumbo is close to my heart. To Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana, no matter where we reside at the moment, just the word gumbo resonates with family, childhood, good spirits, challenge and hope. As a university professor I try to bring that mix of ingredients to my efforts to teach.
Right now, I am in the fourth week of the Fall semester. As always, one of my courses is a 200 student, auditorium class. This semester that course is my favorite, Introduction to Social Psychology. My specialty is social psychology and I teach that course as a course on what it takes for a relationship to develop and be maintained. My goal is to challenge students’ romantic assumptions about how romantic interpersonal relationships work. We are at the point in the semester where my students are starting to realize that I meant what I said when on the first day I declared to them, “you’re not going to like this class.â€
Are secrets the story of a marriage? Andrew Sean Greer’s novel is about how some people live in their relationships with secrets. Why is it so difficult, Greer seems to be asking, to talk to the person we say we love, the person we have married? Is it because we begin the relationship holding back? Is that it?
A storyteller leaves you with the story. There were people who lived, who knew or came to know each other, something or some things went on that had to be, and were, dealt with, and that was the way it happened.
I am a country boy. I grew up in Louisiana, in a little town; Opelousas. I grew up “in town†but “in town†was still “the country.â€Â Friends of the family and our relatives lived on farms with chickens, cows, pigs, horses and all that. Still, even in town, next door to our house, our neighbor Mr. Reuben had pigs and chickens. Like I said, I am a country boy.
Somebody’s killing white men. But not just any white men. These are men who 40 years ago were accused of killing a black person. Yet though accused under the weight of overwhelming evidence, these white men were never punished or even found guilty. Now in Mississippi where the original racial murders occurred, 40 years later, one after another these white men are being killed. And these white men are not just being murdered. No. They are being killed in precisely the same manner as was the black person they are accused of killing. If the black person was lynched, the white man is found lynched. If the black person was strangled with barbed wire, the white man is found strangled with barbed wire. No doubt then, the killings are acts of vengeance. But whose vengeance is it?