By Wes Brown.
John Vercher, After the Lights Go Out (Pushkin Press, 2022)
In 1908, the black boxer Jack Johnson defeated the white defending champion Tommy Burns. In the words of Jack London, the bout was a “hopeless slaughter” and journalists called on former champion James Jeffries to come out of retirement to “wipe the smile from Johnson’s face”. Jeffries declared he would “reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race” and relieve the anxieties of white supremacists everywhere. In what was then billed as The Fight of The Century, Johnson defeated Jeffries, sparking race riots in which hundreds of black people were injured and a number killed. It was five years until Johnson dropped his belt to a white boxer, Jess Willard, with Johnson claiming he threw the fight in protest to the rage hurled at him. It would be another twenty years before an African American boxer was allowed to contend for the title.
The ‘great white hope’ trope has been repeated in fight films and novels alike, dramatizing fears of the other and offering wish-fulfilment fantasies for Caucasian audiences. Even in the Rocky films, it is Apollo Creed who Rocky must overcome as his first adversary. In Rocky Balboa (2006), The Italian Stallion comes out of retirement in his 50s to fight a brash black fighter and put him in his place. The franchise has since gone some way to rectify this with the Creed series, allowing black directors and black actors to tell their own stories. But in literature there has been a lack of black protagonists in fight fiction. While the stink of the ‘great white hope’ has lingered, Vercher’s After the Lights Go Out is not so much a counterpunch to the trope as a knockout blow, a slow-burning noir thriller disguised as a sports drama about identity, memory and race. It is a contender to the crown of a canon that has not always been so welcoming.
When MMA biracial fighter Xavier ‘Scarecrow’ Wallace finds himself lined up for a number-one contenders fight after years as a journeyman and failing a drugs test (not his fault), he sees his chance for glory. But the problem is he’s absorbed too much punishment, his brain pin-balled across his skull too many times and like his father he’s beginning to forget who he was. Xavier’s central conflict arises from his divided and dissolving identity: everything he once held certain, black or white, appears to be disappearing. His white father, Sam, has Alzheimer’s and is confined to a care home. He was once married to Xavier’s mother, Evelyn, a black woman who abandoned her family when Xavier was a child. Sam was once the kind of ‘colour blind’ white liberal who said he didn’t care if people were, “Black, yellow, purple or green” and make jokes about his wife’s ethnicity, only to laugh away his remarks:
He’d pinch her behind and tell her that despite her dark skin, he could see her at night just fine with his own baby blues. She laughed, but not in a way that said she found it funny.
Now suffering from dementia, he is finding it harder to conceal his racist inclinations. Still, Xavier is shocked when nurses report his dad has been racially abusing staff. Xavier is taken aback. They mean to say the man with a biracial son, who was married to a black woman is capable of racism? Xavier doesn’t believe it until he uses the n-word to describe him. “That man back there. . .” he says, “I don’t know that man.”
As a white reader, After The Lights Go Out is at its best when it makes you question your own certainties and prejudices. Vercher is careful to avoid being too didactic: this is a noirish world where nothing is black and white. Even Xavier’s mother, Evelyn, who veers close to being a sermonising voice in the novel, is not beyond fighting dirty (years of experience of racism have seen to that). She offers him the possibility of reconciliation, though if Xavier can take that is a different matter. There’s short shrift for white liberals like Sam who engage in ‘hipster’ racism: using their privilege to tell ‘ironic’ racist jokes that couldn’t possibly be so because they’re ‘too self-aware’, the kind where the butt of the satire tends to be less privileged white people who are the ‘real’ racists. Humour can be transgressive and bond people, though the line between a joke about racism and a joke that is racist is often unclear. The novel gets deep into the moral complexities of identity. What is black? What is white? Who has the authenticity to decide?
In one delicious scene, Xavier encounters Shot’s latest white MMA prodigy in the gym. Lawrence is a rising star, unaware that he’s fodder Shot can build to help him throw fights. Lawrence is a jumped-up white guy with cornrows, full of sneering, upstart braggadocio who claims to be “Blacker” than the more cerebral Xavier. Lawrence reminds Xavier of the “white boys” he went to High School with who imitated black rappers so unflatteringly they put on a “modern-day minstrelshow” and told Xavier that he listened to “white music” and talked “all proper” because his black mother taught college English. In defending his pride, Xavier goes too far and the dark inner voice takes over during sparring:
An image flashed across his mind’s eye Lawrence’s face leaking blood from openings both natural and not. And Xavier wanted to make the image real.
Xavier puts a beating on Lawrence but forces himself into an impossible position. Shot has his own underworld dealings and without his pawn in place, Xavier is forced to repay him: throw his match or suffer the consequences as he spirals downwardly into post-concussive oblivion, unable to ascertain who his father really was and who he’s fighting for. After The Lights Go Out is not the kind of sports drama where conflicts are resolved by athletic prowess. Inside the octagon might be where the last of Xavier is most together: unleashing his ID, in gales of ultra-violence but where the maelstrom of his doubt and self-destruction is most fierce. In the run-up to his fight, as the inner whispers grow louder, his identity crisis threaten a loss of control. Battles within the cage are merely microcosms of the power struggles without. This is knockout artistry as consciousness raising.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wes Brown teaches creative writing at the University of East London. His autobiographical novel about pro wrestling, Breaking Kayfabe, will be published by Bluemoose in 2023.
