Johnny Compton's Blog
October 20, 2021
The Worlds Between Words – Devil in a Blue Dress
In Walter Mosley's excellent hard-boiled mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress there is a line that struck me like a solid swing of baseball bat to the abdomen. Mosley’s lead, World War II veteran Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, describes the fear that seized him during his introduction to combat.
“The first time I fought a German hand-to-hand I screamed for help the whole time I was killing him.”
As I made it through the rest of the novel, that line would to flash across my mind from time to time. There’s nothing aesthetically remarkable about the above line. It’s not meant to be poetic. It has no intention of showing off any metaphors or similes. But that one sentence captures the character’s experience with violence and presents a scene worthy of its own short story. Even with the novel done, questions born from reading that sentence persisted.
How did Easy find himself in the situation where he was fighting an enemy hand-to-hand? Where were his allies? Was he alone, in a building perhaps (the scene of Adam Goldberg fighting for his life in Saving Private Ryan comes to mind), or out in an open space surrounded by fellow soldiers all too busy fighting their own individual battles to hear or heed his cries for help? What was going through the German soldier’s mind as this black American soldier cried out during the attack? Was he able to understand anything that Easy was saying? Could he understand the meaning of the words without knowing the language, just by reading the panic in Easy’s eyes and soaking in the terror in his voice? Was the German soldier crying out for help as well, suffering a crisis of faith in the Nazi Übermensch concept he may not have believed in in the first place?
The next line, “His dead eyes stared at me a full five minutes before I let go of his throat,” almost seems redundant to me, but I recognize that this may just be on account of what I extrapolated from the preceding sentence. Not everyone reading the novel likely pictured Easy continuing to scream for help well after he had already killed his enemy; stabbing, punching, kicking and strangling a corpse.
**originally published on JohnnyCompton.com***
“The first time I fought a German hand-to-hand I screamed for help the whole time I was killing him.”
As I made it through the rest of the novel, that line would to flash across my mind from time to time. There’s nothing aesthetically remarkable about the above line. It’s not meant to be poetic. It has no intention of showing off any metaphors or similes. But that one sentence captures the character’s experience with violence and presents a scene worthy of its own short story. Even with the novel done, questions born from reading that sentence persisted.
How did Easy find himself in the situation where he was fighting an enemy hand-to-hand? Where were his allies? Was he alone, in a building perhaps (the scene of Adam Goldberg fighting for his life in Saving Private Ryan comes to mind), or out in an open space surrounded by fellow soldiers all too busy fighting their own individual battles to hear or heed his cries for help? What was going through the German soldier’s mind as this black American soldier cried out during the attack? Was he able to understand anything that Easy was saying? Could he understand the meaning of the words without knowing the language, just by reading the panic in Easy’s eyes and soaking in the terror in his voice? Was the German soldier crying out for help as well, suffering a crisis of faith in the Nazi Übermensch concept he may not have believed in in the first place?
The next line, “His dead eyes stared at me a full five minutes before I let go of his throat,” almost seems redundant to me, but I recognize that this may just be on account of what I extrapolated from the preceding sentence. Not everyone reading the novel likely pictured Easy continuing to scream for help well after he had already killed his enemy; stabbing, punching, kicking and strangling a corpse.
**originally published on JohnnyCompton.com***
October 4, 2021
Confessions of a Fearphile: The Golden Arm
This is, to my recollection, my earliest encounter with a ghost story, antedating my ongoing, abusive, unhealthy love affair with horror. It’s not the clearest memory, I was only five-years-old, but it’s less opaque than other memories from that age.
“Who’s got my Golden Arm?!”
My kindergarten teacher’s name was Mrs. Nina Lu Long (R.I.P.) and one day she decided to introduce the class to a classic tale about a chimeric person’s spirit. I’m unsure if this was just a Mississippi thing, or if other parts of the country also had incredible kindergarten teachers who were willing to relate introductory tales of terror to their classes.
Years later, this story still floats around in the back of my mind, so to Mrs. Nina, thank you. As for the story itself, here is the briefest of synopses of the version I first heard:
A man has a friend who has a prosthetic arm made of solid gold. Said friend dies and the man decides to disinter his buddy, remove the 24-karat limb from the corpse and sell it. The dead friend takes offense, crawls out of his grave with his one remaining arm, hunts down his buddy and then…
Well, you could Google “Golden Arm” and find a number of variations to the tale. Some give you a formal rendition making abundant use of the word “thou”; others give you the chitlin’ circuit interpretation. Its central characters are alternatively friends, brothers, or husband and wife.
In most portrayals the returned friend/brother/wife stalks through the thief’s house, crying out repeatedly, “Who’s Got my Golden Arm?!” until finally they happen upon the terrified thief, cowering in his/her bedroom, and then the ghost screams “You’ve Got it!!!” That’s where the story abruptly ends, but it’s intimated that some grievous demise awaits the one who stole the arm. I’m sure that the ghost didn’t rise from the grave just to say “You’ve got it! And I’m very disappointed. I’m really reconsidering our relationship. I thought we were closer than this.”
Despite the story’s obvious intent, it wasn’t the vengeful spirit’s return from death that disturbed me most. It was more disturbing to me that someone had a golden arm in the first place. The surrealistic, abominable image of this character still stands in my mind the same as when I first heard the story and imagined his appearance. This is a greedy, selfish, maniacal, loathsome person. One with jaundiced, spoiled eyes and skin the color of the ocean at night.
Today I can apply some semblance of logic to the conclusion I’d drawn as a kid. Even setting aside the callousness of getting buried with an appendage that could be donated to your friend, or wife, or charity or something, a golden arm would be terribly heavy and cumbersome. Only a severely troubled mind would dream of grafting such a gaudy, useless artificiality to their body. In short, you’d have to be crazy to want a golden arm, and not the good, comedic kind of crazy, or the tolerable, fearless-when-it’s-not-necessary kind of crazy, but the seething, malignant kind. That special brand of crazy potent enough to wake the dead.
**originally published on JohnnyCompton.com***
“Who’s got my Golden Arm?!”
My kindergarten teacher’s name was Mrs. Nina Lu Long (R.I.P.) and one day she decided to introduce the class to a classic tale about a chimeric person’s spirit. I’m unsure if this was just a Mississippi thing, or if other parts of the country also had incredible kindergarten teachers who were willing to relate introductory tales of terror to their classes.
Years later, this story still floats around in the back of my mind, so to Mrs. Nina, thank you. As for the story itself, here is the briefest of synopses of the version I first heard:
A man has a friend who has a prosthetic arm made of solid gold. Said friend dies and the man decides to disinter his buddy, remove the 24-karat limb from the corpse and sell it. The dead friend takes offense, crawls out of his grave with his one remaining arm, hunts down his buddy and then…
Well, you could Google “Golden Arm” and find a number of variations to the tale. Some give you a formal rendition making abundant use of the word “thou”; others give you the chitlin’ circuit interpretation. Its central characters are alternatively friends, brothers, or husband and wife.
In most portrayals the returned friend/brother/wife stalks through the thief’s house, crying out repeatedly, “Who’s Got my Golden Arm?!” until finally they happen upon the terrified thief, cowering in his/her bedroom, and then the ghost screams “You’ve Got it!!!” That’s where the story abruptly ends, but it’s intimated that some grievous demise awaits the one who stole the arm. I’m sure that the ghost didn’t rise from the grave just to say “You’ve got it! And I’m very disappointed. I’m really reconsidering our relationship. I thought we were closer than this.”
Despite the story’s obvious intent, it wasn’t the vengeful spirit’s return from death that disturbed me most. It was more disturbing to me that someone had a golden arm in the first place. The surrealistic, abominable image of this character still stands in my mind the same as when I first heard the story and imagined his appearance. This is a greedy, selfish, maniacal, loathsome person. One with jaundiced, spoiled eyes and skin the color of the ocean at night.
Today I can apply some semblance of logic to the conclusion I’d drawn as a kid. Even setting aside the callousness of getting buried with an appendage that could be donated to your friend, or wife, or charity or something, a golden arm would be terribly heavy and cumbersome. Only a severely troubled mind would dream of grafting such a gaudy, useless artificiality to their body. In short, you’d have to be crazy to want a golden arm, and not the good, comedic kind of crazy, or the tolerable, fearless-when-it’s-not-necessary kind of crazy, but the seething, malignant kind. That special brand of crazy potent enough to wake the dead.
**originally published on JohnnyCompton.com***
