THE MONKEY SUIT
Short Fiction on African Americans and Justice (1998)
By David Dante Troutt
This collection of ten short stories fictionalizes ten actual legal controversies involving black folks and American law from slavery to the millennium. Some of the cases are landmark Supreme Court decisions, such as Powell v. Alabama (1932), Buchanan v. Warley (1917), Screws v. United States (1945) and Mapp v. Ohio (1961), others are obscure. Together they attempt to put flesh and circumstance on human difficulty, as the imagined characters from real life wind their way into a conflict that will one day teach history. It is a way of remembering.
The stories were inspired by my own sense of alienation from law school when, during the grueling first year, I could smell the invisible souls of black folks in the cases we read for class. Often they had been stripped by the opinions of all identity. For example, the first story conjures the night a slave is stolen back from a repo man by two men who had defaulted on a mortgage owed his owner. The 1833 case came from a squib—an abbreviated case note—I read in torts, which deleted the slave’s gender, name, reason for being tied to a rope and laying on a floor. It was enough that the cutting of the rope by armed men constituted a battery against the white man sleeping in the bed above the slave. After extensive research into the case circumstances, the history of the place and the times as well as slave dialect, the story “Glow in the Dark” was born as a kind of counter-story to the case.
Told through a variety of narrative approaches, the stories are arranged chronologically in five periods: i) Bondage, Borders and Supremacy, ii) the Depression and Wartime, iii) Mid-Century, iv) the New Black Metropolis and v) Near Millennium. They span the struggle of one of the Scottsboro Boys’ moms, to a fuller measure of privacy when a woman is busted for possessing obscene materials that aren’t hers. The interracial friendships possible during the rise of Jim Crow are juxtaposed against an interracial love 70 years later. In another, a cop killer grows old and somehow beloved on Parchman Farm; in another, a junkie dodges fate during the Detroit riots, searching for his lost father. And lastly, in the title story, set in the Los Angeles of both Rodney King and OJ Simpson, a young son of civil rights gains works his way into tragedy at a white shoe law firm.
Law tells stories about America, and The Monkey Suit tells stories about law. It may be my favorite work to date. Please enjoy.
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