Unpacking the Mystery of Race in America

As I was finishing Bill Fletcher Jr.’s debut novel The Man Who Fell from the Sky, the Ralph Northam scandal was unfolding in Virginia, about which Fletcher powerfully weighed in.

Northam’s apparent participation in a racist episode some thirty years ago, documented in a photograph in his medical school yearbook that had lain dormant and forgotten, suddenly erupted as if from out of nowhere — as if it fell from the sky — threatening at the time to destroy Northam’s political career and causing many to call on him to resign Virginia’s governorship.

Northam, now positioning himself as anti-racist, launching his gubernatorial campaign in part by speaking out against the white supremacist violence committed in Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, had never come clean or made amends for his evidently racist actions of the past.

His individual story in many ways reflects the story of America and its relationship to and lack of serious accountability for its racist national past, which, arguably, is what in part hobbles the nation in any effort to address and overcome racism in the present.

The Northam episode really drove home the story Fletcher’s gripping detective, or crime, novel carefully weaves.

The novel opens one warm June morning in 1970 when Thomas Julius Smith, respected owner of a construction firm on Cape Cod, breakfasts quietly with his wife Marge and then, while getting ready to head off to work in his truck, is murdered by sniper…