America’s Deserter: Forms of Racialised Mistreatment and Escaping the Need to Escape in Percival Everett’s American Desert

Abstract

In this article, I consider the protagonist of Percival Everett’s American Desert (2004) – Theodore “Ted” Street – and his treatment as a short-lived cultural phenomenon after inexplicably coming back from the dead. I read Ted’s experiences alongside Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten’s ideas on the impacts of racial inequality on Black experience and writing. I discuss Hartman’s work on the “afterlife of slavery” in “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” (2016), and Moten’s Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being (2017), where he discusses the “predication of blackness” as “immersion” in the aftereffects of the slave trade.American Desert’s episodic narrative problematises Ted’s efforts to escape mistreatment by persistently placing obstacles in front of them. Ted’s afterlife leads to different forms of mistreatment, including unwanted media attention, harassment towards him and his family, and being held captive in two different settings, which are all intensified because Everett invites us to read his character as AfricanAmerican. In line with Hartman and Moten’s work, as the novel progresses Ted realises that to end his cycle of futile escapes he must escape the need to escape, which is a necessary response to the racialised mistreatment he is subjected to.