Counter-Counterstorytelling: Rereading Critical Race Theory in Percival Everett’s Assumption

Abstract

Counter-CounterstorytellingRereading Critical Race Theory in Percival Everett’s Assumption Matthew Mullins (bio) Percival Everett’s story “Warm and Nicely Buried” was first published in Idaho Review in 2001 before appearing at the heart of his 2004 collection, Damned If I Do. The narrative follows deputies Lem Becker and Warren Fragua as they investigate the mysterious death of a young man named José Marotta and the subsequent disappearance of José’s body from the morgue of their small New Mexico town. Warren, the only Native on the sheriff’s department payroll, reappears unchanged in Everett’s 2011 novel Assumption, but Lem is reimagined as Ogden Walker, the reserved and oftentimes out-of-place black deputy, whose heroism and integrity position him squarely in the tradition of classic lawmen of the American West. In Assumption, the José Marotta case is just one in a series of cases that culminates with the murder of Terry Lowell, a local Fish and Game officer. From the outset of this final episode everyone but those who know Ogden best suspect him of Terry’s murder. As the story reaches its climax, Ogden has exhausted every possible lead that might vindicate him, but as it turns out his battle for exoneration has been fueled by guilt not innocence. In a startling twist, Warren confronts Ogden at the scene of the crime in the middle of the night: “Warren couldn’t see his friend’s face, not that he would have recognized him if he could. ‘I think you killed this man right here. Somehow Terry Lowell found you with the body and you shot him, too.’” To which Ogden responds: “That’s pretty much it” (Everett, Assumption 224). With these four words, spoken in a shockingly matter-of-fact tone, the novel capitalizes on its title, eclipsing assumptions about its hero, the themes of guilt and innocence, and the Western genre all in a single revelatory flash. Assumption is not Everett’s first rodeo. Amongst his previous novels at least five have received critical attention for their ties to the Western, including Walk Me to the Distance (1985), God’s Country (1994), Watershed (1996), Wounded (2005), and Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001). As Ogden Walker’s literary genealogy suggests, Everett has also taken up the Western genre in his short fiction. All three of his earlier collections, The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair (1987), Big Picture (1996), and Damned If I Do (2004), trace the contours of at least a few Western towns and characters, as does 2015’s Half an Inch of Water. Literary critics have almost unanimously treated Everett’s Western fiction as revisionist history committed to rewriting the Western with an eye toward the narratives of oppression and marginalization that often go unrecognized or unowned in the genre. Yves Bonnemère and Leland Krauth offer insightful readings of Everett’s characters, who often appear or even claim to be traditional Western character types, but in satirical and ironic ways turn out to be something else. Curt Marder, for instance, the white, would-be hero of God’s Country, “claims to be a real cowboy, a tough fellow, but from the very beginning what he says [End Page 457] points in the other direction” (Bonnemère 149–50). Among other problems, the should-be good-hearted cowboy is plagued by an unshakable racism. “Confronted with black men as well as Indians,” Krauth says of Marder, “he is full of prejudice; he considers all racial ‘others’ not just inferior but even sub-human, savages beneath the law, with no claims to justice” (319). William R. Handley and Michael K. Johnson have examined Everett’s Western writing as a broader body of work, and note two distinct rewriting approaches, the one almost slapstick and the other more subtle. Handley maintains that “if Everett’s other westerns, God’s Country and Grand Canyon, Inc., are mischievous re-workings of generic conventions that call to mind Mark Twain, then Watershed is a non-formulaic but equally revisionist western” (305). Johnson also sees Watershed as a turning point in Everett’s Western fiction, noting that the “more recent stories are often developmental narratives that trace the evolution of...