Peter de Lissovoy

For the SNCC 50th reunion in 2010 I edited and produced a nonfiction book of recollections of mine and several friends from the 1960s civil rights movement in Southwest Georgia. This book, The Great Pool Jump, was printed as a limited edition of 500 copies for the reunion and is sold out, with only a handful remaining. I am contemplating a new edition, as apparently little has changed over the course of my lifetime in America. The Great Pool Jump is available from the author for a limited time. See Contact page.

Something must happen after the end of a story but we don't always know what it might be. Rita and "the Armchair" is not exactly a sequel but more likely a possible alternative series of events after the ending to my novel Wisconsin. Various characters become more or less prominent and the usual turns of luck and fate have occurred. It is probably best read after Wisconsin but can be read independently as well.

My first novel, Feelgood, confronted the possibility that the civil rights movement in the US might fail and the white supremacists win. In 1963 and 1964 while I was in south Georgia, before the big civil rights laws were passed, this seemed like a definite possibility. Today, sadly, with the resurgence of a white supremacist mentality in the country, to contemplate the likelihood of a civil rights movement failure again seems realistic. The novel is about a white kid who has been in the Movement living on the black side of a small Georgia town during a post-civil rights movement defeat and recounts his adventures along more traditonal lines of African American resistance to and coping with American cultural realities. (Feelgood is out of print but can be found for sale on various sellers' websites.)

"The last person I could have expected to see in the club that night was Melusina, who had never been there before to my knowledge, but suddenly swept in wearing a floor-length silverfox coat. And it was summer. I was struck dumb by the unexpected look of authority in her gaze. She placed herself directly before me, fists on her hips, flashing the fur outward, showing a bit of red satin lining. The dim darting forest animals with their quicksilver pelts and molten-lead tails, through black trees in the moonlight, the satiny interior which showed at the level of her calves and between her legs, the craft and money. I had always had reason to believe she held a grudge." (And so the reader is introduced to M, who dominates the story and centers the narrator's quest for deliverance and wholeness. This novel is based entirely on dreams of mine recorded in a dream journal I kept for a period of ten years. Everything in it was a dream, in the technical sense, that is, originating in one's consciousness as it is recalled from dreams while asleep at night with their goal, it may be imagined at least, of some sort of enlightenment.) 

What was it like in white supremacist Rhodesia before it became troubled Zimbabwe? “Iron Man” Ian Smith had declared Independence from Britain in 1965 determined to keep Rhodesia “white man’s country.” By the early 1970s the Matabele and Mashona freedom fighters were over the borders in Zambia and Mozambique readying for war. A young American wanders into this country's captital Salisbury (now Harare) and lives on both sides of the racial divide, working as a cub reporter for the European newspaper by day and joining the youth wing of the revolutionary African movement ZANU by night. The tension this sets up in his experience mirrors that of the whole country, which must either lead to a synthesis of all that is threatening to blow the country and his life in it apart, or the necessity of choosing a side in the coming war of liberation versus white supremacy.

Two steps inside Jackie’s joint on 43rd Street on the Southside of Chicago, sight of an evil face sliced off twenty years like brain surgery with a straight razor and the cop was sixteen years old again, full of hate. Bobby the Fist had spruced up some since the old days, and he looked  like he’d seen plenty. Next to him in the booth was a white girl about half his age with a presumptuous look in her eyes like she owned the place . . . At a pretty fair cultural distance from Jackie's club, a despair nevertheless oddly similar to the cop's afflicted a very different character at the opposite end of metropolitan Chicago this morning, a cab driver working the far northern town of Greenshores, so recently carved out of farmers' fields, a foreign country probably to Southsiders . . . Both the cop and the cab driver were about to have their worlds disturbed by a strange girl. It was the last thing Rita would have wished to happen, although women are often judged as aiming to create conflict and confusion. She had plenty of problems of her own. 

"Freedom is everything to me, how about you? At the moment I'm sitting by a blue lake far north of San Francisco, in Wash­ington State, or Oregon, possibly Canada, somewhere or other like that, taking it easy, surrounded by water, green woods, and a few cars. I've made my break with the world, ­or at least you have to give me credit for trying. On a still day I can see my growing collection of antiques reflected on the shining surface of the waters. In front of my cabin I already have several of the rare old American beauties. The natives are friendly, and they're helping me with my research. They don't mind a bit that I'm going to restore them and make a mint back in L.A. They don't believe it for a minute. They think I'm a fool. They may sense that I am hiding out, too. I do have a lot of time on my hands. I don't know how much more freedom I can take. Trapped by too much freedom! . . . I keep my mind off Julie—if only I could. Maybe she's forgotten about me. Women have such capa­cious storage rooms in their hearts, they just shift things around a little, slip you behind or next to someone or something else, put you in mothballs, until convenient, there's always room for more, we're all one big happy family in their minds. I've bought too many cars. I stand on my doorstep and count more than a dozen. I glance out my cabin window and see cars rumbling through the forest like bears, peering up at me like giant trouts from the deep. But I do have my freedom." (This novel is told by a narrator whom the literary folks might describe as possibly unreliable, even quite unstable, yet in his mad way he is in touch with certain overarching realities of American life.)