An Embodied, Complex, Powerful Story

Those We Thought We Knew is the haunting, pitch perfect title of the latest novel by Western North Carolina’s own David Joy, who, at the ripe old age of 39 has already written more acclaimed novels than you can shake a stick at. The title echoes back to us time and time again throughout the novel, reminding us that even folks who have grown up together in the same little mountain community might not know each other as well as they think. 

Joy is a wonder at first sentences, and the first sentence of Those We Thought We Knew couldn’t be a better example: “The graves took all night to dig.” It’s an ominous image and sets a dark tone that the novel ultimately lives up to, even though we learn almost immediately that the graves aren’t actual graves but representations, part of a Master’s in Fine Arts project. Toya Gardner, a 24-year-old Black art student from Atlanta, has returned to her ancestral mountain community to spend the summer with her grandmother Vess Jones and pursue research at the university for her thesis, which focuses on her family history in the broader context of the town’s legacy of prejudice and racism. The mock graves memorialize the Cullowhee African Methodist Episcopal Church founded in 1892 which the university moved to make way for a classroom building and which forced the reinternment of some 80 bodies, including some of Toya’s ancestors.

The graves, which are on university grounds, are enough to draw media attention, create concern among Toya’s family and irritate local officials, including White Sheriff, who has Toya arrested. Coggins, who becomes increasingly central to the novel, grew up with Toya’s grandparents, considering them close, dear friends. Coggins tries to protect Toya from the backlash but Toya, who is fearless and determined, makes clear to Coggins she doesn’t want or need his help.  And she’s proven right when the university drops charges against her, realizing that prosecuting a Black student memorializing a Black church that the university itself removed would be very bad publicity.

However, it’s not long before Toya, who is increasingly consumed with the community’s racist past, comes upon a Confederate Civil War monument in the middle of downtown and is so infuriated that she conceives a bigger, more dramatic project. But we also sense that Toya doesn’t appreciate just how dangerous her new plan might be. 

The same night Toya finishes the mock graves at the university, seven miles down the road in Sylva, Ernie Allison, a White deputy, is called to a convenient store downtown, where he and a White police officer together rouse a suspicious shirtless man sleeping in the back of his station wagon. At first he appears to be just another wandering vagrant passing through, but they soon learn he has driven from Mississippi. They notice a swastika tattoo on his shoulder and, in his car, find Klan robes, a gun and a list of contacts which the deputy is disturbed to realize includes many local figures. The name on his license is William Dean Cawthorn, a fitting name for such an unsavory character, who we learn is high up in the Klan.

The deputy’s physical description of the man embodies Cawthorn’s inner depravity: “…Cawthorn had a head too small for his body, a long pencil neck, and a greasy mullet that lapped at his shoulders.” Then deputy goes on to notice, “All of his facial features were mashed together, wide eyes sunk behind a nose that obviously had been broken, his mouth crammed under that beak like there wasn’t a tooth in his head.” 

We learn soon enough that Cawthorne has come to Sylva to connect with Klan members and other bloody-minded community members, that he’s as wicked as he is ugly and is above all, a purveyor of violence. And soon enough violence will be visited upon both Toya and the Deputy Allison who initially raised the alarm about Cawthorne and his Klan connections. The rest of the novel is devoted to fleshing out Vess Jones and Sheriff Coggins and their long relationship, as well as following the investigations by rookie Detective Leah Green, who is not only bright and observant but who grew up in the area and knows the people she’s investigating and is unafraid to confront them. Green becomes for me one of the most interesting characters as she comes to know this community she thought she knew so well. 

Those We Thought We Knew is a brave novel written in a fraught time that dares to ask hard questions about racism and prejudice. It’s written convincingly from Black and White points of view. Joy has said in a number of interviews that he intended the book to be especially for White readers, hoping to pose hard questions and uncomfortable truths that White readers might not have given much thought to or for one reason or another have shied away from. 

To be clear, this novel is in no way a reductive polemic or morality tale or lesson of any sort. It’s a story—an embodied, complex, powerful story inspired by a place where Joy has lived much of his life. His rendering of the place itself draws the reader in.  His major characters couldn’t be more compelling, and his minor characters couldn’t feel more true, living expressions of the landscape. One of my favorite minor characters is Curtis Darnell, who is key to the solving of one of the attacks. He couldn’t feel more of the place. We learn that earlier in the spring Darnell had seen a snake in his house, so all summer he’d been sleeping in the cab of his truck.  On cold nights he’d crank up the truck, but with the floorboard rusted out and the exhaust manifold leaking, he wake up “woozy and sick to his stomach and had to walk two miles of fresh air before he’d ever get his feet put back beneath him.” 

Joy starts another chapter with a wonderful description of Darnell eating:

“Curtis Darnell sat on the tailgate of his truck with his feet swinging under him like a child. He was eating Vienna sausages, stabbing them out of the can with the sheepsfoot blade of a stockman folding knife and mashing them onto soda crackers.

“There were three crackers lined up and ready down his thigh, and he zigzagged a squirt of neon-green relish onto each of them from a small condiment packet he’d likely swiped from a gas station hot dog stand. When he finished, he stacked them together and shoved them all in his mouth at once. With his cheeks stuffed, he licked his fingers and spoke, shards of crackers flying from his lips like birdshot.”

There’s no doubt to the reader that Joy knows this place and these people. But it’s also clear that in Those We Thought We Knew, the writer has stretched himself, writing movingly from points of view that some might argue are out of bounds for a White writer. But it seems to me Joy has done nothing if not follow Eudora Welty’s freeing advice, “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.”

In the end, reading Those We Thought We Knew is like stepping into a swiftly running river and being carried off by a current of tension, drama and revelation. Before you know it, you’ve traversed its nearly 400 pages, and after you close the book and look around, you might feel a bit dazed, a bit shook up and for a little while anyway, you might see the world from a little different slant.