I Was a Revolutionary: Stories
“an evocative and provoking collection . . .”
Andrew Malan Milward’s short story collection I Was a Revolutionary is populated with both fictional and real life characters that build a substantive portrait of “the heart of the heartland.” He vaporizes any perception of the state being full of ultra-conservatives and explores its broad cultural diversity. Milward is fascinated by how Kansans have “veered to extremes on the left and the right. It’s hard to square Kansas’s warring instincts for progressivism and conservatism.”
In the opener “The Burning of Lawrence” a female history student tries to investigate the facts and the myths of the infamous confederate slaughter of the town's citizens by pro-Confederate raiders led by William Quantrill. It recounts the 1863 slaughter of 200 townspeople in an attempt to shut down the abolitionists and lay claim to Kansas as a slave state.
In “The Americanist” Mike is recently laid off from the Wichita Historical Society, and is pulling away emotionally from his lover Will, who works at Dr. Tiller’s women’s health clinic, who was gunned down in his own church for providing legal abortions. As Will’s life spirals out of control, he wonders how he’ll finish writing the story about real life character David Brinkley, the jazz age huckster promising a cure for male impotence by means of goat testicle injections. He is so successful that he runs for governor of the state. Will wonders, “How could I improve upon, in a novel, what had actually happened, a true narrative that needed no fictionalization?”
“O Death” tracks two African American families during Reconstruction after the Civil War. One from Mississippi and one from Kentucky, both families are falsely lured to Kansas with the promise of free land. They are part of the hundreds of “Exodusters” who are cast on its barren reality of living in burrows and barely able to survive once they get there. Milward’s raw poetic imagery and emotional verisimilitude of this story is breathtaking.
“Hard Feelings” explores the racial tensions in 1952 in which a black veteran is suffering from memories of war and trying to raise his young family. Meanwhile he sees racism all around him as a valued employee at the local appliance store. He starts to suffer symptoms of war-related post-traumatic stress, and his wife wants him to seek professional help. Flash forward to the 60s and he sits in a mental ward. Cut to 1968 where his son is part of a high school walkout after the administration refuses a list of demands of racial equality on every level at the school. Later still, his son and daughter part of the Panthers student movement planning one last visit to that appliance store.
“Good Men a Long Time Gone” is a barroom yarn about the men and women at the Kansas meat processing plant who all go to Ricky’s bar on payday in Dodge City in the 1990s. The first to arrive are the three women who work the packing line; their male coworkers saunter in after getting cleaned up; and the butchers are the last, revered for their surgical skill. This is a soap opera of sex, marriage, drinking, and gambling—all subverted by a mosaic of race, poverty, exploitation and forgotten lives.
Two stories, “'A Defense of History” and “What Is to Be Done,” strike one as too meandering next to the supple narrative arcs of the others. But Milward’s closer “I Was a Revolutionary” is one of the book’s best. A 60-year-old college professor who teaches Kansas political history is breaking up with his wife. His tenure is also in jeopardy when his name appears in a book about the couples’ anti-war activism and anti-Vietnam war connections to the Weather Underground. As his marriage and his academic life unravel he tries to hold on to idealism only to be further disillusioned.
Even though some stories have narrative overreach, this is an evocative and provoking collection, full of Andrew Milward’s inventive craft.