Freddie Owens

North-South Structures

I grew up around Detroit, but would sometimes spend a week or two - once I spent six weeks - in Kentucky, my birth state, staying with cousins or with my grandparents. It was an entirely different world for me, providing some of the best and worst times of my growing up years. I had a great time on a dairy farm there with several of my cousins, milking cows, hoeing tobacco, running over the hills and up and down a creek that surrounded the big farm. I remember too, periods of abject boredom, sitting around my grandparent's old farm house with nothing to do but wander about the red clay yard or kill flies on my grandmother's screened-in back porch.

Certain aspects of these growing up years did come to light in the novel, Then Like The Blind Man: Orbie's Story, knowingly at times, and at times spontaneously and distantly, as ghostly north-south structures, as composite personae, as moles and stains and tears and glistening rain and dark bottles of beer, rooms of cigarette smoke, hay lofts and pigs.

As conveyed above, I spent several of my growing-up summers in what to me was this Kentucky wilderness. While my big city prejudices and toxic beliefs about 'hillbillies' were quashed there, my prejudices against 'colored people' were largely supported.

With each trip I became more and more confounded by a white culture that could be very loving of its own kind but not of those belonging to the black culture. It wasn't until college and the advent of the Civil Rights Movement that I began to untangle this confusion. Then Like the Blind Man fictionalizes and captures aspects of this journey.

Freddie Owens