Letting Readers Feel the Environment
From “Wake,” by Tenea D. Johnson:
Take this: a few days before the New Year, the government issued tickets for evacuation buses that never showed up. That long day and night, as folks realized they never would, I sat in City Stadium’s main parking lot, the useless ticket balled in my fist and a moist rag tied over my mouth. I watched the shadows of people, backlit by fire, shuffle back out into wet hell. As they went, I saw their last bits of hope pop! like blown bulbs. It was my first time seeing people extinguished.
It made me lie down on the asphalt and hold my churning stomach. The echo of the red-faced child rang in my head. I tried to ignore it, counted backwards from ten. When I could open my eyes without gagging I watched fire planes roar overhead as they dumped retardant in bright orange trails that lit up the sky.
One of my favorite ways in which an author can inspire trust in her readers is by letting them feel the environment of her stories.
Tenea Johnson does this masterfully with the use of minimal text that hides huge scenery. In “Wake,” she brings her characters alive by letting readers search for what lies behind the text.
Her scenes end up feeling much more developed than the word count suggests, and I get the privilege of letting my mind fill in the blanks.
Take these examples:
Buses Never Arrive
The first few sentences in this selection refer to the broken bus schedule. Johnson’s narrator mentions the buses’ expected arrival only once, which has a particularly arresting effect on the passage as a whole.
…a few days before the New Year, the government issued tickets for evacuation buses that never showed up. That long day and night, as folks realized they never would…
At this moment in my read-through, I think I wasn’t up to speed with what the text demanded of me. I wanted something immediately clearer like, “as folks realized the buses never would arrive….” It took me a few repeats (amusingly enough) to consider that the lack “buses” and “arrive” in her presentation mirrors the absence of the evacuation transportation.
I was left in the cold, wanting, like everyone in her story who was standing in the rain.
Johnson’s ambiguous use of “they” and the open-ended “never would” took me a few beats to parse, but those beats were worth it. This isn’t confusion on my part; it’s nuanced presentation on Johnson’s part that forced me to dig into the story.
I had thought I wanted additional words for clarity. Instead, I got to explore and find clarity, and as a reward, Johnson left me more in touch with the characters I was supposed to know.
Fire Illuminates the Crowd
Moving on, I wondered how much fire it would take to illuminate a person in the night.
…I watched the shadows of people, backlit by fire, shuffle back out into wet hell.
Johnson builds an ominous picture here of the people and their procession into wet darkness. Could they number in the many hundreds or thousands since they’re temporarily housed at City Stadium?
To cast shadows behind these hundreds or thousands, I assumed the burning would need to be huge. Buildings engulfed. Yet the people walked toward the light, so the burning couldn’t have been close.
I was already standing in the rain with them. Now I could imagine the far-off warmth with them, never to be approached for comfort, and soon sensed fear with them.
Johnson leaves it to “backlit” just before they are “extinguished.” Single words and one more: a “pop!” to ignite the chaos.
The Worst of It
Johnson doesn’t say how many died. She only blips the worst of it.
The echo of the red-faced child rang in my head.
Even the most innocent never make it more than a few steps from the stadium. Is it screaming or blood or both? It colors what everyone there saw and absorbed.
Johnson’s “echo” reverberates as both a sound and image in any way you wish or don’t wish to imagine it. It made me pause, at least, and reflect on what was left in the grandiose but unhelpful response of the fire planes.
Those bright orange trails of retardant fell on anyone near those buildings. As a part of the crowd at the stadium, I wondered whether it would have been more or less lucky to have been alive at the burning scene in the distance, and I prayed for my present crowd in knowing their future could easily meet the same end.