The Chaneysville Incident
David Bradley, 1981
HarperCollins
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060916817
Summary
The legends say something happened in Chaneysville.
The Chaneysville Incident is the powerful story of one man's obsession with discovering what that "something" was—a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young black historian John Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage. Returning home to care for and then bury his father's closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, he comes upon the scant records of his family's proud and tragic history, which he drives himself to reconstruct and accept.
This is the story of John's relationship with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and acceptance. From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1950
• Where—Bedford, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.A., University of London
• Awards—Academy Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters); PEN/Faulkner Award;
O. Henry Award
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California
David Henry Bradley, Jr. is the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982.
The Chaneysville Incident, inspired in part by the real-life discovery of the graves of a group of runaway slaves on a farm near Chaneysville in Bedford County, PA, where Bradley was born, also earned Bradley a 1982 Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His short story "You Remember the Pinmill" (winner of a 2014 O. Henry Award) was published in 2013 in Narrative magazine.
Since 1985, Bradley has worked primarily in creative nonfiction, with pieces in Esquire, Redbook, New York Times, Philadelphia Magazine, Pennsylvania Gazette, Nation and Dissent. His work has also appeared online in Obit, Narrative, and Brevity.
Bradley holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in United States Studies from the University of London. He was an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. On June 12, 2011, he appeared 60 Minutes in a segment regarding the censored version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved June 10, 2015.)
Book Reviews
David Bradley's second book, The Chaneysville Incident, took ten years to complete. A deeply moving work set in the mountains of Pennsylvania, it received the PEN/Faulkner Award as the best novel of 1981. John Washington, the novel's hero, is a history professor and scholar...[who] uncovers the mystery of his father's suicide; learns the heroic truth of how his great-grandfather, an ex-slave, was killed when caught helping twelve runaways; discovers that his contempt for his mother is misplaced; and creates within himself a place of compassion where commitment to Judith can grow.... In beautiful and precise prose, Bradley tells the story of how...an intelligent reclamation of one's heritage can be a source of strength and peace.
Sacred Life
Discussion Questions
(These questions were kindly offered to LitLovers by Gail Golden, who developed them for The BFF Book Club. Thank you, Gail.)
1. In what year is the novel set in the first chapter?& How did you feel about the way that the stories unfolded as the book progressed? If this book had been written in 2015, how might the story between John and Judith have been different?
2. Why is it significant that John is an historian? How does that help to connect him to his father, Moses Washington, especially after Moses’s death?
3. What is the significance of coffee and toddies in this novel? How does the choice of drinks help the reader to understand the progress of Judith’s and John’s relationship?
4. Do we ever really know the actual names of the Town and the County? Are the names important? Why or why not?
5. John shows anger throughout the book. How do the foci of his anger change as the story progresses, or how does it become clearer to the reader the focus of the anger?
6. Share one of the vignettes that help us to understand why John felt so hostile toward the town in which he grew up.
7. Discuss the role of Old Jack Crawley in this story.
8. Compare the home of Old Jack and the one that Moses built for himself. Compare the two sides of the Hill on which the Blacks in the Town lived.
9. Describe the evolution of C. K. Washington which led up to the “incident.” Did that vignette help you to understand why Moses took his own life? Do you think that it helped John to understand?
10. If you had been one of the thirteen involved in the “incident,” would you have chosen the way that they did? Why do you think that John and Moses had such a hard time finding out about the “incident?”
11. What was the significance at the end of the book of John’s resealing the folio that Moses had left him? Why did he burn up all of his notes? He says that he is leaving the folio intact for anyone in the future who might look into it. Who might that be?
12. Did this book give you any new knowledge/revelations about slavery, the slave trade, runners, and/or the Underground Railroad? Has the book changed your previous notions about PA or any of the other states mentioned in the book?
13. Pick one minor character in the book and discuss him/her and how he/she fit into the centuries-old story told in the book.
14. Is there a particular episode in the novel that you would like to discuss?
(Questions prepared and submitted by Gail Golden of The BFF Book Club.)