Waiting for ‘the storm’ that would never come

I’m writing from a place of fear. My debut novel, “Don’t Know Tough,” was released on March 22, and six months later, I still fear the storm that could come of it. Luckily, I’m not alone.

The late, great Harry Crews once told a story about the late, great Flannery O’Connor going to church. Harry paints a picture of young Flannery walking back into the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville, Ga., after having published “Wise Blood,” a Southern gothic novel where a man finds a shrunken corpse and declares it the “new Jesus.”

The punchline of Harry’s yarn comes when he imagines Flannery taking her seat in that Catholic church and undoubtedly suffering the judgment of the blue-haired ladies in the back row.

“Did y’all read that poor girl’s book?”

“Sure did, Geraldine. Lord have mercy … ”

Close your eyes, and you can almost hear them whispering. I’m not sure if Harry’s take is factual, but I know it’s true. He’s talking about the same thing I was talking about earlier — the storm that can come from publishing a book.

To “publish” simply means to make public, to put something out there for people to poke, prod, applaud and/or criticize. That’s why, in the months leading up to my novel’s publication, I feared the storm that might swell around my novel.

This storm would be different from the one Flannery weathered, different because the world is different, more divided now than it was in the 1950s. At this point, we’re all familiar with “cancel culture.” But there are varying degrees of cancellation. There are people saying mean things about you online, and then there’s what’s taking place down in Florida, where books are literally being banned, outlawed in a way that feels like something out of a dystopian novel.

Both outcomes were real possibilities for my book.

I’m a born-and-bred Arkansawyer (confused? Google “Donald Harrington, Arkansan vs Arkansawyer”). I live in my hometown. I love Arkansas, but my book is crime fiction, a genre that often portrays people at their worst. In this case, my people. The kids I grew up with, my family and friends.

I did my best to depict Arkansas as I’ve encountered her, a state of beautiful sweeping landscapes littered with poverty and despair, a trap for so many of my players and students over the years. Barry Hannah once said, “I’ll say anything, so long as it’s true,” and that was my guiding principle as I drafted the

manuscript.

The truth, however, can be downright scary.

I feared my church, my family, my school district. Most of all, though, I feared getting canceled.

My book could’ve easily set off those folks in the Sunshine State, or others like them, and been banned from libraries across the country. On the other hand, it could’ve enraged a zealous social-media mob. A few early readers had already expressed concern over my protagonist, a white running back who lives in an Arkansas trailer park and is heavily influenced by hip-hop culture. His voice is distinctive, something I’ve never seen in literature, but have heard across countless football fields and classrooms. I tried to get him right, the same way I tried to nail down my home state’s vicious poverty and radical religiosity.

By publication day, my mind was dark and swirling, just like the sky. There was an actual storm blowing in from Oklahoma, scheduled to hit Russellville at the exact same time as our “launch day event.”

My wife had reserved a venue downtown and poured her heart into orchestrating the big day. We were still at work getting the customized napkins positioned perfectly around the book-shaped cake when the first guest arrived, an older lady, who’d shown up early because she didn’t want to wait in line.

I remember thinking, Line?

What line? as I started for the card table in the back corner of the room. My local bookstore (Dog Ear Books) had ordered two hundred copies of my book, enough, surely, to last for months, if not more.

I signed that lady’s copy as the wind picked up outside. Through a forced smile, I thanked her, still anxious about what was to come, and then I sat down.

I didn’t get up again. My people never stopped coming. That first lady was replaced by another around the same age, a teacher from my high school days, followed by a friend of mine who’d driven all the way in from Dallas.

When the tornado sirens went off, there was a line out the front door. Nobody flinched. Nobody took cover. These were Arkansawyers, after all … the same hard-nosed, scrappy folks found inside the pages of my debut novel.

Luckily, the tornado warning proved to be just that — a warning. No twisters touched down in Russellville that night. There wasn’t any “storm,” either, at least not the kind I’d feared.

Since that time, I’ve been waiting for an email or a viral Tweet, waiting to walk into church one Sunday morning and hear the same whispers Flannery heard all those years ago. But, so far, six months into publication, no one has come after me with a digital pitchfork, or called to question my faith.

Maybe it’s because I’m a hometown boy, I did good, and that’s good enough. Broadly speaking, maybe the explanation is more akin to Barry Hannah’s fabled remark. Maybe, deep down, people know what I wrote is true.

In these days of division, the truth goes a long way. It’s what we’re all pining for but rarely seem to find. Lord knows it can’t be found doom scrolling through Twitter or sifting through Facebook posts. But when we do come across the truth, we know it. We feel it in our bones. Raw, unfiltered truth is the one thing we can all agree on, and that’s just what I tried to deliver with every line of “Don’t Know Tough.”

At least that’s what I tell myself, but there is another, and probably more fitting explanation for why the storm I feared never came, and that’s the distinct possibility that nobody’s read the book.