The Problem With Detta Walker

I'm a big fan of Stephen King -- although not, I should point out, his "Number One Fan." I've read all his books, many of them several times -- and if you consider the size of some of his books, that's a heck of a lot of reading.

My wife recently signed me on as a member of Kindle Unlimited, and one of the perks is one free audiobook. I chose the second book in the "Dark Tower" series, The Drawing of the Three, mostly because of all the Dark Tower books, it's the one I have the most trouble remembering. I remember the broadest strokes of the plot, but that's about it.

I was thoroughly enjoying it up to a point. The narrator/ reader of the audiobook version is Frank Muller. I am not familiar with his work at all, but he does an excellent job here, using different accents, speech patterns, and more subtle vocal tricks to make each character in the story entirely distinctive from each other.

Yes, I was thoroughly enjoying this audiobook presentation -- until the introduction of the character of Detta Walker, when all subtlety must, by necessity of the character's personality, go flying out the window.

A bit of context/ explanation: The character of Odetta Holmes is a cultured, noble, valiant, wealthy African-American civil rights activist in the 1960s, who suffers from such a severe case of dissassociative personality disorder that she's completely unaware of her second personality.

Odetta's alternate personality is Detta Walker, an aggressive, foul-mouthed, hate-filled, hyper-sexualized black woman who hates white men, sees persecution even where it doesn't exist, and would rather spit at you than give you the time of day. She is incapable of speaking a full sentence without including at least one, usually more, unnecessary sexual vulgarity.  She is, understandably, intensely offended by the N word, but she also slings that same word around with wild abandon. She is, in short, the very caricature of everything a mysoginist, racist white man imagines when he thinks of a black woman.

Now, there is an explicitly stated narrative reason for Detta's personality. At one point in the book, Eddie Dean outright acknowledges the extremes of Detta's personality, and theorizes that maybe she acts the way she does because it's how Odetta, the primary persona, imagines the way an uneducated black woman would behave

Still . . . Eddie's theory isn't an "excuse," if one is needed for a fictional character's personality traits. (I'll leave that open for debate.) Eddie's theory doesn't make it any less comfortable for a white male reader to read words written by another white male, yet spoken by a fictional character who is black and female.

Today, I learned the hard way that that level of discomfort is raised to the Nth degree when the words are spoken out loud. Now we've got a male white listener listening to a male white narrator speak the words of a male white author, through the mouth of a black woman who just happens to be disgusting, vile, and hateful. What's worse is the way King and Muller make her talk, with a hyper-exaggerated accent that isn't New York, it isn't Southern, it's a white man's version of a generic "black accent," and it's painful to listen to. It's bad enough that every other word out of Detta's mouth seems to be various slang terms for male and female genitals, but when "for sure" comes out as "fo sho," when every "this" and "that" is a clearly spoken "dis" and "dat," I feel like I'm watching a blackface minstrel show. It's uncomfortable, and I suppose, in at least a way, it should be uncomfortable. It makes me feel like a mysoginist and a racist myself.

I want to throw it out there to my friends, "hey, is it even okay to be listening to this, if the intent itself isn't racist, but the caricature (for explicitly stated narrative reasons of course!) undeniably is? But then I remember -- nearly all of my Facebook friends are white too. So who are they to tell me if it is or isn't acceptable? Wait, are all of my Facebook friends white? (Quick check . . . . . ) Nope, not all ! I'm good! I guess I'm not a racist after all ! (Right?)