David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-montgomery-bus-strike"
Driving the King
DRIVING THE KING is primarily about an attack on the stage while Nat King Cole was performing in his home town of Montgomery, Alabama. A man is about to bash Nat’s head in with a pipe when his boyhood friend Sergeant Nat Weary, recently returned from WWII, comes to his aid, using the microphone as a weapon.
The white man is sentenced to three years working on a cattle ranch, a walk-in-the-park compared to what Weary got. He got ten years at a maximum facility where he chopped Kudzu plants, among other indignities. The charge was inciting a riot.
The main problem I had with the book was that Nat King Cole is such a bland character. The last time I checked his daughter was still alive, and there’s plenty of information out there, newspaper clippings and otherwise, about one of the greatest singers America ever produced. All we learn here is that Nat could’ve been a pro baseball player; he could pitch with both hands, due to his piano playing ability.
Ravi Howard centers on three other incidents in the book: the Montgomery bus strike and the Nat King Cole TV show, which he apparently financed himself due to his inability to find a sponsor. It was fifteen minutes long. I remember it, but I don’t remember it being that short. It was the first time a black man had his own television show. The third involves Nat King Cole’s return to Montgomery to finish what he started, put on a show for his people. That’s the trouble with using real life characters in fiction. This never happened. Yes, there was an attack, but Nat never performed in the South again.
Howard also centers on another real person, Almena Lomax, who covered the bus strike for her newspaper in Los Angeles, where Weary had moved after he got out of jail. We see the editor of the newspaper delivering her own papers , which is where Weary met her. There’s also a very short glimpse of Martin Luther King, more of a walk-on than anything.
Nat Weary also has a love life. He originally took his girlfriend Mattie to the show; they were planning on getting married, but when he got his jail sentence he cut off their relationship. There was always the chance his sentence might be extended in the Jim Crow South, and he wanted her to have a life. One of the conflict situations is when they meet again after he gets out. Actually they meet twice, once in Los Angeles and in Montgomery, and Mattie is married with a couple of kids. Meanwhile Nat has started a new relationship with a singer looking for her big break; she works part-time at a diner.
Ravi Howard is an established writer; he was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PenAward; he is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other kudos. Ravi can do better than this; he already has with is first novel, LIKE TREES, WALKING. Fictionalizing a national icon is a hard enough challenge, but you’ve got to do him justice.
The white man is sentenced to three years working on a cattle ranch, a walk-in-the-park compared to what Weary got. He got ten years at a maximum facility where he chopped Kudzu plants, among other indignities. The charge was inciting a riot.
The main problem I had with the book was that Nat King Cole is such a bland character. The last time I checked his daughter was still alive, and there’s plenty of information out there, newspaper clippings and otherwise, about one of the greatest singers America ever produced. All we learn here is that Nat could’ve been a pro baseball player; he could pitch with both hands, due to his piano playing ability.
Ravi Howard centers on three other incidents in the book: the Montgomery bus strike and the Nat King Cole TV show, which he apparently financed himself due to his inability to find a sponsor. It was fifteen minutes long. I remember it, but I don’t remember it being that short. It was the first time a black man had his own television show. The third involves Nat King Cole’s return to Montgomery to finish what he started, put on a show for his people. That’s the trouble with using real life characters in fiction. This never happened. Yes, there was an attack, but Nat never performed in the South again.
Howard also centers on another real person, Almena Lomax, who covered the bus strike for her newspaper in Los Angeles, where Weary had moved after he got out of jail. We see the editor of the newspaper delivering her own papers , which is where Weary met her. There’s also a very short glimpse of Martin Luther King, more of a walk-on than anything.
Nat Weary also has a love life. He originally took his girlfriend Mattie to the show; they were planning on getting married, but when he got his jail sentence he cut off their relationship. There was always the chance his sentence might be extended in the Jim Crow South, and he wanted her to have a life. One of the conflict situations is when they meet again after he gets out. Actually they meet twice, once in Los Angeles and in Montgomery, and Mattie is married with a couple of kids. Meanwhile Nat has started a new relationship with a singer looking for her big break; she works part-time at a diner.
Ravi Howard is an established writer; he was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PenAward; he is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other kudos. Ravi can do better than this; he already has with is first novel, LIKE TREES, WALKING. Fictionalizing a national icon is a hard enough challenge, but you’ve got to do him justice.
