I like a good murder mystery, even when you the reader-audience just know things. Like, when there are co-conspirators, co-murderers, there always comes that moment when one of the bad guys breaks. One of them doesn’t stick to the storyline, the agreed to narrative of what happened and when and why and how and where. One of them puts aside the notion that if they all just stick to the “story,” they’ll get off, free as birds.
Keeping your straight is basic stuff for criminals. And politicans. So when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam couldn’t keep his own story straight, well, it’s no wonder there have been so many calls for his resignation over a med-school yearbook photo in which one person wears blackface and the other a KKK sheet. Here’s the headline of an op-ed that distills this basic point about the power of narrative: “Ralph Northam’s Changing Stories Make No Sense.”
Author Joan Walsh’s subhead reads, “Multiple explanations in 18 hours will not convince Virginians that their governor can be trusted. He must go.” She explains how Northam at first admitted being one of the men in the photo; the next day, he said neither of the men were him. Walsh doesn’t mention Northam’s added detail: that he did once don blackface to portray Michael Jackson. Even without this detail, Walsh says this, “The story keeps getting crazier.”
She threads Northam’s individual story with Virginia’s “story” as a Southern state known for racism, Northam’s gubernatorial victory as one that owed much to massive support from African Americans, his gubernatorial opponent in that race as a “Donald Trump Republican,” the lieutenant governor’s story (the state’s first African American in that position), the inescapable logic (“certainly, one would remember painstakingly donning blackface”),and the various calls for Northam’s resignation. The Virginia Democratic Party, for example, released a statement: “Governor Northam must end this chapter immediately, step down, and let Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax heal Virginia’s wounds and move us forward.”
In short, Walsh tells a story. More exactly, she constructs a narrative that pulls together pieces of other stories to make her case: “[A]ll of that is why he has go,” she says.
I understand narrativeas the structure that connects individual events or even contains an individual event. I like Abbott’s simple notion of narrative as a “representation of an event or a series of events” (13). Going back to those murderous co-conspirators I mentioned earlier, narrative is the representationof what happened (and when-where-how-why). Keep the stories straight, and there’s a good narrative (at least in crime and politics). Like many readers, I suspect, I agree with Walsh’s conclusion. Surely Northam would remember rubbing on some blackface or pulling a KKK sheet over his head, unless these actions were so common for him and his classmates that he can’t remember on which occasion he did these things, or he’s trying to protect someone else …
And already, I’m trying to create a narrative from Northam’s inability to keep his story straight. In every narrative I can craft for explaining why he can’t, I come back to the trope that those who lie are hiding something. Is Northam hiding what really happened? The real story may yet come out. Meanwhile, Walsh’s arrangement of individual details and stories makes a good case for his resignation.
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