How can anyone get past the first pages of To Have and Have Not without contending with the racism. Readers need strategy for these encounters. I stall at its periphery.

A couple nights ago prompted by an agenda item for the Ketchum seminar I rented the 1950 film “The Breaking Point” for being considered the most faithful to the novel. Juano Hernández plays Wesley Park and the closing scene features Park’s son alone on the dock with no idea his father’s body was thrown overboard. Dozens of onlookers are shooed away by police after medical professionals have left by ambulance with Harry, his wife, and two weeping daughters, and the final 20 seconds shows the young, Black son alone at the center of the aftermath looking as if he wants to call out to the parting crowd, and toward the dock and departing coast guard, but he turns toward one side and the other, toward shore and toward port, and remains silent.

Yesterday my mother made her final trip to Asheville to the same memory care doctor who has accompanied her these past ten years since diagnosis. She remains in the doctor’s care, but is too frail and anxious to be driven again for appointments in person. She and Hemingway have a number of points in common including dementia which forensic psychiatrist Andrew Farah argues is the correct diagnosis for the author in the latter years of his life. Also in common: her firstborn was delivered through difficult labor in a Chicago hospital the very day Hemingway ended his own life in Ketchum. The labor was an atmosphere of professional animosity between white doctor and Black nurse. At apex of our family’s story is that birth culminating even before my other brother and I were born as the source, justly or not, of blame which lives on to this day.

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