Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2004 The King of Love Willie Hobbs Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES THE KING OF LOVE By WILLIE HOBBS, III A Dissertation submitted to the English Department in the partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004 Copyright © 2004 Willie Hobbs, III All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Willie Hobbs defended on May 6, 2004. Virgil Suarez Professor Directing Dissertation Maricarmen Martinez Outside Committee Member Elizabeth Stuckey-French Committee Member Darryl Dickson-Carr Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to thank God first and foremost for good health, good company and the sweet madness of hearing the muse… I’d like to thank my wife Dr. Tameka Bradley Hobbs and son Ashanti for support along this nerve-racking journey. I’d like to thank Ma and Dad and the rest of my family who have supported my unconventional dream… Much appreciation to the FEF McKnight Fellowship for making my matriculation possible. Equally in that respect, much thanks goes to professor Darryl Dickson-Carr for helping the scholar in me better define the artist in me. Much love to Virgil Suarez, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor (I’m getting mushy writing all this), Janet Burroway, the unstoppable Robert Olen Butler, the grouchy Bob Shacochis… Writing rules! Much thanks to Drs. Dana and Sharon Dennard for showing married folks can do this thing, Carolyn Hall and all my colleagues in the English Department. I love you. Follow your dream – and buy my books when they come out, too. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract …………………………………………………………… v 1. THE RETURN …………………………………………… 1 2. AT THE DEMOCRAT ………………………………… 7 3. CAN I BE DOWN?……………………………………… 58 4. GETTING MY HANDS BLOODY …………… 92 5. BOUNCIN’……………………………………………………… 119 6. THE GEMINI EFFECT …………………………… 165 7. WHEN EVERYTHING’S EVERYTHING … 195 8. JUST TO BE WITH YOU ………………………… 235 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ………………………………… 266 iv ABSTRACT “The King of Love” is a creative dissertation. It is a novel focusing on the struggles of the African-American community to bridge gulfs and divides within itself. The location and setting of the story are in the present day and revolve heavily around the historical black community of Tallahassee, Florida known as Frenchtown. In the tradition of Randolph Fisher’s “Walls of Jericho”, the novel is primarily steeped in the genre of the detective mystery and offers elements of satire throughout its narrative. As with Walter Moseley’s highly influential Easy Rawlins detective series, issues of class, race, culture and heritage are at the forefront of the story. This lead to the employment of the first person point of view, which best captured the humor, flavor and idiosyncrasies of the Frenchtown inhabitants as well as its supporting characters. v CHAPTER 1 THE RETURN My attitude had lifted with the flat lands and brisk Indiana air. I was more talkative. I had reinvented myself, even started to wear glasses. Marble brown frames, lightweight and professional looking. Not prescription, but you get my drift. I wore them on campus and took them off when I was with either Carla or professor Krementz, drinking Killian’s at the Iron Horse. Me, a lowly sophomore, drinking hard with big dog, tenured professors and handling it. People there like Professor Krementz were interested in me in ways everybody back home took for granted. I noticed the possibilities: The acne scars could have been possible signs of economic hardship. The love of khakis a possible hint of gang culture. The cloudy eyes evidence of weed sessions untold. It was all up to me. The memorization of rap lyrics was a sign of pedigree, so maybe I indulged a little. Being a real musician, I didn’t care for most of it, it was just my job somehow, to stay up on it and explain… The other two black girls in the department couldn’t stand me. They wouldn’t have even noticed me back home. In Indiana, I had my own kind of thing. The last thing I wanted to do was drive over the Georgia/Florida line with most of my shit to come back home to Tallahassee to intern for the fall. I was just beginning to master being too stoned to feel the telescope around my eye while viewing the Milky Way at the Kirkwood Observatory, of existing off of one of the Uptown’s huge servings of cajun meatloaf for three 1 days. I began to crave the smell of Neutrogena T-Gel Shampoo in Carla’s chestnut hair against the limestone buildings. I especially hated the idea of giving up the raves. The teeth chattering ability to float until sun up. The X. On August 19th, I had left Indiana’s smoothly paved roads, cool air and returned to kudzu-covered trees that lean over roads and choke out the sunlight. Back to drawn out, shitty sweltering days where even two showers a day barely suffice. I was back home again for the fall semester, with chain smoking, fattening, stagnant people from fattening, stagnant families I had grown up trying to avoid my whole life. Back among flying roaches, sorry-ass Chinese takeout and three hour plus church services. I didn’t even know how to talk to these people anymore. Everybody in Indiana reamed me for my accent and so, the “suthun” twang that I learned to subdue – I now felt it curling up the sides of my tongue again with every breath. Claustrophobia from all sides. I had been exploring a new place with new people, to see how my own first impression - and not the influence of my family – affected how people thought of me. There’s just no way to know what you can achieve on your own without trying. And things were moving along. I had all A’s in American Lit, Foundations of Journalism and Mass Communication, Intro to Sociology… all the signs that I was mature enough to be on my own. So why in hell did Ma and Dad pull strings to get me to intern at the Capitol Outlook again, the local black newspaper that comes out only once a week? Because they didn’t respect me or even see the big picture. 2 This is why I had set up the internship with the Tallahassee Democrat instead. I was working on writing a book Professor Krementz had given me an idea for after my original internship with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was already screwed up thanks to Ma and Dad threatening my advisor. Carla was going to fly down to see me for God’s sakes! If I was going to be home for the fall, it was going to be on my terms. Professor Krementz had told me how to break out from the pack as a journalist. There’s your exclusive, which usually takes years of experience to luck up on. And then there’s a book. He totally supported my writing and was always telling me that I should start writing from what I knew. I’ll be damned if that wasn’t what I was trying to get away from in the first place. Krementz was from Bloomington, which couldn’t be whiter. Krementz, like many whites from there, never ventured into nearby Gary, Indiana – Blacktown, USA. I was constantly the only black person in my classes so I had to explain a lot about blacks. He said there was this thing called gentrification going on in many black communities that I should look into. I told him my parents said that’s what was happening in Frenchtown and that they hated it. Gentrification’s when people try to renew a run-down area with middle or upper class people. Their being there brings in the dollars that renovates abandoned buildings ad brings in new business. The casualty usually is the removal of poor people that were there at first. Frenchtown’s the part of Tallahassee that I came from. Krementz figured if there’s something a young journalist had to explain constantly to various audiences that they 3 obviously know about intimately – then there’s where their material and the chance to get noticed was. I just figured some really important black neighborhood like Harlem of southside Chicago would be more important. Krementz thought differently. After that e-mail, he took to Instant Messages with me to get me on task: “You’ve got a wellspring of material at your front door, Orlando. The capitol of the most visibly corrupt state as far as voting is concerned. Jobe Bush has to be corrupt. You can go straight to the source to find out what’s going on with the gentrification of your neighborhood. ” Jeb Bush. It’s Jeb. “Jeb? What’s with that? That’s the Beverly Hillbillies all over again? How’d you people even vote somebody with a name like that in? This guy lobbed the ball to his asinine brother for the winning slam. The presidency! How can that not be rich?” But as Professor Krementz kept bringing up things I know he had probably read about in Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men book, it occurred to me just how far off he and others who had never visited the state and especially, the capitol, were: “I mean you got your Disney World, everybody’s in bikinis, everybody from the Caribbean flavoring the pot.