David Haynes on Right by My Side

(Guest post by David Haynes)

“I’m a very dangerous boy. I’ve been known to say almost anything.”

Marshall Fields Finney said that.  He’s the narrator in Right by My Side, which was my first novel. It’s fair, I think, to consider the first paragraph of my own book for the MPP—since I don’t remember much about writing the book, and it is, after all, now an official “Penguin Classic.” Which has been my occasion for revisiting Marshall and company, thirty years after publication and close to thirty-seven years after hearing that first line in my head. When a book is reissued, you are assigned by your editors to read it again in search of necessary updates, mostly copyediting errors that slid by the first time (a painful subject for a different essay). So, I did, and it very much felt like reading any book that’s new to you for the first time—until it wasn’t, until it was like, “Oh, I remember this guy.”  Both Marshall and the guy who dreamed him up, that is. And still that first paragraph blows me away, in that way that openings that stick with us tend to do. 

“I steal.”[1]

“I was not there, yet I was there.”[2]

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”[3]

“I am born.”[4]

There’s something arresting about characters immediately announcing themselves on the page in declarative mode (N.B., “I am born” is technically not the first line of the Dickens novel but, instead, the title of the first chapter, out of which the next sentence flows seamlessly). These characters tell the reader they are here and that they did not come to play. You will deal with them on their terms.

That all this bravado is a mask is, of course, an expected part of the journey ahead. What it masks is the reason we turn the pages.

Surely it occurred to me, back in the heart of the Reagan years, the implications of a young man announcing himself to be “dangerous.” An era highlighted by (but not particularly unique) in its demonization of black youth. In the mid-eighties, I taught sixth grade at an urban school in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was surrounded by incredible and resilient young people every day, and back then I would have no more created a depiction of a dangerous black teenager than I would publicly share personal details of their complicated lives. Ironically enough, more than one editor who responded to Right by My Side said they would consider publishing the book if I made the young people in the book more dysfunctional, including one who specifically requested more sex, drugs, and violence. Because, you know: it’s a book about black people.

What interested me back then and even still is the second sentence, the thing that makes Marshall genuinely dangerous, the words that those editors seemed to elide past. The part about saying almost anything, the threat to tell the truth.

Back then, I had a vision of a young person having a voice and being willing and able to use it, in all kinds of ways: benign, comical, for ill or for good. In hindsight, I credit this to the most important thing I learned in my teaching career: if you make space for them, kids will tell you all kinds of truth about all kinds of things. Often enough, they would tell me how they felt not seen or heard or cared much about. At school. At home. In their communities. Often enough, by sixth grade, they were pretty much done with talking.  (Silent boys. So many silent boys in the world!)

A kid I made space for showed up in my head one day. And he started talking. So, I let him. 

I’m a very dangerous boy. I’ve been known to say almost anything.

Sam and Rose—two people who are supposed to be my parents—have washed out my so-called fresh mouth with soap more than once, but not since I turned fifteen and turned into an overgrown moose. Just maybe it was my big mouth got us into this mess. I don’t think anyone knows or cares. It’s been more than a year since all this started. Here we are: right back where we began. Same old Sam and Rose and Marshall. Probably forever and ever and ever.

Marshall Fields Finney: does he feel dangerous to you? No? 

Maybe think again.

Across the country, legislatures and school boards and parent groups are culling voices like Marshall’s from classrooms and libraries. And LGBTQ voices and books about human sexuality, and, and, and, and, and. Voices as benign as Marshall’s, many more significant, all of them needed by that one particular reader in search of some necessary truth they might only find within those pages, now missing from the shelf.  

Marshall understood what it meant to be dangerous. It was my great honor to provide him that voice, and I am proud he is speaking to new readers all these years later. 

It is our duty to fight to allow him and the others to be heard.

*

[1] Mona Simpson, “Lawns”

[2] Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

[3] Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster

[4] Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

David Haynes is the author of seven novels for adults and five books for younger readers. He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. Since 1996 he has taught regularly in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and has also taught writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Hamline University, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and at the Writers’ Garret in Dallas. He has received a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series “Selected Shorts.” His most recent new novel is A Star in the Face of the Sky, and in 2023 he published a 30th anniversary edition of Right by My Side as part of the Penguin Classic series. He is also the author of a series for children called “The West Seventh Wildcats.” His upcoming book is a collection, Martha’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories. 

David spent fifteen years as a K-12 teacher in urban schools, mostly teaching middle grades in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  He worked on numerous school reform efforts, including developing the influential Saturn School of Tomorrow, where he served as Associate Teacher for Humanities.  He was involved in the early developmental work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, coordinating efforts of the nation's finest educators to develop standards in the fields of social studies, vocational education, early childhood education and for teachers of students whose first language is not English.

David serves as Board Chair for Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.