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Andrew’s been listening to audiobooks of Howard stories lately, and therefore so have I – hearing the texts is a different experience, somehow, than reading them – they seem slower and more detailed. The racist ones are even more uncomfortable when read out loud (there was a Conan one where I finally started making snarky comments, “oh gee, are the villains still black – I’d forgotten it since he mentioned it two sentences ago.” The frustrating thing is that Howard could write stuff that was much more sympathetic and nuanced towards PoC; maybe it’s a case of earlier stories vs. later stories. Anyway, I enjoyed the one last night -- a weird boxing story called “The Apparition in the Prize Ring.”
So in this story, "Mistah John," a white boxing manager recounts how African-American boxer Ace Jessel faced the toughest opponent of his career, Senegalese boxer "Mankiller Gomez" (his professional name), with inspiration (and last-minute supernatural assistance) from the ghost of early 19th-century black prizefighter Tom Molineaux (who was a real person). So for the count, we’ve got two good-guy boxers vs one bad-guy, all three of them black, and a white narrator telling the story to a (presumably?) white audience. Now to an extent I think Howard is able to sidestep skin colour in this story because it’s still basically a “heroic American vs. sinister foreigner” yarn; Jessel is a fast, skilled boxer whose only flaw, so far as his manager is concerned, is a lack of ruthlessness (see “flaws only a protagonist could have”); by contrast the brutal Gomez has won all his fights, up until the time he meets Jessel, through sheer strength and bloodthirstiness.
I think it would be interesting to translate the story to a comic or short film – a 3rd-person PoV would put Jessel and his manager on a more equal footing for character development (frex, although the manager attribute’s Jessel’s unwillingness to go for the kill to his ‘happy-go-lucky” nature, there’s a brief mention of “the wars’ if the story takes place in the 1920s that could indicate Jessel is a veteran – in which case he may personally want to keep a clear division between having killed men on the battlefield and boxing for sport) while allowing them to demonstrate despite the racialized setting, a convincing bond, demonstrated in the story by them being the only two able to perceive Molineaux’s ghost.
So in this story, "Mistah John," a white boxing manager recounts how African-American boxer Ace Jessel faced the toughest opponent of his career, Senegalese boxer "Mankiller Gomez" (his professional name), with inspiration (and last-minute supernatural assistance) from the ghost of early 19th-century black prizefighter Tom Molineaux (who was a real person). So for the count, we’ve got two good-guy boxers vs one bad-guy, all three of them black, and a white narrator telling the story to a (presumably?) white audience. Now to an extent I think Howard is able to sidestep skin colour in this story because it’s still basically a “heroic American vs. sinister foreigner” yarn; Jessel is a fast, skilled boxer whose only flaw, so far as his manager is concerned, is a lack of ruthlessness (see “flaws only a protagonist could have”); by contrast the brutal Gomez has won all his fights, up until the time he meets Jessel, through sheer strength and bloodthirstiness.
I think it would be interesting to translate the story to a comic or short film – a 3rd-person PoV would put Jessel and his manager on a more equal footing for character development (frex, although the manager attribute’s Jessel’s unwillingness to go for the kill to his ‘happy-go-lucky” nature, there’s a brief mention of “the wars’ if the story takes place in the 1920s that could indicate Jessel is a veteran – in which case he may personally want to keep a clear division between having killed men on the battlefield and boxing for sport) while allowing them to demonstrate despite the racialized setting, a convincing bond, demonstrated in the story by them being the only two able to perceive Molineaux’s ghost.
