Paradise Sky - April CC Book Club Selection

[ignatius]

Nat and Cullen - as do the “China girls” - undertake a variety of jobs. China girls: prostitution, laundry - okay, read that before. Nat: work in a livery, a general store, a saloon as “bouncer” - okay, read that before. However, Cullen and waste removal, Nat and Win and Madame, rat catchers, Nat cleaning spittoons - hmm, never read that before.

I admire the work ethic of Nat and Cullen and the jumping in to do a nasty job. I just never thought - or read - about the variety of work needed - and of course removing “night soil” was needed.

I read a book on the White House staff (The Residence) and remember being surprised at the number of employees. I knew about the butlers and maids and chef and gardeners. I just hadn’t thought about plumbers and painters and carpenters and florists and electricians, etc. that work at the White House keeping things running. If you need a plumber you don’t call out for one, I guess.

[Midwest67]

The brutal rape of Win & Madame was so sad. I appreciated the gentle touch Lansdale took in sharing the degree of psychological trauma Win endured & her decline. I thought Win might be part of Nat’s happily ever after story, and it was hard to see her vibrancy and life broken.

[Mary13]

^ For me, two of the most heart-tugging passages in the novel involved Win: the first in a happy way, when she and Nat first kissed:

That first loving kiss, the one that comes out of you from the source of your personal river, and the one that comes from her that is the same, there’s never another moment like it; never another flame that burns so hot. It can never be that good again, ever. All manner of goodness can come after, but it’s different. And that’s a good thing, because if we burned that hot for too long, we’d be nothing but ash.

…everything in my life from that point on lay under the mountain of that single kiss, and try as I might, I have never climbed that high again. (p. 165)

And the second in a sad way, after Win’s death:

I swear to you a snow-white owl came down from the dark sky and rested on the headstone, its moon shadow falling across the grave like a blanket…Reckon if I was an Indian I would say it came for her spirit, carried it off into the sky. And like those Greeks and such Mr. Loving told me about that was always getting put among the stars, I fancied that’s where she was. It seem right to me she would be among them heroes and beauties, shining down forever like the star she was. (p. 334)

[PlantMom]

What similarities do you see between the only other western we have read, Lonesome Dove, and Paradise Sky?

The characters in both books were so respectful of the dead and their remains. Hauling the dead wife’s pickled body on the wagon’s side, or Cramp’s decaying body in the Chinese women’s wagon in Paradise Sky reminded me of Gus’s body being delivered by extraordinary means to Texas in LD. It’s hard to imagine taking such measures, imo!

[NJTheatreMOM]

@Mary13

Composting in America dates back to George Washington.

I figured that composting in one form or another had to be very old. It was just that the term “compost pile” sounded jarringly modern to me (as did the word “trash,” and I was right about that one).

If Loving had called his compost assemblage a “stercorary” as George Washington did, or some other old-fashioned sounding word, I would have been a lot happier.

The clever Mr Loving whom y’all adore told Nate that his large ears would sunburn if he didn’t wear a hat. As if Nate would not have known that!!

[ignatius]

Really good point @PlantMom - Post #63. For some reason that escaped my attention - and it’s such a strong connection.

[Mary13]

2. Since Paradise Sky is inspired by a real-life character, there are historical characters and events embedded in the story. Did any of these jump out at you? Did Lansdale do a good job of weaving them into the story?

The only historical character who initially jumped out at me was, of course, Wild Bill Hickok. His death also pinpointed the date of Nat’s story:

In 1876, Hickok was shot from behind and killed while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory (present-day South Dakota), by Jack McCall, an unsuccessful gambler. The hand of cards which he supposedly held at the time of his death (including the ace of spades, the ace of clubs, the eight of spades and the eight of clubs) has become known as the dead man’s hand.
Wild Bill Hickok - Wikipedia

And Nat Love was there to see it happen.

Another name that sounded familiar (so I looked it up) was Judge Parker, who hired Nat when he was in Fort Smith. Yep, Judge Isaac Charles Parker:

He became known as the “Hanging Judge” of the American Old West due to the large number of convicts that he sentenced to death. In 21 years on the federal bench, Judge Parker tried 13,490 cases. In more than 8,500 of these cases, the defendant either pleaded guilty or was convicted at trial. Parker sentenced 160 people to death; 79 of them were executed.
….
Parker arrived in Fort Smith on May 4, 1875, initially without his family. His appointment at age 36 made him the youngest federal judge in the West.

In the timeline of Nat’s story, Judge Parker would have been in his late 30s. Nat observes:

He was sharply dressed in a black suit and had a long, graying beard that come to a point like a spike. His hair was thick and neatly combed and maybe touched up with shoe polish. He wore eyeglasses. He could have been thirty-five or fifty-five. It’s hard to tell with bearded white people. (p. 338)

[Midwest67]

I just looked up Bass Reeves to see if he was a true historical character. Yep. I know next to nothing about the Old West. Seems like Bass Reeves could fill a book with his adventures!

[NJTheatreMOM]

6. From the BookList review: “Lansdale never allows the reader to forget that Nat is a black man who is always paid less and has trouble even putting his horse in a livery.” Were you constantly aware of Nat’s color? Do you think the racism of the time was accurately depicted?

The author made sure the reader was constantly aware of Nat’s color, and the racism in the book seemed plausible to me, However, I suspect that it was likely much more pervasive and vicious than the way Lansdale depicted it.

On the other hand, a couple of Nat’s reactions to the racism were perhaps not in sync with the times:

1. Near the beginning of the book, a white person called Nat "boy" and he didn't like it. That seemed to me like something that would have been so common, back then, that Nat would be unlikely to have noticed it particularly.
2. On page 172, Wild Bill said that Nat was a tribute to his race. Nat commented (in the narrative) that Bill did not realize there was an insult in that. Nat's comment seemed to me more like a modern sensibility than something a black person would have felt at the time, though I could be wrong.

[PlantMom]

1. Since Paradise Sky is inspired by a real-life character, there are historical characters and events embedded in the story. Did any of these jump out at you? Did Lansdale do a good job of weaving them into the story?

Calamity Jane. Wild Bill’s description of her in the book (p. 152 ) certainly jumped out at me I just looked up Agnes Lake Hickok, Wild Bill’s “flexible”, former-circus-performer wife. She was real too.

[Mary13]

Calamity Jane, of course! I forgot about her. Neither Wild Bill nor Joe Lansdale treated her with much respect. She was a heck of a woman, but her small role in the novel was essentially an unkempt, lovesick, alcoholic.

@Midwest67, good catch! Bass Reeves was so over-the-top, I never dreamed he was a real person.

http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-bassreeves.html

@NJTheatreMOM, I agree with your post #68–and you’ve answered discussion question #8 as well. It must be difficult for an author to keep the political correctness from seeping in, when the story is (partly) about race and the hero is supposed to be a legend who earns our admiration. It’s not that Nat wouldn’t know innately that he was the victim of racism, unjustly belittled and degraded, but would he would be able to articulate it in that 21st century kind of way? I’m not sure. Maybe – if he had read a lot of Frederick Douglass while he had access to the Loving library. (“While we worked he was telling me about something or another from one of his books. The books was stacked every which way in the house, and how he found what he was looking for I got no idea” ([p. 41]).

[NJTheatreMOM]

^But isn’t Frederick Douglass a contemporary person?

Somebody thought he was!!

[Caraid]

I had a distant knowledge of Calamity Jane, but curiosity made me look her up to see how close Lansdale’s description was to the truth. Descriptions of her add that she was compassionate to the sick and needy, but everything else seems pretty close to the truth, or at least the legend of the truth.
Here is the Biography description of her. http://www.biography.com/people/calamity-jane-9234950

I also looked at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamity_Jane

[ignatius]

@VeryHappy

Apparently he learned to shoot as well with his left hand as with his right.

^^^ @VeryHappy - I just read the article on Bass Reeves that @Mary13 shared - post #70 and noted this: “Ambidextrous, he rarely missed his mark.” Maybe Lansdale took this fact and shared it with his protagonist Nat. I was a teacher and occasionally ran into a ambidextrous student - could write/draw equally well with either hand. I sometimes wondered if the student started out left-handed and was “encouraged” to switch to his right. Back in the day, that could happen.

@Mary

In several reviews and author bios, Joe Lansdale has been compared to Stephen King. To me, Ruggert—with his will-not-die monster persona—is straight out of the King character drawer. Or better yet, like a character in Joe Hill’s The Fireman. Remember the relentless Jakob and his plow?

@Mary13: You hit closer to the truth than you realized. ^:)^

He [Landsdale] is still influential to younger genre writers like Tim Bryant, Stephen Graham Jones, and Joe Hill. (Hill, whose father is Stephen King, got hooked on Lansdale as a teenager after reading The Drive-In. “My own story ideas were goofy and gory and silly and it would’ve been natural to keep them to myself,” Hill wrote to me in an email. “Lansdale suggested another possibility: he seemed to be saying you could stick your crazy right in people’s faces.”) Darkness on the Edge of Town

^^^ Good article - interesting man.

[Caraid]

Good call @Mary13 and good find @ignatius. I love the connection!

[Mary13]

^ me, too – I had no idea!

[Mary13]

@NJTheatreMOM

The author made sure the reader was constantly aware of Nat’s color, and the racism in the book seemed plausible to me, However, I suspect that it was likely much more pervasive and vicious than the way Lansdale depicted it.

I’m sure you’re right. In this regard, Lansdale seems to have been channeling Love’s autobiography:

…according to some historians, Love’s autobiography was as remarkable for the information it omitted as for the adventures it recounted. While the book “confirms the large-scale participation of black cowboys in the long drives up the Chisholm Trail,” [Scholar William Loren] Katz suggested, Love “provides little insight into the intricacies of western racial relationships…. From the moment he left Tennessee and went west, he appears to have forgotten he was black. To hear him tell it, he was accepted by all—from the western psychopathic killer, Billy the Kid, to the aristocratic Spanish maiden who was his first passion.”
Nat Love | Encyclopedia.com

[Mary13]

@ignatius, thanks for the Texas Monthly piece on Lansdale. It gave me a real appreciation for his journey as a writer and the way he developed his craft. So many interesting points I could quote, but here’s one that stood out in light of Paradise Sky:

Lansdale’s favorite weapons for skewering racism are satire and explicit violence, and deploying them can be a risky gambit, an easy way to get denounced and misinterpreted. Lansdale has faced his share of both. He has received letters from racists that read, “I hate them too.” Editors, especially early on, recoiled at work that was so raw, failing to appreciate his social aims. “They’d say, ‘If you drop a happy ending on it, we’ll take it,’” he remembers. “I said, ‘Nah.’ So it was a battle.”

[ignatius]

I like that Ruthie has a family (Luther and Samson) that already likes Nat and that he likes also.

Mr. Loving, Madame, Luther all like Nat. They seem to trust him with that and/or those they care most about.

[Mary13]

It’s curious that the happily-ever-after ending is with “Ruthie,” when Nat Love’s real-life wife was Alice (whom he married in 1889 and to whom he dedicated his autobiography).