Ghost Boy (27 page)

Acknowledgments

Like most stories,
Ghost Boy
doesn't really begin with the first sentence on the first page. It starts instead in another book, with a title I've forgotten, in a paragraph or two about an English circus in which the elephants played cricket. In that very real circus, the elephants enjoyed their little game immensely but pouted when they lost.

I liked that image and mentioned it one day to my father. He surprised me by telling me what the elephants wore, and how they held the cricket bat, and how they lumbered up and down the pitch. He talked very fondly about it, because he remembered seeing it as a boy. The baseball game in this story is based on what he told me, and the story grew from there, through the help of many others.

Details of the circus come from two British-born friends, Barry White and John the Hermit. Barry had captured elephants in Kenya and knew firsthand their favorite ways of trampling people. The Hermit remembered the mud and smells of a circus lot and the mysteries of Gypsies.

The story was transposed to postwar America through the help of librarian Kathleen Larkin of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. She found answers to countless questions, down to such details as whether army trucks had glove boxes. Her husband, J. Kevin Ash, brought my elephants to life when he introduced me to three of them as they passed through Prince Rupert in a Shriners' circus sponsored by his club.

The writing was helped along by my wife, Kristin Miller, and my very good friend Bruce Wishart. My agent, Jane Jordan Browne, suggested several changes and then found an excellent place for the story with Delacorte Press. There I was lucky to work with two wonderful editors: Lauri Hornik, who guided
Ghost Boy
into a major revision, and Françoise Bui, who saw it through its final changes.

From the first word I wrote, I saw Harold Kline as an albino. But I threw away almost a hundred pages when I realized that there was more to albinism than just a whiteness of skin. For teaching me the realities of the condition—which changed the story completely—I owe many thanks to NOAH, the National Organization of Albinism and Hypopigmentation, and especially to one of its members, an inspiring young man named Eric Downes. Eric told me some very personal things in a very patient way and suggested new directions in which my story could grow. He very kindly read the final manuscript and provided this clarification:

“Although Harold Kline has albinism, he must always be considered an individual. There are over a hundred different DNA mutations which can cause albinism. No two albinos are alike, just as no two people with regular vision and skin pigmentation are alike. Some albinos have a small amount of pigment in their skin, some have none. Some albinos see 20/40 (very close to the ‘perfect' 20/20), some see 20/400. Harold is intended to be only a person with albinism, not a representation of every albino.”

For more information on albinism, NOAH can be found at
www. albinism.org
.

         

READING GROUP

Questions for Discussion

1.
From the very beginning of the novel, Harold is on a journey. What is he looking for? Does he find it?

2.
At no time during this journey does Harold stop and wonder about the consequences of running away. Why not?

3.
Describe Harold's personality. Which of his characteristics do you find admirable?

4.
“And across the wide front window of May's Cafe was a poem in slanting lines:

He's ugly and stupid

He's dumb as a post

He's a freak and a geek

He's Harold the Ghost.”

Harold has seen this cruel rhyme and heard the people of Liberty call him names such as Whitey, Maggot, and Harold the Ghost so often that he has accepted it all as true. How do other people's perceptions of Harold affect his perception of himself? How do others' perceptions of you affect the way you look upon yourself?

5.
The Gypsy Magda asks Harold, “If you think that you are less than them, can you blame them for thinking they are better?” Discuss the meaning of her question. When does Harold begin to see himself clearly? How has society tried to justify its treatment of minorities, foreigners, and others who don't fit into the conventional models of the community?

6.
Harold struggles to exist between two competing worlds: the world of the sideshow performers and the world of the “normal” people. Teens are often faced with a similar dilemma: family versus friends or one group of friends versus another. How would you manage these choices without alienating one group or the other?

7.
“The morning clouds were thick toward the west. Blue and black, smeared with yellow, they made the sky look bruised and battered.”

There are beautiful descriptive passages throughout the novel. Read aloud your favorite of these lyrical passages and talk about why you find them so pleasing.

8.
Throughout the novel, there are characters, events, and places that are symbols for ideas: the circus, the Cannibal King, the Oregon Trail, and the storm, to name a few. What does each of these metaphors represent?

9.
Whenever Harold feels threatened, he closes his eyes tightly and chants silently to himself,
“No one can see me, no one can hurt me. The words that they say cannot harm me.”
Harold's belief in his own invisibility defines his sense of being an alien. Many teens share these feelings of being an outsider. How have you experienced these feelings? How do you deal with them?

10.
At first Harold thinks Samuel is the ugliest thing he has ever seen. Yet when Harold stares into Samuel's eyes he sees something other than ugliness. Samuel and Tina carry the message that a person's self-worth is determined by what is inside, not by physical appearance. But every message from the media today seems to be that your physical appearance is the only important thing. Where do you stand on this issue? Talk about the instances in the novel where the sideshow performers show their goodness. In which instances in the novel do the “normal” people show their lack of humanity?

11.
“Beware the ones with unnatural charm. And the beast that feeds with its tail… . A wild man's meek and a dark one's pale. And there comes a monstrous harm.”

This is one of Gypsy Magda's prophecies in the novel. What are some of the others? What do her prophecies mean? Do they come true?

12.
We meet Tina, Samuel, and the other malformed sideshow performers when they are adults. What do you suppose it was like for them as teenagers? Did they view themselves as freaks? Did they have the same hopes and aspirations that you do? Do you think they would receive the same kind of treatment now as they did back then?

13.
Harold is beset with loss. His father dies in World War II, and his brother is missing in action; he feels he has lost his mother to another man; he loses his dream romance with Flip, the bareback rider; he witnesses the death of Tina; and he even suffers from the lack of pigment in his skin. How does Harold deal with these losses? What losses have you had in your life? How did you cope with them?

14.
When Harold first meets Tina, it is she who says to Harold, “Maybe you should come with us.” Yet her dying words to him are “ Go see your mama. Okay? … She'll miss you, kiddo.” What does Tina know about what Harold needs?

         

A CONVERSATION WITH IAIN LAWRENCE

Q.What was the hardest part about writing this novel? What was the best part?

A.
The hardest part was trying to imagine the world through Harold's eyes. I spent a fair bit of time squinting at things, but never fully understood how things would actually appear to him. But apart from his vision, there was also the question of how he would imagine the world to be. Harold had lived all his life within a couple of miles of his house. He had never seen a television or a forest or a three-story building. But when he set off on his journey he had particular ideas of what all of those things would be like. And that was the question always in my mind: What would Harold make of this?

The best part, by far, was any scene involving Thunder Wakes Him. I developed a real fondness for the old Indian and his wandering existence.

Q. You are from Canada, yet you chose to set the story on the plains of America. What was the reason for this?

A.
The story had to take place just after World War II, when the small-time traveling circus was fading into history, when sensitivities were bringing an end to the public display of “freaks” and “human oddities.” At that time, and still today, the towns of the Canadian West were smaller and farther apart than those south of the border. But more important to
Ghost Boy
is Harold's journey to the West. It's an exploration for him, a small counterpart to the travels of Lewis and Clark and the settlers on the Oregon Trail. Like them, he goes west hoping to find a better life.

Q. Harold appears in and is the center of all that happens in the story. Why didn't you have him tell the story in the first person?

A.
I normally write at least one scene of a story in both third person and first, and then decide which I like better. With
Ghost Boy
, though, there was never a question. I didn't feel capable of describing the world through Harold's eyes and mind. An elephant, to him, would be a big, brown blur; a face might be unrecognizable. I imagine now that a story told in that way could be extremely powerful, every visual image mysterious, every sound sharp and clear. In retrospect, I probably should have tried to tell
Ghost Boy
that way, but I would probably still be struggling with the first few pages. As it is, I think the story already sometimes steps a bit too far from Harold's point of view.

Q.You know more about the characters than you have told us. Can you give us more background?

A.
I never develop detailed character sketches before starting a book. I'm more likely to write something brief, in the first person, that will give an idea of how the character sounds, and more interested in knowing his ambition than his past. So I really only have vague ideas myself about the background of the characters.

Thunder Wakes Him is just a middle-aged white man. He lived an ordinary life in an ordinary household, until he started performing his trick-riding act in the costume of a Plains Indian. His eccentric and romantic shift into a full-time portrayal of an Indian took place over time, until he now nearly panics when rain splotches his makeup. But it is recent enough that the circus people still know him as Bob. If Harold's eyesight was better, and if he was a little less naïve, he would have seen through the makeup right away.

Samuel and Tina met at Hunter and Green's and have been traveling together ever since. They intend to get married as soon as they have saved enough money to buy their little house. Tina is perfectly happy with her lot in life; she has never wished to be anything else than she is. Samuel, though, is often bitter and angry at the world in general. Abandoned by his parents, sold into a type of circus slavery, he carries on for Tina's sake alone, and will likely quit the circus before another summer's over.

Mr. Green has been looking for ways to make money ever since he was a child. He formed Hunter and Green's only a few years before the story began. He sees it only as a business and lacks the ambition and the imagination to turn it into anything better.

Flip grew up in circuses. Her parents were stars in a much larger European circus before coming to America to escape the looming war in Europe.

Q. Did you consider a different climax to the novel—another event other than Tina's death that would allow Harold to take what he's learned and return home?

A.
The story was only roughly plotted, but I knew from the first word that Tina would die. I nearly changed my mind when I reached that point in the story. She had become so real then that I could hear her voice in my mind and see how she walked and stood and gestured. I actually cried as I wrote the scene, and in the days that followed felt terribly guilty. But Harold brings everything on himself: He largely ignores the warnings of the Gypsy Magda; he doesn't listen to Flip when she tells him he's spoiling the elephants. The discovery that the elephants make him powerful, and his love of that power, lead inexorably to Tina's death. The elephant is only protecting him from an imagined threat.

In the original plot outline, Harold found his brother. He saw him in the bleachers as he rode the elephants round the circus ring. Apart from the unlikelihood of that—the faces would all be blurs to Harold—it didn't seem to help the story. Harold would naturally go home with his brother, ending his journey right then. It wasn't much of a resolution.

Q. Many of the themes you explore in the book appear throughout literature. What books influenced you in the writing of
Ghost Boy
?

A.
It was the idea of elephants playing baseball that started
Ghost Boy
. I was well into the story when I started thinking about
Toby Tyler: or, Ten Weeks with a Circus
, a book I loved as a child, and the basis for a Disney movie I remembered enjoying very much. It was a bit of a shock when I saw it again, as I discovered that I was basically rewriting this half-forgotten story. I threw out all that I'd done and started over, shaping the story around Harold instead of the elephants. I looked for novels about people with albinism, but found very few. The only one I was familiar with was Erskine Caldwell's
God's Little Acre
, though just from the movie version. In
Ghost Boy
, Wicks, the circus cook, imagines that all albinos can sniff out gold and dowse for it with forked sticks. I hoped the reader would conclude that Wicks had formed this opinion by reading Caldwell's book.

A friend in Prince Rupert [British Columbia] read my developing story and pointed out that Harold was quite close to the classical hero, that in searching for the Cannibal King he was off on an almost heroic quest. My friend steered me toward Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, but while I delved into this study of myths and heroes, it's hard to say how much influence it really had.

Unfortunately, I don't keep good records of my research material. I read many books about circuses, looking specifically for first-person accounts from days long enough past to include memories of freak shows.

Q. How much of the story did you mean for readers to take literally and how much for them to take on another level—metaphor, fantasy?