Halo's Eve Tip #6: Big Voiced Theme

An excerpt from Dee Stewart's Sugar Rum Halloween...

 

The smell of sugar cane rum burned my nose when we entered through the church doors. Ma Mable said that slaves and sugar came to America hand in hand. Sugar was the reason so many blacks were brought here. We were introduced to the sugar canes in Barbados, slept beside them on ships, stilled them through the sugar mills of the South, made rum for the masters, who saved some of it to sell to Europe, in order to buy more slaves and to keep the circle unbroken. And we Gullah-Blackfoot-captives drank from the leftover barrels to numb ourselves from the guilt and reality. I memorized that story line by line, because Ma Mable said it so slow and constant it was like a favorite hymn, just like the extra place setting she kept on the dinner table for Jesus, and like the fourth friday demon-ousting nights at God Bless Us Missionary Baptist Church...A crazy faith that haunted the hearts of thirteen-year-old black girls like me. It haunts me still.

Ok. So we're talking about theme this week. One thing that I'm working on in my own work as well as revising this short story is using Big Voice to buttress my story's theme. Sugar Rum Halloween is the story of a young reluctant exorcist, who doesn't believe in her family church's rhetoric, but can't come up with a better explanation for the crazy things she witness until she meets a young airforce chaplain. I wrote this story in 2003. Then workshopped it last year. I'm revising it now for a short story submission. 

Big Voice in fiction is like rants in movies and asides in plays. Think Tom Cruise circa Jerry McGuire:  "We live in a cynical world..." speech before he says "you complete me."  This is the part of the story when we get to let our characters tell us about how they see the world. We don't have to agree with it, but now we get there point of view. We-readers-understand why they the did the things they did and we also get to view the theme of the story at a different angle. In Jerry McGuire the largest thread is the dichotmous relationship with sport psychology and love. In Sugar Rum Halloween it is black spiritualism and love. What is your story's theme? And what does your protaganist say in your story that would help me understand them?

Come to the discussion board and let's talk about it.

Dee

 

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