Beetlecreek by William Demby

First published: 1950

Type of plot: Existential realism

Time of work: The American Depression era

Locale: Beetlecreek, West Virginia

Principal Characters:

• Bill Trapp, a white recluse who lives close to the black community
• Johnny Johnson, a teenage black boy from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who develops an acquaintanceship with Bill
• David Diggs, Johnny’s uncle, a black man who develops an acquaintanceship with Bill
• Mary Diggs, David’s wife
• Edith Johnson, a former resident of Beetlecreek who returns to the town and renews an old relationship with David

The Novel

The plot of Beetlecreek develops chronologically, in four parts focusing on three different sets of human circumstances, actions, and events that converge at the end. Part 1 introduces four of the five main characters. In chapter 1, Bill Trapp, a white hermit feared by a large number of the black people who live nearby, chases four young black boys from under a fruit tree in his yard and discovers that there is one young black boy up in the tree. Bill, whose reputation is unjustified, invites young Johnny Johnson to come down out of the tree and into his house. After Johnny and Bill talk and drink cider together, Johnny’s uncle, David Diggs, arrives looking for him, the other boys having reported that the strange white man has caught Johnny up in the tree. Trapp also invites David to have some wine, and the two men become acquainted and later go to Telrico’s Bar and get drunk together. The budding relationship carries a sense of heightened expectancy for Johnny and David, because they are stepping across racial lines, violating black and white community conventions by associating with the ostracized white recluse. For Bill, the potential relationship is exciting because it represents his coming out of seclusion, the end of his isolation from both blacks and whites.

The last chapter of part 1 focuses on David’s wife, Mary Diggs, as she immerses herself in the trivial social activities and church events that define her life. Throughout the novel, Mary’s actions and activities remain on the level of the petty. The events of Mary’s life are one of the three sets of events that are important in the novel; her actions suggest all the negative possibilities in life.

Part 2 centers on the attempts of Bill and Johnny to develop the sense of rich possibility which they had when they first met. Bill comes out of seclusion, associates with both black and white people, and actively tries to win community favor by doing kind deeds. Johnny, who is visiting Beetlecreek from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, struggles to reconcile his friendship with Bill with his need, as a newcomer to the community, to prove himself to the local black youth gang. The gang attempts to force Johnny into behavior that is callous and insensitive and that interferes with his deepest responses to Bill. The connection between Bill and Johnny is the catalyst for a second group of events, which allow Demby to examine the possibility that two people can interact with each other on a spontaneous, human level that is above societal insensitivity.

In part 3, Bill, with the intention of continuing his pursuit of a meaningful life through significant human interaction, has a picnic that brings together young black and white girls. His good intentions, however, have negative consequences: The black girls feel intimidated by the white girls, and more important, one of the white girls steals a picture of a naked human body from Bill’s anatomy book and takes it to her parents, who start the rumor that Bill has molested the girls. The community rejects Bill even more strongly than before and with great pleasure spreads and magnifies rumors of what happened at the picnic. Although Johnny knows what really happened, he allows peer pressure from the gang to stop him from revealing the truth and also renounces Bill. Johnny decides that he wants to be a member of the gang more than anything else.

Edith Johnson enters the novel in part 3 and renews an old romance with David. After his encounter with Bill, which has awakened his desire to escape what he calls the “death grip” of the average human life, David is ready to leave his wife, Beetlecreek, and their pettiness. He agrees to go away with Edith to Detroit, hoping to draw from her the strength to live as a self-determined, independent person, free of society’s death grip. The situation in which Demby places David by means of this relationship provides the impetus for the third major set of circumstances in the novel, circumstances that hold forth the possibility of true freedom and fresh, authentic living.

In part 4, as part of his initiation into the gang, Johnny agrees to burn down Bill’s shack to punish him for molesting the girls, but when he starts the fire and is confronted by Bill, he hits Bill over the head with the gasoline can. The blow apparently seriously injures Bill or kills him, and Johnny runs away. David leaves for Detroit on the bus with Edith: The tone and atmosphere of the last chapter are suggestive of his negative future. To the tragic end of the relationship between Bill and Johnny, Demby adds the strong implication that David, too, will fail to escape the meaningless death trap that life is for most people.

The Characters

It is through the three major male characters—Bill, Johnny, and David—that Demby conveys his concern in Beetlecreek: the pursuit of a significant life experience. These three characters and the relationships between them form three perspectives from which to view this concern.

Bill, an orphan, has always had to struggle against his sense of being alone and outside the human community. Before coming to Beetlecreek, he tried to live a meaningful life among other people, but he became frustrated and eventually retired to the seclusion of a farm in Beetlecreek. At the time of the novel, he has lived there for fifteen years. Now an old man, his encounter with Johnny at the beginning of the novel rekindles in him a desire to pursue a significant life through relationships with others. Bill’s character incorporates a broad range of qualities with which readers can identify: When inspired, he can be almost heroic, devoting energy, patience, and tolerance to others in an attempt to get them to see him for the compassionate human being that he is; on the other hand, he can be small, weak, pathetic, and ineffectual as he gropes for his identity in seclusion.

Johnny, a teenager adrift in the world, is trying to find the most significant pattern for the life ahead of him. He is perceptive enough to know that it is important to respond spontaneously and humanely to Bill; moreover, his soul instinctively revolts when he sees acts of wanton cruelty, such as those practiced by the gang members in an attempt to prove their manhood as dictated by society. Despite this revulsion, however, Johnny, like many teenagers, is highly vulnerable to peer pressure, and his desire to be accepted by the gang—to become what he calls the “new Johnny”—is so strong that he is willing to burn down Bill’s shack to gain that acceptance. Johnny is adrift, with no landmarks but his own emotions. His precarious position shows how easy it is to slip from achieving true personhood, which is based on spontaneous human emotion as demonstrated in his warm response to Bill, to “achieving” a shallow, insensitive version of manhood as touted by the gang.

David, at thirty-two, knows that it is “necessary for himself to act for himself”—that is, to move beyond what other individuals or society in general prescribes for him—but this nevertheless frightens him. He has spent much time in pursuit of pleasure, as well as in the mundane activities of his life with Mary—all socially sanctioned behaviors—despite his knowledge of the importance of independence. David believes that when he first married Mary, he was, for a time—before he settled into Beetlecreek’s superficial community patterns—actually beyond the clutches of life’s death grip. He has the opportunity to live beyond that death grip again with Edith, yet he suspects (indeed, knows) that the same thing will happen in his relationship with Edith that happened with Mary. His challenge is to renew his struggle for meaning constantly, without falling into negative patterns. The reader can identify with David because his crisis—the crisis of maintaining meaning and relevance in one’s life—is one that many people face.

Mary and Edith are less well developed than are the male characters of Beetlecreek; rather, they serve symbolic functions. Mary is a totally one-dimensional character. Although the narrative is related from her point of view several times in the novel, Demby never shows her as having a thought that is not selfish or narrow. Her stereotyped characterization therefore serves as a mundane standard against which the reader can judge the strivings of Bill, Johnny, and David.

Edith is somewhat less easily defined. Since Demby never narrates the novel from her point of view, as he does for the other major characters, it is difficult to tell exactly what he intends to achieve through her. At times, Edith seems to be the character who has attained the individual freedom for which David is searching; she appears to do whatever she wants and to answer to no one. On the other hand, she is limited by her lack of compassion—for the woman who adopted and reared her, for poor people, and for people in general. It is clear that she is seductive and alluring and will probably place David in another death grip after he has been with her for a while. From one perspective, she represents the extreme of the carefree life of sensual pleasure, the opposite of Mary’s overly structured life. Yet, from another perspective, Edith, like Mary, represents a conventional approach to life that David needs to avoid. Her characterization, then, is almost as one-dimensional as that of Mary.

Critical Context

Perhaps, the best way to see Beetlecreek is in the context of the literary “mainstreaming” which was popular among some black writers and scholars during the time that Demby wrote the novel. Black literary mainstreamers believed, in part at least, that black writing would mature when it lost its distinctive identity, as manifested in a focus on concerns that were specifically black, and merged thematically with the general body of American and world literature. In Beetlecreek, some readers may find that Demby is too easily and too summarily rising above racial concerns in his attempt to produce the mainstream, universal novel that depicts broadly the problems of human existence. Perhaps Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), another work by a black author that aims to enter the mainstream, is more successful in the manner in which it works through to the universal by concerning itself first with specifically racial themes. Yet one must remember that Beetlecreek preceded Invisible Man by two years and, at least in the context of literary history, achieved very early something that a number of black writers and intellectuals were trying to achieve.

It is also important to note that Demby’s approach to his existential theme (the idea that man is cast alone into a meaningless universe in which he has to determine his own meaning) is more like the approach of Ellison, who followed him, and less like that of the French existentialist Albert Camus, for example. Camus not only assumed that man’s search for meaning was doomed to failure, but he also failed to stress that the values of sensitivity and humanity were important in the search. For Demby and Ellison, the values of humanity and sensitivity are important in this quest. Demby’s fiction is thus an example of one important direction that literary existentialism took in the mid-twentieth century.

Bibliography

Bayliss, John F. “Beetlecreek: Existentialist or Human Document?” Negro Digest 19 (November, 1969): 70-74. Bayliss disputes Robert Bone’s argument for a dominating theme of existentialist choice as central to Beetlecreek. For Bayliss, the novel dramatizes human dilemmas that can be easily understood without resort to the grim visions of modern philosophies of despair.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Bone discusses Beetlecreek in a chapter on “The Contemporary Negro Novel,” finding in it a parable on existential freedom. David Diggs is caught between Bill Trapp and Edith, and chooses the course that leads away from the good. Similarly, Johnny is destroyed by the forces that draw him into the gang.

Christensen, Peter G. “William Demby.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Provides a critical biography of Demby, as well as a bibliography of works by and about him.

Fabre, Geneviève, and Klaus Benesch, eds. African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds: Consciousness and Imagination. New York: Rodopi, 2004. Includes an essay by Benesch on Demby and African American modernism.

Hall, James C. Afterword to Beetlecreek, by William Demby. Jackson, Miss.: Banner Books, 1998. Reevaluation of and commentary upon Beetlecreek by a Demby scholar at the University of Alabama.

Margolies, Edward. Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro Authors. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968. Stresses Demby’s realistic style and the existential themes of Beetlecreek, which are especially suitable in a treatment of black life in America. Margolies observes of the persecution of Bill Trapp: “Thus Negro life in all its deathly aspects is the mirror image of white society.”

Marowski, Daniel G., and Roger Matuz, eds. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 53. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. The entry on Demby includes a good biographical sketch and excellent excerpts from the sparse commentary on his novels.

O’Brien, John. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Interesting comments by Demby on the genesis of Beetlecreek: He recalls that he had fallen in love with a woman in Salzburg, Austria; when she went out with someone else, he got angry and wrote the novel’s closing scene.