I ran across Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery, story by Mat Johnson, art by Warren Pleece, and letters by Clem Robins, in the graphic novels section of my local library. It's fiction, but it's based on the true story of Walter White, the former head of the NAACP, who was, as Johnson puts it, "an African-American even paler than I was." White went undercover passing as a white man in the Deep South in the early 1900s to investigate lynchings, which was, of course, incredibly dangerous.
Incognegro's protagonist is Zane Pinchback, who works for the New Holland Herald of New York, reporting undercover on lynchings in the 1930s. Having narrowly survived his last assignment, he wants to switch to local Harlem coverage, but his editor pulls him back one more time by telling Pinchback that his brother back in Mississippi has been charged with murdering a white woman, his partner in distilling illegal moonshine; meanwhile, a sheriff's deputy has gone missing. Zane will save his brother Alonzo if he can, and cover the expected lynching if he can't.
This effort becomes more complicated when his best friend turns up on the train. Carl wants to tag along and learn how to become an incognito black reporter himself, but he's overestimated his acting ability, and gets into his own trouble. Also, it turns out that missing deputy was keeping a major secret, too, which plays a major part in how things turn out.
I admire the characterization and plotting here; Johnson tells a great story, interspersed with ironic humor that highlights the horrors of dehumanization. He's aided in this by Pleece's striking black-and-white artwork; its bold expressiveness really brings people, including their conversations, arguments and actions, to life. Additionally, the juxtaposition of cheerful camaraderie in some of the crowd scenes with the crime that they're there to perpetrate is quite chilling.
The version of Incognegro that the library had was a 10th anniversary edition, published in 2018. An afterword by Johnson written for this edition says that when he first wrote it, he thought of it as a story of America's past -- not that racism was gone, but that its organized, overt expression had largely been defeated. But now, "the racial dynamic of the early 20th century seems to be, in some ways, repeating itself. ... Sadly, the era of racial terrorism covered in Incognegro is suddenly relevant again."
I couldn't agree more. I'm from the South myself, and the facts that acted as a springboard for Incognegro weren't any surprise to me; however, seeing how they played out here in fiction acts as a visceral reminder of how normal and accepted vicious racism has been in this country's past, and if we don't work hard to stop its current recurrence and spread, may become so again in the not too distant future.
Content warnings: Lynchings and other violent deaths, drawings of dead bodies, casual and vicious racism, racist language.
Disclaimers: None
