John Vercher is a biracial author based in Pennsylvania who is good at what he does. In his first two novels, Three-Fifths and After the Lights Go Out, Vercher writes about biracial Black men reckoning with the tragedies of passing as white, recognizing white family members’ racism, and ultimately dying by murder or suicide. Yet, in his most recent novel, Devil is Fine (Celadon Books, 2024), he also writes about a biracial Black man’s healing, and readers get to see that joyful ending.
As a Black multiracial writer, reading all three of John Vercher’s works lets me know that the ultimate tragedy for a biracial Black protagonist is being separated from their Blackness. The novels deal with the visceral incisions faced by hyphenated identities. However, in Devil is Fine, the protagonist reckons with and gets closest to his Blackness, and his grief helps him get to his happy ending.
Three-Fifths centers on our protagonist, Bobby, who passes as white due to living with his single white mother, Isabel, and not meeting his Black father, Robert, until she facilitates their first meeting. Bobby’s father doesn’t learn of Bobby’s existence until the meeting takes place.
In the most impactful part of their conversation, Bobby’s father calls him out on thinking passing has benefitted him:
“I think you look in that mirror and tell yourself you’re white because you think it’s what you have to do to survive. That it’s what makes you happy and keeps you safe.”
Bobby looked away from Robert.
“Can I ask you something?” Robert said.
Bobby kept his face averted from Robert but nodded.
“Has it made you happy?”
Bobby shook his head.
“Has it kept you safe?”
A tear fell from Bobby’s eye. Then another. He shook his head and wiped at his face with his sleeve.
The novel takes place in the nineties, not too long after the Rodney King riots. These events are compounded by Bobby’s childhood friend, Aaron—formerly someone culturally appropriating Black culture, now a converted white supremacist—being released from prison. When Bobby witnesses Aaron commit a hate crime against another Black man with a brick, Bobby feels in more danger than ever before.
Aaron claims throughout the novel that he would never hurt Bobby, so Bobby wants to maintain a relationship with him. But first, he wants to turn Aaron in and confess to being present at the crime.
Unfortunately, the story ends with Aaron shooting Bobby before shooting himself.
In an interview with the Virtual Memories Show, Vercher said Three-Fifths started with his fascination with the “tragic mulatto” as a mode of storytelling, which he learned about during his undergraduate film studies: “The whole concept of ‘passing’ was new to me. I didn’t know that it had a name or was a thing, honestly.” Vercher was in healthcare for ten years before he went to get his MFA and began to write this novel that was inspired by the screenplay he wrote in his early twenties. He wanted to make clear that although the novel seems “timely,” the tragedy it presents is nothing new; “it’s cyclical.”
After the Lights Go Out is a present-day narrative about Xavier “Scarecrow” Wallace, a professional wrestler in his late thirties who struggles with pugilistic dementia while seeing his white father decline from Alzheimer’s. Regarding the health issues of the novel, “The research was my experience and my experience was the research.” As the father loses more of his faculties, Xavier witnesses his racism for the first time and realizes why his Black mother left home when he was young.
When Xavier reunites with his mother, he asks, “Why didn’t you ask me to go with you, Mama?” Confused, she responds, “Xavier, I did ask you to come with me. . . . You said no.”
Of all the ways the novel plays with Xavier’s crumbling memory, this one hits the hardest.
Despite the chance to have more time with his mother and the possibility of working as a wrestling coach and teacher at the college where she adjuncts, Xavier leaves to compete in a high-profile (fixed) fight where he has to lose on purpose to pay back his cousin.
Due to his condition, Xavier blacks out during the fight and ends up winning. After, he must go into hiding to avoid his cousin and works in a restaurant worker under a fake name. Meanwhile, his health continues to worsen. Finally, to make the constant ringing in his head stop—an element that is repeatedly and skillfully referenced throughout the novel—he points a gun at it and fires.
As a former physical therapist for athletes, Vercher has said, he saw “MMA [Mixed Martial Arts] as a bridge to talk about other mental health issues.” He wanted to explore the parallels of both men, Xavier and his father, losing their minds. Vercher’s wife continues to work in a skilled nursing setting where a lot of Black women have had awful racist things said to them from white patients in a vulnerable state.
While Three-Fifths is an introduction for Vercher engaging in the “tragic mulatto” narrative, the tragedy in After the Lights Go Out is more focused on how race intersects with athleticism’s violent pressures and the deterioration of mental and physical health. There’s more compartmentalization of Xavier’s life than Bobby’s. Devil is Fine has a happier ending, but that doesn’t mean Vercher shies away from the trials of his late-forties protagonist, who remains unnamed to the reader. Unlike Vercher’s first two novels, which were written in third person, Devil is Fine is written in alternating second and first.
The second-person point of view functions when the narrator is writing to his teenage son, Malcolm (aka Mal), who has died in a car crash by the time the story begins. The narrator is grieving, and struggling in his job as an English professor, because he hasn’t come out with a second book that meets the standards of white readers. He receives notice that his estranged maternal grandfather left a plot of land for Malcolm to inherit when he turns eighteen. But because Malcolm’s gone, the land belongs to the narrator.
When he visits the plot of land, he realizes it is a former plantation, which makes him face his lineage on both his Black father’s side and his white mother’s side. This is the only Vercher novel where the protagonist’s parents are still together; although he is estranged from his grandfather, he is not estranged from his parents.
After confronting alcoholism and using prescription pills, the narrator writes a novel inspired by haunting sleep paralysis episodes. In these episodes, he receives ghostly visits from foxes, jellyfish, and his son. He is entrapped in the body of his slave-owning ancestor and witnesses the murder of an enslaved teenager that parallels that of his own teenage son. Two years later, the novel is published, and he visits the friends he made while in town near the plantation. During a poorly attended reading, news breaks that the remains of enslaved people are to be returned to their homes, away from predatory museums.
Near the end of the book, the narrator follows his Black father’s advice: “If your business takes you back to the beach, get out in the water again. Wade out deep. Maybe even swim. Find that place in yourself again where you were so brave you had to be rescued.” The narrator swims with a phantom version of his son at a younger age, and then he swims alone. “I went deeper and deeper, farther and farther. I was unafraid. Brave enough I’d need to be rescued.”
In a July 2024 conversation with author Chet’la Sabree—whose prose poetry collection Field Study provides the opening epigraph for Devil is Fine—Vercher says the inspiration for this story came when he and his family saw a plantation in a beach town in Delaware. He thought, “What would I do as a mixed-race Black man if I found out I owned a plantation?”
To appreciate John Vercher’s complete oeuvre of fiction, we have to appreciate what has remained throughout his work and what has shifted. What has remained is the impeccable deconstruction and analysis of Black biracial identity for male protagonists and how they intersect with different family dynamics. This deconstruction doesn’t require an unhappy ending. Vercher’s shift in his latest novel to a happy ending is important, because it gives the writer an opportunity to breathe. It gives Black readers of the author’s work an opportunity to breathe.
