A Nice, Provocative Silence
Eighth and Olive, looking east, in St. Louis, Missouri, 1925. [St. Louis Public Library]
Francis Spufford is the author of nine books, many of which are historical novels. Red Plenty, published in 2010, enters an alternate historical timeline in which advanced computer programing allowed the USSR’s planned economy to produce a viable but imperfect alternative to free market capitalism. 2016’s Golden Hill follows a secret history in which abolitionists attempt a mass liberation of American slaves, and in 2021’s Light Perpetual, Spufford explores a timeline in which a horrific World War II Blitz bombing never occurred. The novel follows the lives of children who did not die in the V2 missile blast.
Cahokia Jazz, released in early 2024, is a noir crime novel set in an alternative version of St. Louis, Missouri. In Spufford’s novel, the ancient Native American city of Cahokia, famous for its giant earthen mounds, never vanished in 1400, instead thriving due to his slight shift in the timeline of smallpox immunity. By the Roaring Twenties, when the book begins, the city is a noir parallel of St. Louis governed by Indigenous Mississippians, and is the fourth largest city in the United States. The book is set at the end of the city’s boom years.
In the real world, St. Louis entered a century-long slide around the 1910s. This city was dominated by highways, fierce segregation, and white flight suburbanization, but Spufford’s Cahokia plays by different rules. It’s not subservient to the United States or dominated by a white European elite. But the future of this Indigenous metropolis hinges on a gruesome murder that Detective Joe Barrow must solve.
Spufford’s career started in nonfiction, and his fiction has developed as an exploration of historical counterfactuals, spinning out alternate timelines that shadow our reality, showing it slant. What changes in the historical record is sometimes positive: the magnitude of a genocide is decreased, a rocket goes this way instead of that, collectivization is given better tools to create equal societies. But Spufford’s worlds are far from utopias.
We spoke via Zoom in July 2024. Spufford had this to say of optimism in his counterfactual worlds:
I think there is a good philosophical argument for saying that historical explanations tend to turn on an implied counterfactual. The reason why thing X happened is because you can spell out the reason why the other thing didn’t happen. So, they have this strangely respectable secret life in philosophy.
But counterfactuals also have this lovely and gaudy popular existence as a way to play games with history. They provide a tool — a good, non-abstract one — for provoking emotion as well as ideas, lending us a way to explore the structures of history and why things came out the way the way they did.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
Do you think that the world of Cahokia Jazz is an optimistic timeline?
It’s tricky for me to say that the counterfactual I’m exploring is more optimistic because obviously in some ways it is. It’s a world that partially reverses Jim Crow in at least a couple of places. It’s much richer in the representation of Indigenous people, who were pushed to the margins in our real world.
You tell these types of stories in order to explore the absence of things in ordinary history. For every optimistic step it takes away from reality, you’re also reminded of the ways in which reality was inadequate and disappointing. For example, the genre includes not just The Man in the High Castle, but also Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, whose excellent noir plot was popular and delightful, but also a very thoughtful exploration of the Holocaust. That book had only half of the bad things that happened in Europe in the 1940s happen. It was a bad thing, but not nearly as bad. Hence a Yiddish speaking community in Alaska.
Chabon has a lovely piece of writing in which he talks about having discovered this fusty old Yiddish phrase book full of useful phrases like, “Please show your passport,” in Yiddish. Or “direct me to the Minister of the Interior.” Yet there’s never been a political unit that spoke Yiddish or had a Yiddish Minister of the Interior. To imagine it otherwise is partly to engage in a kind of roundabout reflection on the absence of those things in real history.
In that novel, the point of wishing away the Holocaust is that there was the Holocaust. You can’t wish it away. It actually happened. You can only find wishful-seeming ways of exploring what happened. It’s optimistic on the face of it, but possibly a bit gloomier underneath.
Was Chabon’s Yiddish phrase book part of the inspiration for the Indigenous vocabulary that you adapted in Cahokia Jazz?
I love his Yiddish book, yes, and I wanted to do something which was as pleasure-giving as well as secretly serious. However, Yiddish is a real language with real speakers. I knew that I needed linguistic difference to make my imagined 1920s Cahokia. You need it in there because it’s part of the grain. It’s a place that has to be strange enough to resist being known.
But I am a white British guy. I’m not going to mess around with spoken Native American languages, which I am certainly not a native of. The language I used wasn’t made-up from scratch, because that would also be embarrassing. You would be treating Native Americans as if they were Tolkien elves or something. Really not right. I needed something with actual history to it, which wasn’t current, and I found Mobilian Trade Jargon. Or enough sufficiently-reconstructed Mobilian Jargon so I could produce the illusion of a language.
Also a trade language is a lingua franca for different Native American nations to talk to each other up and down the Mississippi. Then, gradually, it’s used to talk to Spanish, French, and English-speaking colonists.
Turns out that the vocabulary you need to do all those things is the vocabulary you need for a noir crime novel. It’s heavy on family, relationships, money, and violence. It’s a lot of, “I don’t feel too good,” and, “Are you my friend?” and that kind of thing. All you have to do is to is to add a trench coat and a fedora, and it’s good to go.
One of the confounding things about Cahokia is that there’s almost no verbal or written tradition of what happened there, or why it was abandoned. It’s sort of a mystery in the archaeological record. Was that what first drew you to the subject matter?
Yes, there’s something about a nice, provocative, silence. Especially if you are a writer with a certain amount of cheek to wonder what might fit into that silent space.
Cahokia is such a potent contradiction of some lazy ways of understanding North American Native history. It defies the idea that the landscape which settlers found was “natural.” In fact, it was a post-plague landscape, and in some ways post-apocalyptic. There is this big blank about why it went away, and where it went wrong. There are ecological explanations which seemed quite likely — that it was due to the exhaustion of that bottom land [from growing crops on the same land every year] in an area with a large population. Meanwhile the river keeps moving around.
But there are also interesting anthropological possibilities — culturally complex explanations that have more to do with the corrosion of labor and early state building. It takes an awful lot of human labor to build an earth pyramid the size of Monk’s Mound. A lot of not-very-happy people. So, it could well be that it was an experiment in extractive power, which was not very much enjoyed by those who were compelled to participate in it, and that they scattered with enormous relief and thankfulness when the experiment was over.
In the book, I needed to devise some form of Indigenous state building that would be strong enough, and organized enough. It had to have the aid of outside sponsorship, and some technology transfer to resist, and then disrupt, the westward expansion of European America.
So I was aware that I was filling the big silence with something calculated to be narratively productive. I was, in some ways, cheating. I posited a city that people wanted to live in and that that would survive with the affection and loyalty of its citizens. I gave it Jesuits, and therefore a kind of sponsorship from Catholic Europe and gunsmiths good and early. And I gave it leadership with a slightly unrealistic kind of political genius. Generation after generation, the leadership played a weak hand really, really, well.
The Mississippi River confluence, with the Ohio and Missouri meeting around St. Louis, is primo real estate that we sort of take for granted today. How did you investigate the region?
I wrote the book during lockdown, at the heights of the Covid pandemic, and I could only use the world of satellite observation until I’d nearly finished. So, there was an awful lot of looking at maps and photographs. I was looking through a telescope across the continents, hoping I was getting it right until one really, really cold day in February when I saw it firsthand. I was the only visitor in the Cahokia Visitor’s Center that day. The guide kindly followed me around from exhibit to exhibit explaining things.
I knew intellectually how cold it gets in the Midwest in winter, but I was still dressed for European winter. So I moved fast. Especially when I got to the top of Monk’s Mound there. You’re getting the wind and little crumbs of snow. Horizontal hail. But it was still fantastic, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I had this fundamental spatial question in my head about the imagined layout of the of the city in the book, and when I got to the top of the big mound, and looked around, it worked very well for me. I could get a kind of ghostly overlay of the of the imaginary city. Thank heavens it worked. It was a phenomenal relief.
In the novel, the Ku Klux Klan accuses Cahokia of being a communist state; a planned society. It’s sort of a conspiracy that reminded me of Red Plenty. How did your interest in ownership mix with Indigenous cultures?
One of the most interesting kind of alignments of a society is what it does with the issue of property. You can generate enormous differences between real and imaginary societies just by tweaking the rules of how people possess the place.
A Native American society strong enough to resist European Americans would probably have a fundamental need to conserve the collective ownership of land. At the same time, they would need to be able to model the modernity of the 1920s. So, you’d need land available for your river ports, and your railroad, and your meatpackers.
In the novel — and I hope got this right — there is a fundamental aspect of Native American culture that see land as inalienable. It’s more of a Georgist system, or some freaky early 20th century kind of set-up where everything is leased but held by the government. You don’t have to demonstrate that it’s actually viable, you just have to sketch it out and go.
I think communism is another European description for some locally derived thing in Cahokia Jazz, but it’s the 1920s. They’ve just had the Red Scare, and there is the Red Army fighting in Alaska rather than the Bering Strait.
I imagined that you would get Friedrich Engels to come and pay a visit to Cahokia in the 1870s to check it out. European leftists would come along and be excited by Cahokia, and it would have taken on various different kinds of protective coloring. But the political economy of Cahokia would stop looking like communism, and would start looking different during the McCarthy Era, in some immensely American process.
This reminds me of Mark Fisher’s quote about the trouble we have imagining a future outside of capitalism. You include an Ursula Le Guin Easter egg. Is there a connection between utopias and historical fiction?
History is the great motherlode where futures are to be found. Ken MacLeod, a Scottish Marxist — a weird Marxist science fiction writer — strongly believes that historical fiction and science fiction are the same thing. They’re kind of isomorphic mutations of each other. In both cases the world and how it works is more the point than in most kinds of storytelling.
In other words, you imagine your way into the past, and you imagine your way into the future in fundamentally the same conceptual operation. And there’s a question of whether this novel is a utopia. I mean, I’ve called it an “ambiguous utopia,” at various points, which is a phrase lifted from Ursula Le Guin.
It certainly has some utopian elements. There’s a fallen noir quality to most of its human interactions, which keeps the utopia ambiguous. It suggests that even the cause of virtue has some extremely dirty back-office dealings required to sustain it. But I’m hoping it actually makes the hope more credible rather than less. So as far as I’m concerned, the noir aspect actually supports the utopian.
Speaking of noir, what kind of crime fiction inspired Cahokia Jazz? Did you grow up reading who-done-its?
I read Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, and watched a lot of films. I’m old enough to come from the era where, if it was on TV that night, you watched it. Therefore, my noir film vocabulary is kind of random. It misses some really obvious things. I’ve never seen Double Indemnity, for example, because it just didn’t happen to be on.
I grew up with the with the pleasures on the page of that first-generation mass-market storytelling. Raymond Chandler has an intensely romantic version of noir, which has its own its own pleasures. But Philip Marlowe is basically a kind of a knight in a shining trench coat. He may talk simple, but he isn’t. Whereas when Hammett writes Red Harvest, it’s a grimly functional anatomy of how a gangster town is run, including various components that all feed on each other.
I probably should have read Ross MacDonald, but to be honest, the stuff I’ve enjoyed is more like noir-inflected speculative fiction than actual full-on genre noir. For example, I admire the work China Miéville, and the strangely-excellent Disco Elysium video game. Disco Elysium is set in an imaginary country and it has a drunk detective. It’s up to you whether he saves the day or not. And you can keep him drunk for the entire game if you’re sadistic enough.
There’s a match between noir and alternative history. It’s no accident that that The Man in the High Castle has a crime-shaped plot. Or that The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a noir because, among other things, crime writing is a fabulous vehicle for the exploration of societies.
What makes detective fiction so fitting for that exploration?
A detective is a licensed asker of questions to everybody. A detective has more social range than any ordinary inhabitant of a society, because detectives go from gutters to palaces and back again, pursuing their case wherever it leads. So, a crime novel is a version of the kind of the social novel where somebody’s got a license to talk to absolutely everybody.
Also, the detective doesn’t know something by definition. So, the detective is a custodian of the reader, who also does not know something. The gradual development of enlightenment by the detective produces the gradual development of enlightenment for the reader.
If you’re talking about the investigating of a city, the reader may not know which actually exists. Not everyone has been to Omaha, for example. If your mystery is set in the Emerald City of Oz, where nobody has been, then the detective creates knowledge where there was none. There is something about going from not-knowing to knowing which fits beautifully with the crime form — social reach and endless curiosity.
There is also something about the outside investigator that’s appealing. The detective has a role no matter how corrupt he or she may be. When it comes down to it, the detective is never only driven by the demands of the society they’re in. There’s always something else there. They are always acting to make the world legible.
You mentioned in an interview with Slate that the detective format was difficult like a good puzzle. What kind of issues were you running into frequently? What was the most frustrating aspect?
I like to play with forms, but the detective novel is an immensely tight form compared to some others. It’s more like writing a sonnet than it is like writing a piece of free verse.
It took me a while, when I began, to understand that that all of the parts had to depend on each other. I got about 40 pages in, and realized that I was running out of road.
I was given the useful advice by China Miéville that you write your scenes on cards. Then you shuffle them endlessly, or until you’ve got a coherent structure. Adding extra scenes where necessary and taking out scenes which, no matter however beloved they are, turn out to not work.
Miéville is also not a crime writer, but wrote The City and The City, which is a fabulous conceptual noir. When I was talking to him, he said that the detective stuff really has to work. You can’t just wish it into existence. Half the plot has happened before page one. The setup of the crime and all of the relationships that led to the crime must have already happened. At the point in which you come on the scene to deal with it, there is forward movement through the rest of the book in which the crime gets detected, and everything that happened before page one is revealed. It’s like narrating a whole book by just looking at the second half. This did not come naturally to me and required quite a lot of finicky adjustment and endless reshuffling of my cards.
There was a whole historical substructure, which couldn’t appear on the page, that had to be looked at as well. I have a few books that are more-or-less complete 17th, 18th, and 19th century histories of Cahokia. That’s how I know the wars whose victories are inscribed on the monument that detective Barrow climbs up with the nun.
I needed to know [these details] so that every now and again, when they came into sight, I would know what to refer to. The research was a big deal, but the best single book was probably Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America. I borrowed a real slave escape story from it and gave it to the speakeasy keeper’s grandfather, who escaped from his plantation.
There are things I had not understood about the economics of slavery. In a wide-open landscape, you wouldn’t be able to keep a population in place. To make your cash crop, unfree labor is a horribly-rational bit of capitalist extraction. If you want to grow cotton on the Mississippi, you’re really not going to get free white labor willing to do it for you. That implies a form of economic motive for a whole society willing to police the movement of African Americans, and prevent your workforce from doing what they dearly long to do, which is fly away.
St. Louis’ history is a fascinating mix of sort-of Southern culture, but on the edge of the Union during the war. Even the physical shape of the city now is influenced by the kind of the ethnic history that comes from demolishing most of the downtown. No disrespect to St. Louis, but in my controversial opinion, that was a bit of an error. I’ve never been somewhere with so little life in its supposed center.
We got problems. Is that what drew you to St. Louis in the 1920s?
I was partly setting the book in the ’20s because it gave me a neat century before the time of writing, and it gave me jazz, which was particularly good for St. Louis, as well as its imaginary counterpart.
Also the 1920s is an attractive era in the history of American cities. Modernity is here, but not yet complete domination by the car. I reluctantly admitted the occasional Model T. It’s mostly an electrical modernity with street cars and big steel frame buildings.
There is still a sort of enchanted architecture with both Art Nouveau and Art Deco. The looks of American cities from that period look like a place expecting a magical future. Great stained glass and fabulous mosaics. There’s a “world of tomorrow” element woven through the fabric of early ’20s, and if you’re going to do an alternative history, then it ought to be a city like that.
