By Mike Templeton
The opioid crisis that hit Cincinnati took some of its highest tolls in the historically urban Appalachian neighborhoods. Lower Price Hill was hit hard by opioid addiction and its attendant problems, and still reels from the impact of the crisis. The availability of drug and alcohol treatment helps, of course, but it remains insufficient for the needs of these and other neighborhoods. Most of the issues that surround drug use and addiction go back decades in the United States, and Cincinnati has never been immune to these things. Long-time associate and friend of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, Michael Henson, has long been involved with helping people struggling with addiction and recovery. Going back to his employment in the East End when that was a mostly Appalachian neighborhood to more recent work with Jimmy Heath House, Henson knows these issues and problems well. He has channeled some of this experience through his creative talents for his latest novel, Secure the Shadow, published by Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press.
One feature of Michael Henson’s novel Secure the Shadow that works beautifully in depicting the contemporary city and serves as an expanded metaphor for the novel is each chapter’s opening with a series of photographs. We do not actually see the photographs except through the descriptions provided, but each one sparks off the page as if we are looking at a visual image. Chapter Five opens with an abrupt list: “A SERIES OF black-and-white photographs: A congregation of winos stands at a street corner against a gray background haze of buildings and streets.”
This brief introduction encourages us to look at the next set of images in a specific way, but what follows complicates whatever our bias toward a gathering of winos might be by offering this description: “They stand in a circle, five of them. At the center, one holds out his palm. Another points; he appears to be counting coins. The others stand watch. From the serious and studied looks on their faces, they might be a group of Socratics, Talmudists, researchers at a university.” Not exactly the stereotype of a group of winos. The novel works with this kind of back and forth in which the toll of drugs, urban decay, and the fraying of social life play out through the lives of a collection of characters whose paths cross, or almost cross, within a mid-sized city of the 1990s, a time that had begun to allow people the old-time freedom to be entirely on their own to starve or die on the street.
Henson has a long history of tackling subjects like addiction and the struggles of contemporary urban life. Going all the back to Maggie Boylen, Henson’s stark form of realism provides us with glimpses of impossible circumstances and powerful images of humanity. Michael Henson’s writing has long been immersed in the social and political without ever using the terms “social” or “political.” One of the notable ways Henson’s style works with force in Secure the Shadow is the way the city itself seems a living unnamed character where its “tiny neighborhood streets were so complicated” as they lead us past “its hive of abandoned buildings.” These mysterious spaces allow characters to emerge and disappear in precisely the ways the anonymous faces we see every day in any city seem to come and go, taking on the form of familiarity while always retaining the reality of being unknown and distant.
As contrast to the dynamic life of the city, there are the photographs; static moments forever frozen which in one sense tell us everything about the subject of the photograph, but at the same time reveal absolutely nothing precisely because the image is a frozen fragment of a life in motion. This give and take between the ever-changing and the static is mirrored in Henson’s use of language. One character’s take on people in general is delivered in the sing-song style of the street: “But I don’t care. I’m for everybody. It don’t make me no difference. People is all the same to me, Black, White, Brown, whatever. It’s all the same. Knowmsain?”
Whereas the horrifying reality of a drive-by shooting is delivered in a stilted snapshot of speech because the moment itself is a sliver of the uncontainable movement within which life itself unfolds: “It was that girl who . . . It’s all that gang-related . . .Wasn’t he the one that . . .It must have been a drive-by . . .” Henson places the frame of the image around the object while he releases the movement of life itself with the play of language. In this way, he can present that which defies presentation.
When I checked in with Michael Henson, he said he was working on some stories and poems, playing music and getting ready for a few gigs, but not much else. If you know Michael Henson, you know he is not much of a talker. I suspect his list of activities is a bit of an understatement. At any rate, his latest novel speaks volumes. Members and associates of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition have a long history of supporting addiction recovery efforts in our Appalachian Communities and in greater Cincinnati in general. That some of us are bringing creative work to these efforts supports the efforts to assist people and communities living with addiction.
Michael Henson’s Secure the Shadow is available through Swallow Press/Ohio University Press at this link: https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780804012355/secure-the-shadow/.
Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, forthcoming from Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.