ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601190095
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY LANA WHITED
DEAD OPPOSITE: The Lives and Loss of Two American Boys. By Geoffrey Douglas. Henry Holt, 1995. $22.50.
In front of a New Haven church in February 1991, a white, affluent Yale student was shot dead by a 16-year-old black gang member. The reason, according to Geoffrey Douglas, is that the life of one boy was of no consequence to the other. Dead Opposite is a book about two families' dreams: one working to get their children into New Haven, the other struggling to get theirs out.
Douglas could not have happened upon a more sympathetic (or aptly named) victim: Christian Prince, the blond, good-looking, athletic, well-liked baby of an affluent family of Yale graduates in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. The boy convicted of murdering this Prince is Duncan Fleming, like his victim the youngest of three children, who, according to Douglas, "joined a gang at thirteen, got high every chance he had ... saw his first killing at ten years old, had sex before he was 12," and had previously been shot himself.
Douglas's intent is neither sociological nor rhetorical, but, as he says, to tell a "story ... about parents and sons." Though he describes himself as a "filter" for this story, he admits that his own life is much more like Christian Prince's than Duncan Fleming's.
There are at least two ironies in Douglas's attempt. The foremost is that his portrayal of the Fleming family is the far more "real" of the two. The Princes are the prototypical affluent family, and the only one who takes on dimension is mother Sally, who, after Christian's death, wanders zombie-like from bedroom to bedroom at night, looking for her son. Despite their subsistence on disability checks with three generations under one roof, the Flemings are far from a stereotypical welfare family. In fact, before diabetes forced Jim Fleming's resignation from a career as security chief for a drugstore chain, the family's income was nearly $30,000. But when his health declined, Fleming's dream of moving the family back to a safer South Carolina was replaced by visions of a lottery jackpot. Throughout, Douglas describes Duncan Fleming's family and their socioeconomic transition with feeling. (The decline of Douglas' own family, chronicled in his first book, "Class: The Wreckage of an American Family," may have contributed to his sensitivity.)
The other irony is that despite the "Dead Opposite" framework, Douglas ultimately argues that Prince and Fleming were fundamentally alike: all boys look to their families, especially their fathers, for values and meaning, and money - by its presence or absence - shapes all our lives. When a Christian Prince is slain by a Duncan Fleming on a prestigious university campus, poverty and hopelessness are everybody's problems. To insist, as Douglas does, that this is not a sociological parable is to miss the point of Christian Prince's death.
Lana Whited teaches English and journalism at Ferrum College.
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