by Terry Kay
One particularly noteworthy feature of the former vision of the West (the Territory, the Swamp), of the imaginative idea of an ideal of America, is the desire for an egalitarian boundarylessness not only between the “haves” and the “have-nots” (the Highway 17 Gang and the Our Side Gang) but also between races. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Huck discovers a new frontier in interracial relations as he discovers his affection for Jim, the runaway slave. In The Year the Lights Came On Colin explores this same frontier as he discovers that “Willie Lee and Baptist were [his] friends.” If Huck finds something like a family relationship with Jim, from whom he learns much about human values, Colin bonds with Willie Lee and Baptist, who function as a loyal family for runaway Freeman Boyd and thereby demonstrate a lesson in human values. Similarly, whereas Huck learns of complexity by developing feelings, thoughts, and a conscience concerning Jim’s condition as a slave, Colin is introduced to complexity by Baptist.
Baptist counsels Colin and his friends, “there’s one thing you not learned about, and that’s people’s meanness. Mean? People are me-e-e-e-ean, boys.” That is a negative lesson introducing complexity into Colin’s world. A more positive lesson in complexity is expressed in Baptist’s statement about loyalty, “if it come down to a choice between takin’ up for Willie Lee or y’all in sayin’ that Willie Lee had helped him out, well, Freeman would take up for Willie Lee.” Stunned by the insight, Colin thinks, “We had never thought of a dilemma so complex, so threatening, so unsolvable.”
Whatever social bounds the Our Side Gang cannot cross in their own race until the coming of electricity, its members always transgress the equally imaginary borders between whites and blacks. They can do this in part because they have been marginalized by the Highway 17 Gang just as blacks have been marginalized by whites; they can do this in part because they are children whose imaginative unitive vision defies boundaries, even if (as it turns out) boundaries have some positive features. The Our Side children are like the half-bloods of the West who readily crossed the territorial, cultural, and mental borders separating white and Native American cultures, and who benefited as much as suffered from their own marginalized status in both cultures.
Willie Lee and Baptist doubtless suffer from their imprisonment behind the mind-forged social barriers white society uses to distance them, but they also benefit from such a partition by developing personal intracultural human values, loyalty, and bonding (huddling, so to speak). Kay’s book suggests that when the black community finally crosses the perimeters white perspectives have created for them, they might find, like Colin, that they have surrendered something in attaining access. Whether, like Colin, in retrospect Willie Lee and Baptist would feel that what has vanished was greater than what was achieved, is not something we can predict. We can only know what Colin, the narrator, has learned about falling into time: that nothing can endure, that one loses the dynamics of the prospective imagination, that with every gain there is necessarily a loss, and that every such loss might in retrospect seem more valuable than what has been gained.
Kay’s The Year the Lights Came On, like Clemens’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), at first seem to be books suffused with the glowing natural light of the youthful world evoked by their respective young narrators. But there are shadows everywhere. In each of these books, meanness, abuse, and death haunt the fringes of the narrative. Each of these artistic acts of retrospective imagination ends on a dark note emphasizing the loss of something valuable never again to be regained, something symbolized in the imaginary terrain of a West which is at once the idealistic promise of America and the prospective promise of each individual self. In Schaefer’s The Kean Land (1959), Ben Hammon, remembering when the Colorado land he stubbornly treasures once held visionary human value, in a sense speaks for all three writers when he describes this loss of the symbolic West: “Nobody to talk to. The kind of folks crowding in around here now aren’t interested in the old days. Too busy making money or trying to and tearing up and down that highway there in cars that aren’t ever full paid for because of always being turned in on new ones and worrying about meeting installments on all the billy-be-damned gadgets people think they have to have nowadays cluttering their houses and getting in the way of a decent living.”
After the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Clemens generally treats life in midwestern rustic villages (the Missourian Hannibal-St. Petersburg matter) more bleakly, including the finally pessimistic implications of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After the printing of First Blood (1953) and The Canyon (19S3), Schaefer emphasizes more than ever before loneliness, haunting, aging, and death in faded western frontier settlements. After the appearance of The Year the Lights Came On, Kay increasingly treats life in southern towns more desolately. Kay’s After Eli (1981) and Dark Thirty (1984) are very gloomy, if powerfully effective and memorable works with warranted violent endings. In After Eli the murderous villain, an impersonator caught in his dream of finding some legendary buried treasure, consistently sees himself as a predestined artist who uses his imagination and manipulates the imaginations of others, including the retrospective imagination of memory, for evil purposes—a very different conception of the role of imagination and dream than that in The Year the Lights Came On. As its title suggests, Dark Thirty is even more pessimistic in its exhibition of the tyranny of many kinds of violence over more creative uses of the imagination; depicted in this novel are “the complexities of [a] world” in metaphoric twilight; a world characterized by retardation and insanity as well as by the displacement of imaginative tradition and continuity; a world where human dignity necessitates the poetic (in lieu of the failed legal) justice of a “right answer,” including dire acts of countering violence—a very different sense of loss than that in The Year the Lights Came On.
Some of the darker features of Kay’s later novels could be forecast from his first novel, which suggests that even in Colin’s dream of reality there is meanness, abuse, and death, including the psychological loss which comes with the end of his dream, with his fall into time, and with the curtailment of the dynamics of the prospective imagination. But the extent to which Kay’s second and third books darken and even turn away from the consolations of retrospective imagination is a surprise, albeit neither factor lessens the artistic merits of his later fiction.
Perhaps finally, if one may speak oxymoronically, the dire philosophic bleakness of these two later books of Kay’s only highlights the scintillating insight and evocative poignancy of his first novel. The Year the Lights Come On, however neglected by literary critics, is an important, rich contribution to American literature. It is much more than a remarkably sensitive reminiscence of a child’s life in a rural town in Georgia in 1947. It is more than another excellent example of the regional thematic interests of latter-day southern American writers. A wonder-full romance, The Year the Lights Came On is a skillfully managed aesthetic statement about the nature of the imagination and its artful designs, a provocative work of art that is philosophically intellectual and, simultaneously, deeply felt, touchingly affective, and utterly unforgettable.
—University of Texas, Austin, 1989
READER’S GUIDE
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Year the Lights Came On is Terry Kay’s evocative tale of Colin Wynn, an twelve-year-old boy growing up in rural northeast Georgia. The year is 1947, and in Colin’s hometown of Emery, Route 17 divides the community into the haves and the have-nots—those with and without electricity. This boundary creates a common bond among Colin and the other members of the Our Side Gang in their frequent confrontations with their affluent neighbors, the Highway 17 Gang. But then the Rural Electrification Administration brings electricity to the homes of the less privileged and Colin boasts that the wires will “knit us into the fabric of the huge glittering costume, Earth.”
Drawing upon his own memories of growing up in Royston, Georgia, Kay follows Colin, his brothe
r Wesley, and their friends through fierce battles fought on the school playground, an exhilarating visit to the Brady Dasher Flying Circus, desperate attempts to throw a search party off the trail in the Black Pool Swamp, and gleeful celebrations when all-important baseball games are won.
With an array of characters like Rev. Bartholomew R. Bytheway, a reformed fertilizer salesman who operates the Speaking-In-Tongues Traveling Tent Tabernacle, and Freeman Boyd, a Georgian Huck Finn who knows the swamp as well as the other boys know their backyards, Terry Kay’s book draws a marvelously nuanced portrait of the rural South poised on the brink of change following World War II.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Kay is the author of nine novels, The Year the Lights Came On (1976), After Eli (1981), Dark Thirty (1984), To Vance with the White Dog (1991), Shadow Song (1997), The Runaway (1998), The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene (1999), Taking Lottie Home (2000), and The Valley of Light (2003). He is also the author of one collection of short essays, Special Kay: The Wisdom of Terry Kay, and To Whom the Angels Speak: A Story of the Christmas. In 2004 he was awarded both the Best Fiction Award from the Georgia Writers Association and the Townsend Prize for The Valley of Light, and in 2006 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Three of Kay’s novels—To Dance with the White Dog, The Runaway, and The Valley of Light—have been presented as Hallmark Hall of Fame movies. Kay lives in Athens, Georgia.
DISCUSSION POINTS
The Year the Lights Came On has been used in some history classes as supplemental reading in the study of the post–World War II period. Why?
In the closing of the book, the author contends that the coming of electricity to rural farms changed the way people lived. What does he mean by this?
All stories have contrast in them—good and evil, for example. What element in The Year the Lights Came On represents this contrast?
In the relationship between Colin and Megan, what is the greatest dilemma for Colin?
What does Freeman Boyd’s character represent in the story?
Kay’s novel is framed with geographical boundaries separating the Our Side Gang from the Highway 17 Gang. There are also many invisible and intangible boundaries such as certain social codes that divide class, gender, and race. Discuss.
Black Pool Swamp is something other than a boundary. Describe its role in the novel and what it represents.
In the epilogue, the narrator says, “We are easily deceived. The REA changed our lives. The REA made us more comfortable. The REA also destroyed us.” What does the REA mean, both literally and in terms of the changes it brought to rural America?
Discuss what aspects of life were better or worse before electrification.
What technologies are changing our lives today? Discuss technologies you’d like to live without versus those you think enhance your life.
