The detestable sheriff of Uz

On April 14, 1935, a black blizzard blew through the American prairie. “The sun sank into a black cloud”, writes Karen Russell in her new novel, The Antidote. “Buried alive, at a shocking altitude, by the duster to end all dusters.” This dust storm – which will come to be known as “Black Sunday” – descends on the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, destroying crops, killing livestock and dashing the dreams of farmers already struggling in the aftermath of another notorious day – “Black Thursday”, which sparked the Great Depression. That’s Uz, not Oz, but the novel shares some elements with the 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s novel: the Dust Bowl setting, actual witches and sentient scarecrows, and a sense that a brighter, Technicolor world might be in reach for those who have the courage to grasp it.

With occasional forays into the minds of scarecrows and cats, this magic realist novel alternates between four narrators. The first is the most far out: Antonina Rossi, a “prairie witch” who goes by the nickname “the Antidote”. Witches like her have an unusual skill: they are able to store other people’s memories as if they were precious objects in safe deposit boxes. Whoever makes a deposit is alleviated of the burden, their eyes filled with “the dreamy namelessness of an infant”, until they make a withdrawal and the memory is restored. But the market crash of Black Thursday is mirrored by a memory crash on Black Sunday, when the Antidote realizes that all her deposits have vanished. Now, whenever someone wants to make a withdrawal, she has to invent a counterfeit.

The second narrator is Harp Oletsky, a farmer whose crops are miraculously spared from ruin, and the third is his niece, Asphodel, who assists the Antidote in her counterfeiting scheme. Asphodel is living with Harp following the murder of her mother, prey to the Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer – so named because of the signature object he leaves on the bodies of his victims. The killer was recently caught and was strapped into the electric chair on Black Sunday, only for the execution to be mysteriously botched. Now he awaits a second attempt. As we learn when a sheriff’s deputy makes a memory deposit, however, the man in jail is just a scapegoat. In order to clear the murders off his desk and win re-election, the sheriff of Uz planted rabbits’ feet on the victims himself and railroaded the accused through the justice system.

Our final narrator is Cleo Allfrey, a Black photographer travelling cross-country as part of the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to document the lives of farmers in order to promote New Deal initiatives. When she finds a beautiful Graflex camera in a pawn shop, something strange starts to happen: the pictures she develops don’t depict what she has photographed in Uz. Instead they display alternative political possibilities, utopias in which Indigenous people are still in command of the land, and Black and white families live in harmony. They also show the sheriff hiding the body of a victim and tampering with evidence.

Because we never get to know the accused killer, his fate isn’t of particular importance to the reader, but gradually it becomes the novel’s focal point. Our four narrators conspire to expose the sheriff by gathering the people of Uz together for an exhibition of Cleo’s photographs, at which Harp will deliver a speech. After withdrawing his father’s memory deposit from a witch who hasn’t “crashed”, Harp has come to realize how deeply implicated he is in the violent displacement of Indigenous people from the land. Like the accused killer, Indigenous people are oddly off stage in The Antidote, but they are meant to form its moral core. “This land is blowing because we stole it from the people who know how to care for it”, Harp tells the townsfolk. “We can see clearly what this system of ours produces: end-of-the-world weather and desecrated earth” – a message that seems particularly relevant today.

The author is correct in identifying the Depression era as a crucial inflection point in American history, when everyday people were earnestly drawn to alternative modes of social organization before capitalism steamrolled everything and foreclosed the political imagination. But her approach does not seem best suited to the subject matter. The magical elements imply that some supernatural force is taking a special interest in these characters and their fates. “Something else has other plans”, Cleo says of her magical photographs, as if God himself were teaching the characters an elaborate lesson, and seemingly there is always a magical scarecrow, or magical cat, or magically opportune rainfall to spare the characters from misfortune – a sense of special destiny that echoes the supreme, ultimately murderous arrogance of European settlers.

Setting aside the question of why this supernatural benefactor chose not to intervene on behalf of Indigenous people in the first place, there remains the matter of the magic offering reassurance when, in reality, nothing will save us but ourselves.

Michael LaPointe has written for the Atlantic and the New Yorker. His debut novel, The Creep, was published in 2021

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