Johnnie-Ray Knox and The Hope in the Future

In the last post, I wrote about the mother and son in P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout who finally see the monstrous effects of racism on an individual at the end of the novel. I taught Clark’s Ring Shout in my Multiethnic American Literature course a few weeks ago, and we followed up Clark’s novella with David Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene’s Bitter Root, a comics series that has numerous parallels with Ring Shout. I don’t have time, or space, to discuss those similarities here; instead, I want to focus on this post on Johnnie-Ray Knox, the white boy from Mississippi that assists the Sangeryes in Bitter Root, specifically his death at the end of issue #10 when Adro impales him through the chest.

John Jennings contacted me in early in 2020 to write a backmatter essay for Bitter Root, and of course I jumped at the chance to do it. For my essay, I focused on Johnnie-Ray Knox’s role within the series, specifically on his movement from some who could easily get sucked down by the roots of racism that attempted to strangle him to the Sangeryes’ ally in their fight against the Jinoo and hate. That essay appeared in issue #10, so I had no clue, when I wrote it, that Johnnie-Ray would die at the end of the second story arc. When I read that issue, those pages gutted me, notably Greene’s illustrations and the silhouetted panels where we see Johnnie-Ray impaled on Adro’s…