The Violin Conspiracy

One of Ray’s strongest core values that keeps him afloat throughout the events of the novel is respect for others and for oneself. This is something that he learns from his grandmother at a young age and that helps him make sense of a world in which he is constantly disrespected because of his race. When Ray tells her of his experience at his wedding performance, his grandmother doesn’t try to shield him from the truth: “It’s an ugly part of life but that’s how things are. Probably how they will always be” (63). She teaches him that the way to overcome these obstacles isn’t to ignore or deny them, but to rise above them by embracing respect as a fundamental tenet of life. Ray first puts this idea into practice shortly after when he goes to have his violin repaired for the first time and is treated with disdain: “A familiar feeling washed over Ray. He remembered what Grandma Nora said about respect” (81). Even though he can’t change the man who’s looking down on him, he emerges from the experience knowing that he honored himself and his grandmother through his actions. Slocumb hence presents the mantra of respect as a family heirloom that aids Ray like the violin. This both relates to questions of inheritance that surface in the discussion about reparations in the 60 Minutes interview and emphasizes the intergenerational scope of a present-day story.

Ray carries this belief with him throughout the novel, using it as a source of personal strength to navigate difficult situations. The idea of “respect” as an inherited mantra is reinforced in the fact that this theme is explored explicitly when Ray encounters the Marks siblings—Ray’s “family are actually owed much more by [the Marks] family” (220). In his first in-person experience with the Marks siblings, Ray is able to find that strength within himself to overcome his fear in a seemingly impossible situation. In another instance, however, he is pushed past his limit and instead becomes what other people see him as: angry and aggressive. This scene recalls sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois’s influential idea of “double-consciousness” as a Black person in America: “a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2007 [1903]). Despite the injustice of his predicament, Slocumb presents Ray acknowledging a lapse of judgment: “He kept saying to himself that one word over and over, his mantra: respect. No matter what. He’d gone overboard with the Markses. Now he just had to get out of this situation before it escalated further, became Baton Rouge all over again” (228). The concept of respect is presented as a survival method in, and a stark juxtaposition of, a racist system.

Toward the end of the novel, Slocumb enhances this core theme through the voice of Ray’s grandmother as a child, and the voice of her grandfather, in the letter that Leon dictated to her many decades ago. At the start of the letter, young Nora writes that she “disrespekt” a neighbor (301) and was being told Leon’s story as a learning experience. The letter is distinctive from the rest of the text because of its language and structure, as well as its vivid descriptions of trauma and violence. Leon closes his dictation by saying, “Even tho [the enslaver] did all that I still lookt him in the eye and treetd him with respekt. No mattr how mad I was. No mattr how bad things got. I was always respektfl. Even when I didnt get no respekt” (305). This shows that Grandma Nora absorbed this tenet from an early age and passed it on to Ray, reinforcing the inherited nature of this mantra.