Author Feature: Beaird Glover and His Book Unconscious Knowledge
Unconscious Knowledge is the story of Marcy Harris, who grew up in a troubled family, alienated from her peers. She took a job at a hospital cafeteria, and the monotony was killing her. Then, on Christmas Day, she met Syd McComb, a jet-cool punk rocker recently returned from a ten-year stent in Mexico, and Syd looked like all the trouble she was dying to get into. Together they were like dynamite, and once the fuse was lit, they vented their frustrations with style, took vengeance where it was due and stayed one step ahead of the disgraced cop who was seething to catch them. And they did not feel guilty doing any of it, because bad people should die—that’s just unconscious knowledge.
EXERPT (chapter one):
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September 12, 1960
Yalahoma Township, Mississippi
Sixteen-year-old Blaine Gunnison propped his bike against a telephone pole at the edge of town, across the tracks from his home. He was big for his age and when he pulled back the hood of his sweatshirt, a blaze of red hair caught the light. He surveyed the basketball court with netless rims, the last man-made thing before the city dump and the backwater. Litton Shaw was the only one there, shooting free throws and scooping rebounds off the backboard. A few months earlier, Elvis had returned from Germany and he was on the charts between Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” called from every window. The world’s population had just topped three billion and thirty-five hundred troops had been allocated to a brewing conflict in Vietnam. The U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in 1954, but the state of Mississippi mostly disregarded that suggestion. Yalahoma Township was an odd exception to the rule— it desegregated only four years after the Supreme Court ordered that they had to do so.
Litton Shaw was the only African-American on the formerly all-white high school basketball team and he and Blaine were teammates in their senior year. Litton was the center and Blaine the point guard. Blaine had disguised himself to come across the tracks and now peeled out of his dark gloves and dropped them by his bike. Litton did not know he was there until Blaine leapt past him and snatched a rebound off the rim.
“What are you doing here?” Litton said.
“It’s a free country.” Blaine spun the ball on his index finger. Both of them stood over six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds.
“Free for you to come to my side of the tracks. Not so much, the other way around.”
“Baby steps, Shaw. You’re in the white high school, on the white basketball team. Come on. Things are looking up, right?”
Blaine passed the ball with backwards English so strong it smacked the concrete in front of Litton’s feet and bounced straight up into his hands.“You’re the best guy on the team, Shaw. I know it. Coach Wallace knows it. Everybody knows it. Coach wants state so bad, he might have gotten the school desegregated just so you could play on our team. What do you think about that?”
“I think it’s bull shit.”
“Maybe, but I’ve got a good feeling about you. I can come over here, to your side of town. I’ll practice with you every day if you want to. Do you want to win state bad enough to practice every day?”
“I do practice every day.”
“I do too. If we practice every day together … who knows?”
“I’ll be here.” Litton threw the ball back at Blaine, calling his bluff. “Did you come over here to teach me how to play?”
Blaine dribbled around him to point position and Litton bent his knees, ready to stuff it down Blaine’s throat if he tried to shoot. “Go ahead, Gunnison, do it!”
Blaine bounced the ball and palmed it like it was stuck to his hand. “You know what, Shaw? Why don’t you call a play.”
Litton straightened up and put his hands on his hips, rolled his eyes. “Is that a rhetorical question? … Because I’m the center. Centers don’t call plays.”
Blaine spun the ball from one finger to the next and kept a steady gaze on Litton’s eyes. “What if they did? What if you did? You think you can read the defense well enough to call the play?”
“Sometimes.”
“Bull shit. I know you can. How about this: tell me where you’re going. We can work on some signals, and I’ll feed you the ball— not where you are, but where you’re going to be.”
“I can do that.” Litton held his hands up, like he was anticipating the pass straight to him. “This means alley-oop, now!” Litton sprang backwards and the ball sailed into his fingers in perfect time for the dunk. It was more magical than either of them had expected. “Nice assist,” Litton said.
“They don’t call me the Gun for nothing.”
“They call you the Gun because you averaged forty points a game your freshman year.”
“Well, that too. But you’re going to average forty points a game this year. We both will. We’ll make up moves so smooth, our mommas won’t even know us.”
“Ha! You cain’t fool my momma.” Litton tossed the ball back to Blaine.
“You know what I mean.”
“Okay, Gunnison. Let’s do it.”
Blaine kept his eyes on Litton and dribbled with a keen sense for exactly where the ball would be. “Show me another one, Shaw. You call it.”
They won the state championship that year, and won that game with a half court alley-oop that Blaine threw Litton just before the buzzer rang. When Litton slammed it, the whole gymnasium went wild and Blaine gave him all the credit.
Black boys weren’t really allowed to be friends with white boys back then, but after that game, something changed in Yalahoma. And when Litton rode his bike across the tracks to Blaine’s house, he smiled and waved to white people, and white people were glad he did.
About The Author
Beaird Glover grew up feral on the mean streets of Obion, Tennessee. Switchblade mumbly-peg was his sport. Raising Hell the only religion he ever knew.
Beaten, abandoned and left for dead in a back-alley dumpster at the age of five, Glover survived on maggots and slimy lettuce until he could claw his way through the garbage and step out into the world again. He slept in a hole behind the city dump and sucked marrow from chicken wings, sharpened his teeth on the bones. He was growing stronger every day, but the stressors of kindergarten were too much.
He took to the bottle and became an alcoholic, was addicted to heroin and crystal meth before first grade. He smoked three packs of Marlboro reds a day. Of these early years, Glover says, “I only had one life to live, and by God, I was going to live it.”
As a teenager he drifted down to New Orleans, where he was lucky to be employed on a fishing boat, right outside the Delacroix. There he met the love of his life Kim Martin, who plucked him out of the muck and brought him back from the edge. He had lost himself in Hoodoo, Satanism and heavy metal music, was one breath away from selling his soul to the devil, at the crossroads.
Glover is much less ferocious now—in fact he is virtually a recluse. When cornered, he growls illusive about his past and evasive about his future, but he and Kim are happily married and they live in a proper house with two beautiful cats.
Still haunted by his darker days, it is only through his writing that Glover interacts with outsiders. The close and savvy reader will divine his ghosts and cheer his deliverance as revealed in the pages of Unconscious Knowledge—from the tumble-down shack where he made his first home and the inferno it became, to life on the lam and finding happiness. And love. And the will to keep on trucking.
