The Name of the Roe's: The Seven Trumpets

A SOLDIER'S STORY COMES TO CHESTERFIELD

In 1982, the Negro playwright, Charles Fuller, would win a Pulitzer prize for the "black Billy Budd", his story about Captain Davenport, a very rare Negro officer, in the U.S. Army of the 1940s, definitely the first that most troops at Fort Neal, in Tinan, Louisiana, had ever seen, but also a JAG officer and Howard Law School graduate who had arrived on special assignment from Washington to investigate the murder of Sergeant Waters, and growing up just across the river from Manhattan, with parents who still went on "dates", one not an option fringe independent, one of only about 13% of Negro males who even holds a baccalaureate degree, and "ain't really black", in the ultra progressive, "Black Lives Matter Sign Bigger than the Cross atop the Steeple Church" Arlington, Virginia, actually remembers the Playbill. But far more are probably familiar with the early film opportunity in 1984 for actors like Denzel Washington, pairing up with Broadway's Ragtime star, Howard Rollins, Jr. (television's Detective Virgil Tibbs, reviving the role of Sidney Poitier for television sitcom audiences watching the series In the Heat of the Night), and comedic actor who has not yet matched the success of Volodymyr Zalensky, Robert Townsend, in the movie filmed at Fort Chafee, Arkansas, and Clarendon, Louisiana: A Soldier's Story, a drama about to be reimagined as a soldier goes south to Chesterfield to solve a murder in Old Virginny. Ain't they ever seen a Negro who wasn't an attorney?

Some view A Soldier's Play as a plagiarized Billy Budd, the book formerly required reading at Washington & Lee University for Professor Stephen Todd Lowry's Business Law course offering in the "C School" department of economics, but any person familiar with narrative storytelling, like a literature or drama major, knows that most murder mysteries, like In the Name of the Rose, are simply a formulaic repetition and variation of a basic plot outline, all the same story, just with different characters, and one could just as easily describe Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose as the Italian Billy Budd, which Wikipedia actually does not do.

So now imagine, in the New South of former Dixiecrats who now hold loyal Negroes on their plantation, in a town with the first female Commonwealth Attorney, but a Republican, pairing up with "the darker Trump" of Arlington, Virginia, to solve the murder of a Negro clergyman who, before COVID-19, had been famous in the Democrat Party for his opposition to the battle flag of Northern Virginia, which many describe inaccurately as "the Confederate Flag." Now imagine them pairing up in a murder story about the murder of a faith leader aligned with the far more conservative Pentacostal denomination.

Now imagine a murder story mystery that would put two conservatives in collusion to resolve a murder that would implicate a former Democrat Virginia Governor famous for his choice of costumes in medical school at parties in a drama where the epitome of Christian Democrats, the "man for others", who has driven with his wife for over 30 years from their home on Confederate Circle to attend "black church", albeit a formerly segregated parish established in Richmond, is the "good friend" of the decedent, and his widow who happened to come into unexpected fortune during the pandemic, upon the death of her husband, apparently qualifying for a black female veteran owned business loan sponsored by the Small Business Administration as a part of COVID-19 relief programs, and the largest recipient of such entitlements in North Chesterfield, twice the amount of the average loan.

If you thought people forgot the science in a pandemic, just wait for the evolving science of homicide investigation.