Milk White Steed

In Michael D. Kennedy’s debut work, he lays out ten short stories that all center around those who have come from the Caribbean — the Indies, as several characters say — to England. While he varies the color palette from one story to the next, making them clearly stand out from one another, a through-line of oppression and alienation holds this collection together, revealing the challenges of those who have sought to emigrate in the 20th and 21st centuries.

One of the most striking things in Kennedy’s book is the bright colors he employs to the stories off from each other. Even while simply skimming through the book, it’s easy to see if one is in “Green Men” or “Yellow Bird Blues” or “Milk White Steed,” which is primarily red, as opposed to the first two, where the title matches the color scheme. Kennedy also draws on animal imagery throughout, and pulls from Caribbean mythology, whether it's a duppy (a ghost or spirit), a loup-garou, of sorts (a werewolf) or Anansi, the spider who is cunning and wise, and often a symbol of rebellion. Kennedy’s artistic style also shifts, sometimes within stories, moving from silhouettes that appear more like woodcuts to panels that seem quickly sketched with minimal details. often when he uses a page full of small panels, while pages with only one to four panels offer more detailed, realistic drawings, especially of people.

All of the stories feature characters struggling to fit into the dominant culture, leading to feelings of isolation. For example, in a brief story called simply, “Duke Ellington on Mars,” the jazz legend walks around Mars performing basic human actions, such as eating dinner or walking to a job while carrying a briefcase, but, given that he’s the only human on Mars, he is consistently alone. In each panel, his facial expression reveals a dejected, forlorn figure who realizes his alienation. On the next-to-last page, he makes the only comment in the story, “‘Go to Mars’ they said! ‘Bring jazz to Mars’ they said!” Notably, he never plays any music, revealing how he has lost who he truly is, much like those who emigrate to another country are often unable to be their true selves.

Kennedy sets up the theme of the collection with a two-page story called “Inglan.” In it, a Black man sits up in a trash can and picks a newspaper up off the ground. He looks at the paper and comments, “Chronic! Same old story.” Then, after dropping the newspaper, he declares, “England is a bitch.” The rest of the collection shows, literally and metaphorically, how those who don’t fit the dominant racial makeup of England — those who are Black, primarily — struggle to succeed or even survive, but receive only abuse and alienation.

A background of oppression runs throughout the stories, especially the white supremacy characters face when they arrive in the UK. In “Duppy Town,” which takes place in North Birmingham in the 1980s, the main character walks down an alleyway with a sign in the background that reads “No Black, No Irish, No Dogs.” Standing in front of the sign is a white man who appears to be a skinhead, though that’s not quite clear. A feeling of menace, however, comes through abundantly. In “Green Men,” a green man travels to Coventry (the Midlands) in the 1950s to sell apples for use in ciders. On the boat, he thinks about the snow that must have fallen on boats that took enslaved people from the Caribbean to the UK, and he compares it to the nuclear fallout that the Japanese people would have seen. He even thinks that “the whole of the West Indies” could see snow if President Truman dropped a bomb on the islands and then occupied them, implying the threat that always hangs over smaller countries that places like the U.S. and U.K. saw as pawns in the Cold War and other conflicts.

Kennedy sets one story, “Yellow Bird Blues” (a callback perhaps to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper) in the United States — Louisiana in the 1920s — and draws on the blues tradition to explore the lack of freedom for women, especially Black women. Here, a woman wants to be a blues singer, wants the success of somebody like Josephine Baker, but her husband leaves to go on the road playing music instead. She finds out that he has other women in other towns, while she stays at home suffering in a house with mold. It might ultimately kill her, or she might shift into a radio or an alien-looking being or both, before ultimately becoming a bird. She tells the story of her Nana who “lived and died on the same planation. She died a week before the Union soldiers came to emancipate her.” By the end, the woman sees through the supposed freedom even somebody like Baker had. She refuses “to be Josephine, eating caviar and dancing every night for the same people that hobbled us. Shackled us. I am a yellow bird now, a Haitian bird, high up. Free.” It’s telling that Kennedy sets this story in the 1920s, given that white women had just received the right to vote in the U.S., but women of color still couldn't in many states. Also, the Haitian revolution is one that terrified white Americans, as a group of people who had been enslaved showed they were capable of overthrowing their enslavers and establishing a viable government.

There’s also overt racism in “Green Men” when the main character overhears a group talking about the recent influx of migrants from the Caribbean. Kennedy is referencing the 1948 British Nationality Act that gave citizenship to everybody who had been the subject of a British colony. Between the passage of that law and 1970, almost half a million people emigrated from the Caribbean to the U.K., later referred to as the Windrush generation. The Green Man in the story hears people making comments such as, “We’ve just won a bloody war and now they want us to take in these … things!” and “It won’t be long before they begin sailing to the coast in their little steel drum rowboats” and “Time to kick these animals back to the Indies. Both of them.” Not surprisingly, the Green Man is unable to sell any apples to pubs or brewers, leading to failure, at least according to his father. Kennedy use of a “Green Man,” which traditionally represents rebirth in England, is ironic, given that the Green Man in his story isn't given any sort of second chance.

In “Giddy Up Duppy,” Kennedy explores police violence towards children through an almost surrealistic story. Cowboy is a child that moves through the town and goes missing, but the main focus of the story is on some sort of shape-shifting werewolf that moves through water lines. He finds Cowboy lying on the ground beside a police car where one of the officers is shaking his fist at the boy. The animal comments, “A young cowboy! Knocked down in his stride!" The final page of the story hints that Cowboy’s ghost haunts the town, startling dogs and babies, and riding the werewolf. The implication is that the death of children like Cowboy, whether directly killed by the police or indirectly by the state, haunts the immigrant community, as well as the city and country at large.

In “Milk White Steed,” the main character sees someone sitting on a bus who looks like he’s wearing the white hood of a KKK member. While it turns out to be a Black man in a hoodie, it nevertheless serves as a reminder of how white supremacy has seeped throughout the culture. That character also sees the police subdue what looks like a large woman, with four officers on top of her, and her face down in the ground. The main character stands and thinks about doing or saying something, but stays passive, echoing George Floyd’s murder. Meanwhile, a Black man walks up and says, “Excessive use of force by police on Black people. Brutality against Black people. Against minorities. Unnecessary force!” before walking off again.

Kennedy draws on possible autobiographical elements in “Red Snapper in the Rea,” a surrealistic story about Kenny, who is isolated from childhood after his father dies, leaving him alone with his mother. Unlike his mother, however, he is unable to handle the abuse they receive with stoicism. He tries to deal with the realities of his situation through both science fiction and whiskey, which his father referred to as "medicine." He marries Hagar, a Marxist, and tries to craft a life as a writer, using sci-fi tropes to talk about racism and oppression.

Kenny's life, however, seems to merge with his a childish drawing his son did of a “snapper man.” This odd looking caricature, also a writer, encounters pro-Brexit, fascist graffiti, not to mention negative reviews of his work from U.S. critics. When Kennedy returns to Kenny, he talks about the government wanting to send him back to the West Indies, a clear reference to the Windrush generation, though the story ends before that could happen. While Kenny is not a direct stand-in for Kennedy, the similarity in their names suggests a connection. Kennedy draws from postmodern elements here – a pastiche of folklore and other genres – and questions the power structures behind the oppression people face everyday.

There are similar autobiographical elements in the titular “Milk White Steed.” The androgynous main character describes himself as having an Irish nose, but also a “foreign nose.” Kennedy comes from Irish and Caribbean heritage, leading him to feel simultaneously included and excluded. Similarly, when the main character is on the bus, they overhear a phone conversation where a woman describes having to ride the bus because “a half caste” pushed a pregnant woman onto the subway tracks. The clear focus here is on the woman’s racist language, while also shows no sympathy for the victim, focusing solely on the inconvenience to her. The main character also seems to struggle with self-hate, given a remark just a few pages later where they wonder what their mother would have done, before concluding, “She’d start by aborting the useless sack of shit in her belly. What have I just said?” The character clearly struggles with their racial identity and how they live in a liminal state,  not accepted in either community.

Kennedy is a writer who embraces a variety of genres. Some could dismiss his work using similar terminology as the Snapper Man's American critics did. However, doing so would also mean they would be ignoring the book's larger themes of racism, immigration, and system oppression. Kennedy has serious messages he wants to convey, but he uses the variety of visual and verbal elements in this collection to provide readers with numerous ways to access them. He’s clear, but not didactic; he’s inventive, but not obscure; he’s angry, but not polemical.

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