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Photo By Victoria Blewer
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Chris Bohjalian's The Buffalo Soldier is about an
African-American foster child living with a family in a
Vermont town.
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Travel plans change. The fact that author Chris Bohjalian faced a last-minute switch in hotels while on the road promoting the paperback release of The Buffalo Soldier is noteworthy only because it's so indicative of his writing style.
"My novels are pretty organic creations. I have no idea. The Buffalo Soldier didn't even begin with a little boy in it," Bohjalian says from a Boston hotel.
That boy, Alfred, is so integral to the novel's tale that it's hard to imagine The Buffalo Soldier without him. Alfred's presence enriches the novel beyond its initial conception of a "he said/she said" exploration of grief. Part of Bohjalian's primary ensemble of characters, Alfred is an African-American foster child who comes to live with Terry and Laura Sheldon after they lose their twin daughters in a flash flood, an event loosely based on a real experience in the Vermont town where Bohjalian lives.
"I was bicycling around the town, and you couldn't drive because the roads were gone. I had never in my life seen a gaping 40-foot chasm appear in the road overnight. I would probably say that within a month of that flood, I started writing that novel," he says.
But having never lost a child, even Bohjalian doesn't understand how he tapped into the grief needed to propel The Buffalo Soldier.
"I'm going to conjecture. But I know when I was writing Terry and Laura's meditations on grief, I found it very heavy sledding," he explains, pausing and noting the need for Alfred. "If only as a father, I wanted there to be some life in that book. Here suddenly was an opportunity for life."
Another key component to The Buffalo Soldier, and one that Bohjalian didn't preconceive, is a horse of a different color -- literally. It's more proof that his novels map their own course.
"When I was probably 80 or 90 pages into the book, one of the other characters, Paul Hebert, decided to get a horse. The horse suddenly became a vehicle -- no pun intended -- for Paul to teach Alfred a variety of life lessons. The horse also becomes one of Alfred's closest companions," Bohjalian explains.
As Alfred saddles up for the equestrian life, he also rides into the metaphor of the Buffalo Soldier as Paul imparts history lessons on the young boy. It enabled Bohjalian to focus on the present while imbuing an era that fascinates the author.
"The thing I love about the Buffalo Soldiers, as an amateur student of history, was black men in a white men's army. They were always the last troopers to get their winter gear and most of the time they were given the other division's cast-off horses. This is the moral of the stories, and yet they succeeded in every way imaginable," the author says.
As appropriate as his title is intended, it might also be misleading. When this is mentioned, it's easy to envision Bohjalian nodding in agreement.
"Many of my female readers would presume that this was a story about 19th-century cavalry battles. I also had concerns that people might think this would have something to do with Bob Marley," he says. "In any case, I simply decided to forge ahead despite some reservations that readers might steer clear of the novel because they didn't want to read about the Plains Indian War."
Titling his work is often more nerve-wracking and laborious than the writing process. Bohjalian admits he has never found a title that pleases him while playing to the masses. His biggest seller, Midwives, initially turned off potential male readers by its very name, despite the novel's murder trial setting.
"Maybe one of these days I'll figure out the perfect title to one of my books," he muses. And when it happens, it'll be another one of Bohjalian's organic creations.
CHRIS BOHJALIAN will sign and discuss The Buffalo Soldier at 7 p.m. Thursday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.
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