The Loneliness of the Larger-Than-Life Black Athlete

THE INCREDIBLY HUMAN HENSON BLAYZE, by Derrick Barnes

“We also have to focus on ourselves, because at the end of the day, we’re human, too.” This quote from the Black Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles serves as an epigraph to a new yarn by the award-winning children’s author Derrick Barnes.

“The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze,” Barnes’s first middle grade novel, speaks in simple, straightforward prose. Its setting is the small, fictional, “glorious town of Great Mountain, Mississippi.” This tiny bijou of a place makes up for its size with tall tales about mystical roots buried beneath its red clay ground (stories within the story, relayed in the manner of traditional Southern folktales) and a few larger-than-life residents.

One of Great Mountain’s biggest personas belongs to the novel’s protagonist, the 13-year-old Black football star Henson Blayze. Not only can young Henson sprint as fast as “a bolt of Mississippi lightning,” he is bright, empathetic and handsome to boot. And though he’ll be entering eighth grade at the start of the school year, he’ll be playing on the high school team.

Henson has cast an especially strong spell over the town’s mostly white inhabitants — adults and children alike — who idolize him in the desperate way many Black athletes experience:

When the students finished their work, they then stood in the open space between their seats … and recited what they had written. Most if not all of the poems were about Henson leading the Midnight Marauders to the first undefeated season in the school’s history. They mused about his height, his muscles and his place in Great Mountain history.

Legend has it that Henson comes from a long line of near-perfect Blayzes, going back practically to the town’s founding. Great Mountain boasts a few other prominent Black families as well, all noble and exceptionally earnest. At times, I was reminded of “A Prairie Home Companion”’s Lake Wobegon, where “all the children are above average.”

The town’s white citizens don’t measure up when it comes to moral enlightenment. After a vicious racist attack forces Henson to choose between what he loves and what is right, most of Great Mountain turns explosively against him, prompting much soul-searching on the part of Henson and his gentle father, Deacon Blayze (who has a story of his own to tell).

Henson’s love interest, the preternaturally mature middle school activist Freida St. Louis, warns him, “Watch the company that you keep, even teammates. All of them boys don’t mean you any good.”

The budding adoration between Freida and Henson is one of the novel’s sweeter elements. Children’s literature doesn’t often feature wholesome middle school courtships between young people who look like them and live where they live, so I found this refreshing.

Not enough middle grade novels with Black protagonists are set in rural parts either, and also deal with important social justice themes, as this one does.

Noteworthy exceptions are Christopher Paul Curtis’s “Elijah of Buxton,” Sharon M. Draper’s “Stella by Starlight” and the legendary Virginia Hamilton’s excellent “M.C. Higgins, the Great,” which won the National Book Award back in 1975 and was the first Newbery Medal winner by a Black writer.

In his author’s note, Barnes mentions that the 2014 police killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice (who was playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park) “unfortunately” provided the context he needed for the wider world in which Henson Blayze and his fabled town would exist: “It will forever trouble me,” Barnes writes, “to know that [the officer] saw no value in that boy, that son, that brother.”

While some of the events in Barnes’s novel are fantastical, they’re creative balm for the violence African Americans face. We deserve a break, and in many ways “The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze” is a fulfillment of wishes.

The book suffers from some weaknesses. Its first two-thirds would benefit from tighter plotting, and several characters and situations lack complexity and nuance. But it finds its heart when it focuses on the otherwise reticent Henson’s candid relationship with Freida. In one instance, he confesses to her his disenchantment with Great Mountain: “Aren’t you tired of seeing this red clay? Feeling these hot, dusty Mississippi summers? … Dealing with the same kind of people who don’t appreciate you, act like they don’t like you? The smallness of everything?”

African American athletes have always struggled with the counterbalance of idolization and abuse — from the 19th-century proto-superstar Frank Hart to Wilma Rudolph, Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Muhammad Ali, John Carlos, Tommie Smith (with whom Barnes co-wrote the wonderful graphic memoir “Victory. Stand!”), Colin Kaepernick, Simone Biles and countless others who still manage to conjure both magic and hatred in too many imaginations.

Young Henson is no “magical Negro,” as Freida, referring to the old cultural trope, suggests that the town’s white sports fans believe. Even so, as his story races toward its almost biblical conclusion, it takes on the tone of magical realism.

After the book is closed, it leaves behind a glimmer of enchantment. Better than the sum of its parts, “Henson Blayze” is a memorable read — particularly its final act. As one character says of Henson, “He ain’t of this world, and that’s the honest to God truth.”

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