Editor’s Note

John M. Burbage, publisher of Evening Post Books, sat down to discuss The Bicycle Man with author Bob Deans. Their relationship reaches back four decades, when Burbage was metro editor for The Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston, and Deans was a cub reporter there. Excerpts from their conversation follow.

Burbage: What, in a nutshell, is The Bicycle Man all about?
Deans: It’s a story about promise and friendship and heartache and reckoning, both in the life of a boy and the life of the nation. One kind of mirrors the other. It’s set on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. It begins in April 1968, on the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. It ends in September 1969, the day Ho Chi Minh died in Hanoi.

Burbage: Interesting bookends.
Deans: Those months are among the most momentous in American history. King’s assassination sparked massive riots. Then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Richard Nixon was elected president. We put a man on the Moon. Woodstock.

And, of course, we had half a million Americans fighting in Vietnam, where 1,400 GIs were being killed every month. We were losing, every three months, about as many troops as we’ve lost in 17 years in Iraq. That war touched everyone. It changed the country.

Burbage: Why did you write this book?
Deans: I wrote an essay in 1999, recalling what it was like to be riding a bicycle with a broken spoke and delivering papers with that epic headline, “Man Walks on Moon,” three decades before. And it occurred to me there was a rich story to be told there, about boyhood in a simpler time, but also about the country itself, and that chapter in our national journey, which was, obviously, anything but simple.

Burbage: Who is Sandy Rivers, the main character?
Deans: Sandy is a paperboy. Thirteen years old when the story begins, he’s very proud to have his first real job. He’s thrilled to be entrusted with a paper route. And, while he doesn’t really see it, delivering his papers each morning becomes a kind of hero’s journey that takes him into the troubled heart of a country that’s torn by social and political ferment.

All of this touches Sandy, through the papers he delivers and through snippets of conversation with others. And so he becomes, in the story, a kind of metaphor for a country going through its own adolescent struggles with a troubled past, blind spots and a kind of misplaced belief in its own might, political infallibility and delusions of righteous omnipotence.

We now know where, by the early 1970s, that all led. At the time, though, we’re trying to figure it out, as a nation, without a script. So, too, very much, for Sandy.

Burbage: Who is the Bicycle Man, the title character?
Deans: Sandy has no idea at first, and neither does the reader. He’s an older man who appears one morning in darkness on a bicycle he’s pieced together from spare parts and makeshift components. He’s resourceful and uses his imagination to make ends meet.

Without giving it away, he shocks Sandy by treating him very differently from what Sandy fears and even feels he deserves. That causes a shift in how Sandy might otherwise have experienced the man. It opens the door to a connection neither one of them expects.

That sets the table for the older man, over time, to offer Sandy a unique perspective. It’s not always wise. It’s not always welcome. But it challenges the boy and he grows from that.

Burbage: Where does the Bicycle Man come from?
Deans: He has a kind of elder status in Skinquarter, an African American community separated from Sandy’s paper route by a thin forest of bamboo, intentionally planted, we learn early on, for that specific purpose. It’s an artificial barrier meant to keep two worlds apart and unfamiliar with each other. That separation, and the ignorance and misunderstanding it perpetuates, breaks down in the face of authentic human connection. That’s really the only way it breaks down – then or now.

That’s the story, really. It’s about unexpected connections that can bend the arc of our lives and shape our very identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we are, what we do and why we matter.

Burbage: Tell us about Hope.
Deans: Hope is a girl Sandy meets at cotillion, on a night when things really don’t go quite as planned – for anyone, really. They inhabit different worlds that somehow keep intersecting. When they do, Sandy finds himself way over his head.

Hope has two older brothers and she’s a little bit tougher, as a person, than Sandy. A little bit more worldly. A little sharper edged. She knows things - about the river, the fields, the ways of animals – and she has her feet beneath her in a way that makes Sandy feel perpetually off balance. He tries hard to keep up with her, but she’s ever a couple steps ahead of him. He’s pretty much completely lost.

Burbage: The book includes several Sunday sermons and a pair of eulogies. Why?
Deans: The story is set in the South.

Burbage: Explain.
Deans: So much of our culture is grounded in the Bible, from stories we’re told as children about the life of Jesus, to epic sagas rooted in Revelations. And a huge part of our national story is narrated from the pulpit. It’s a literature of faith.

Those sermons we listen to, those eulogies we hear, are formative. They’re foundational. They help to forge many of our deepest beliefs about where we come from, what’s expected of us and how we fit into the larger world, the larger cosmos.

Remember, in 1968, the United States was pitted in what many viewed as an existential Cold War with the Soviet Union – Godless Communists with nuclear arms. That played itself out in the space race and, oftentimes, in church.

Burbage: How does all that impact Sandy?
Deans: There are two preachers, black and white, who feature prominently in the book. Sandy takes their words onboard. If not entirely sacred, they’reinspired, he believes, by something true and pure. He carries that with him. He reflects on it. He finds strength in it when he’s frightened.

Most of the story takes place outdoors, a lot of it in near darkness informed as much by sound as sight. Sandy’s world is full of natural wonder, fleeting beauty and mystery unexplained. That’s Biblical. To Sandy, it’s holy.

And so, when words he hears from the pulpit, or hymns he sings in the sanctuary, connect with something he’s experiencing or trying to figure out, the spiritual becomes substance. It sets his life in a larger context, a kind of moral order. And, it’s like radio. There has to be some moral field of force in order for that field to be disturbed in a way that can carry a signal. We can’t tune in to what’s troubling to Sandy, or understand exactly why, without some glimpse of that order and its origins.

Burbage: The story takes place in the late 1960s, long before cell phones and the internet. And it’s clearly a very different time for the country, which, today, seems to be more and more divided, in part by social media.

Deans: The Bicycle Man recalls an era when the daily paper was a kind of cultural totem we all touched each morning. It started us out more or less on the same page. The nightly news put us to bed with a common story. And top-40 radio had us singing, as a nation, from the same sheet of music.

Those were powerful forces for unity. They pulled us together, as a nation. They reminded us how much we shared in common.

In some ways, though, that unity was an illusion. It was a media narrative dominated by white men, some great editors and reporters, no doubt, producing a lot of great journalism.

The problem was that minority groups, African Americans and others, were largely missing from the story. Their voices, their perspectives, were just begin- ning to be heard, most often in times of conflict and trauma. We weren’t as united as it may have appeared. In the story, the cracks are beginning to show.

Burbage: How does that present itself in the book?
Deans: For Sandy, those voices that seldom surface in the pages of his newspaper break through in ordinary places that take on extraordinary meaning. The vacant lot where he picked up his newspapers before dawn. The narrow footpath through a bamboo thicket along a honeysuckle swamp. The old graveyard behind the Skinquarter A.M.E. Church. Crossing places, as Sandy sees them at one point, where chance encounters can bring different worlds together. The Bicycle Man, himself, is the embodiment of all that.

Sandy also encounters people who are embracing change, and others who are rejecting it. What he’s experiencing, one-to-one you might say, echoes, on a personal level, what was happening across the country and what, in many ways, is happening today.

Burbage: And yet, reading this story, there does seem to be something about trusted sources of news: the morning paper, Walter Cronkite. That feels very different from where we are today, with everybody throwing out opinions, conspiracy theories, invective and even falsehood. Is there something here that’s been lost?

Deans: We’re at risk, in some ways, of losing the idea of trusted sources of news. We’re looking, instead, to reliable sources of agreement, sources that reinforce our world view, rather than inform it in the way that enables our thinking to evolve. That stunts us, as people and as a society. It impedes progress. It’s one reason we’re so divided as a nation.

Disagreement doesn’t have to mean division. In a functioning democracy, people find ways to disagree and still get along, to compromise and make progress, to vest faith, not in an outcome, but in a process, even when we don’t get everything we want, because we know we’ll get to come back and try again next time.

All that gets poisoned when the only way we know to disagree with someone is to demonize and disparage and delegitimize them. It puts every conversation on contested footing in an all-or-nothing fight. That leaves no room for common ground. And common ground – those interests, aspirations and values we share – is where real unity takes root.

Burbage: What does The Bicycle Man show us about the difference be- tween where we were, just a generation ago, and where we are now? Deans: It’s about accountability. That’s basic, and its essential in a democracy. What we see in Sandy’s world, right from the start, is an emphasis on account- ability. Sandy gets held to account. He experiences forgiveness. He gets a second chance. But he’s made to experience shame because he’s hurt other people, he’s disappointed other people. He sees other paperboys get held to account. Leaders get called out – from the pulpit, no less.

And the newspaper is held to account. Care is taken. Corrections are made. Credibility is the coin of the realm because readers won’t tolerate being lied to and the newspaper is a pillar of the community, on par with our independent courts, our elected leaders and lawmakers. That’s what it means to be the fourth estate. Sandy is reminded of all that, not only when he delivers his papers, but when he sneaks off into the pressroom and sees the massive machinery, a city block long, that produces the paper each day. That’s capital. That’s real. People’s jobs are at stake. You don’t put all that at risk by reporting falsehood that undermines your authority, misleads readers and opens you up to a libel suit. Sandy feels the weight of that, literally and figuratively when he hoists a bundle of papers into his basket and when he tosses a paper and watches it land on a porch.

Burbage: What’s the lesson for us today?
Deans: That democracy without accountability is farce. We’re living in a moment when some online sites, social media, and cable news outlets have blurred the distinction between opinion and fact. With people unsure where to go for the truth, our leaders can traffic in falsehood, distort the real impact of their actions and leave the rest of us in the dark, cowering in our partisan corners.

That won’t work. It will break our democracy. In some ways, it’s breaking now. Government by the consent of the governed means we, as citizens, must hold our leaders to account – for what they do, or fail to do, on our behalf. Reward them when they do the right thing and make them pay a price when they don’t, confident in our ability to know the difference between the two.

That’s why we can’t separate the quality of our democracy from the qual- ity of the information we take in. In the book, we see Sandy learning that for himself, one story, one conversation, one headline at a time.

Burbage: Is he trying to tell us we were better off before?
Deans: My generation thought the internet would deliver us from falsehood and free our minds in a great open air market where only the best ideas would flourish. Instead, it has destroyed hundreds of newspapers without replacing them with anything remotely comparable to what they once provided.

Papers in small towns and rural America, especially, have been gutted, leaving behind vast news deserts where people struggle to find out what’s going on in their own communities. I think Sandy’s telling us we haven’t begun to grasp, as a nation, the magnitude of what we’re losing.

Burbage: How do we turn it around?
Deans: We have to be more discerning as consumers of news. Support news sources that tell us the truth, and stop squandering our civic inheritance on those that don’t.

I’m optimistic we’ll get this right. What gives me hope is the great journalism that’s being published, in print and online, by national papers like The New York Times, The Washington Post and a few others, as well as committed local papers, like The Post & Courier in Charleston and The Times-Dispatch in Richmond.

The printing press had five good centuries. The internet’s, what, 30 years old? There’s time to fix this. But we can’t afford to keep losing ground.

Burbage: What do you hope readers will take away from this story? Deans: Fiction gives us all the chance to participate in a part of the human experience we might otherwise miss.

I hope younger readers, who know of this period from their history books, will experience it through the eyes of someone going through the same growing pains every teenager knows firsthand.

And I hope readers of my generation, those who grew up in the ’60s, the ’70s, will reflect back on the ways this period played itself out in our own lives and how it shaped the people, and the nation, we’ve become.

Burbage: What did you take away from writing this book?
Deans: It had me asking questions about how I processed the events of that period. How did those events influence me? What lessons did I take from them at the time? What mistakes did I make? What did I do that might have hurt someone else? How might I do things differently, if only in my heart, the second time around?

Burbage: What was your biggest surprise, in writing the story?
Deans: I thought I was writing about community. I assumed the characters would get along with each other. That’s not always how it turned out.