Abstract

The entrance to a story is not moral pondering, grand emotion, or even legal theory, but detail and small event. The small event that began "Snap" occurred five years ago, about the time I was abandoning traditional legal scholarship to write stories.It was late summer. In the heated snarl of weekend traffic, I witnessed the driver of a pick-up truck terrorize an old lady in a shiny sedan: He rode close to her tail, then raced ahead, honked insistently,then swerved in and out of lanes only to pull back in ahead of her and stomp on his brakes. He was young. They were both white. A few months later, I sat down to write a story about the young man. A punk, I thought, the angry white man stripped of his historic privileges of race and gender. The path through the hidden door of this small event, however, led me to Snap, the young man who worked at the gas station where the old woman turned for help. Snap took over. The story became about a character who is often forgotten in the discourses of feminist and critical race theory, the young white man, as yet untouched by the rage of misogyny or the shame of race hatred.