The Fugitive in American Culture - Intro

Like so much in my life, the Grateful Dead defined this project for me. It came from my deep love for their music and from my identity as a Deadhead. The idea to write back stories based on the lyrics of their music came to me almost fully developed shortly after the assignment was made.

Just as a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, I wanted to choose three songs to represent the beginning, middle and end of my story cycle.

Considering the conventional fugitive motif of someone running to escape, two songs from the Dead’s repertoire were immediately obvious, while the third one took some deliberation before being decided upon.

The clear choices were Jack Straw and Friend of the Devil. Both of these songs have distinct fugitive themes written around the idea of escape.

Jack Straw has two characters, who are traveling together. One, Shannon, is obviously the bad guy. We don’t know much about Jack’s moral character, except he’s not very happy about the actions of his traveling partner. The song is full of ambiguity. We don’t know why they are traveling together. We don’t know what score Shannon wants to go to Tulsa to even. We don’t know why he hides under cover of darkness. The song continues the ambiguity to the end. Does Jack cut his buddy down, as in kill him, or does he cut him down after he is killed? The story I chose to write answers some of these questions and raises a few more. In particular, I leave open the question of what Jack does and where he goes after he buries Shannon but before he shows up in Reno at the start of the third story.

Friend of the Devil is also a song full of ambiguity. We don’t really know why the character is being chased by the sheriff and twenty hounds. We don’t know much about the character at all, except the name of the woman he loves and that there were at least two other women in his past. One of whom has possibly had his child. In the story I chose to write, we know why he is being chased, but nothing else is made any clearer about the lost time between the end of the second story and the beginning of the third. It does, however, clear up and create an additional mystery lingering from the first story, which is the fate of his sister, Suzy.

The choice of the third song was a more difficult decision. Several good candidates were considered and discarded. In the end, I decided to go with Loser. While there is no obvious fugitive theme, the strong ambiguity of it is the tie that links it thematically to the other two songs.

This song is obviously about someone trying to wheedle a stake out of a woman named Suzy, so he or she can gamble with it, sure they will win at the game this time. Perhaps they have done well in the past. Perhaps they are overconfident of their true ability to win. In the end, we are left to wonder whether the person wins or loses. This song was open ended enough to develop a story that could be about anything as long as gambling was the theme.

I created the fugitive theme in this story by having the main characters work for the Underground Railroad and spy for the Union during the war. When the story opens, the war has ended, their activities have been revealed and they feel it’s no longer safe for them to continue to live in the community in which they grew up. So, they become fugitives running from their past.

Choosing which order to present the songs and their stories was also a difficult decision, because at this point I wasn’t sure about what I was going to write. Eventually, I decided that Friend of the Devil seemed to have more of an air of finality to it than the other two, while Loser, with it’s more wide-open
interpretation could serve as the beginning song for the stories as well as a natural lead-in to Jack Straw.

From the beginning, I knew that Jack from the song Jack Straw would be the character I would carry through the three stories. I felt the ambiguity of his role in the song allowed me a lot of flexibility to write his character.

I attempted to highlight the ambiguity in these songs within the stories because I think that ambiguity is a strong theme that runs through any fugitive tale. In the case of fugitive slaves, for instance, ambiguity defined their existence. Slaves were sold off away from their families or ran away. In either case, often never heard from again. If they worked for an erratic owner, they might not know from day to day whether their actions would cause them to be threatened, shipped or sold.

A fugitive of any sort has a measure of ambiguity in their lives. If they are doing something illegal or are on the run, will they be caught? Who can they trust? If they are simply living outside of the norms of the dominant culture, will they be allowed to live in peace or will they be harassed by other members of society? Who is it safe to confide in? Who can they turn to for help?

The use of gambling as a leitmotif throughout the stories also gave me another type of fugitive theme to work with - that of gamblers being outside the usual norms and values of the rest of society. It also serves to show that people are often not what they seem and a fugitive can be anyone and anyone can become a fugitive under the right circumstances.


A minor device I employed , unrelated to the fugitive theme, was the use of ten gold dollars and the twenty dollar bill to represent good and bad. Because money is mentioned in each of these songs, I decided at some point in the writing process to use the money as a symbol throughout all the stories. Ten gold dollars is always handled by Suzy, and is used in a positive or, at least, neutral way, while twenty dollars, especially a twenty dollar bill, is used by Shannon, usually giving it to Jack. The scene at the end of the first story where Jack takes the twenty from Shannon and gives it to Suzy serves as a metaphor to sever the essential goodness of Jack and the tie between Jack and Suzy, in order to taint Jack with, and tie him to, Shannon’s corrupt nature. The use of twenty’s also serves to set Shannon up to represent the devil in the last story, while establishing Jack as the friend of the devil.