Allegory in Two Works by Stephen King

Stephen King wrote the Green Mile, except that I only saw the movie. But I did recently read a short story he wrote called, Ayana. The stories are similar in that unlikely characters have an incredible power to remove serious illness from other people. In the movie, it is a large black man who cures a (white) man's urinary tract infection, heals a woman dying of cancer and saves a mouse from an untimely demise. The short story's title is the name of a small, blind black girl whose kiss of the narrator's dying father immediately brings recovery.

I can imagine that Stephen King chose black people as the medium for transmitting miracles because most whites had no trouble imagining blacks as having a mystery about them. There was, and to an extent still is, a separation between life as experienced by whites and that experienced by black folk. Therefore, it becomes natural to consider something not known well in a fanciful way.

But I also see his choice as part of an allegory that matches the societal intention to squeeze the members of the black race of their lives. That discriminatory laws, customs and implementations existed is not in dispute. What carried further beyond a legal framework was a willingness to not only discount the experience of black life but to also descend into a repudiation of its existence.

An act like this is fundamentally violent, but when it is transposed into literature the focus is on the life-giving aspect rather than the taking away of it. This is natural when written from the perspective of the economically dominant race. It is not entirely untrue, but it does downplay the diminishing aspect to the giving up of life. And it completely ignores the devastating impact of this discount when cast upon one people by another.

I have no idea if this perspective captures what the author had in mind when writing these tales. But I do think it is reflective of a theme played out in our society and when it is expressed as literature the portrayal is of beneficence rather than exploitation. I see this differed rendering as symbolic of a societal cleft that may or may not have been the author's intent to depict.