Alternate Histories: An Alternate History
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz, Scribner (2024)
Reviewed by Joel Harold Tannenbaum
At the beginning of Cahokia Jazz, Detective “Indian” Joe Barrow is called to a grisly murder scene on the roof of a downtown building. The building houses the offices of something called the Land Trust. The victim, an employee of said Land Trust, appears to have been ritually murdered, with his heart removed and fragments of an obsidian blade buried in his now-empty chest cavity. It is 1922 and the downtown in question is downtown Cahokia, a densely populated multiethnic city-state on the banks of the Missouri River.
In our world, Cahokia is the name assigned by archaeologists to the remains of the largest pre-Columbian society in North America. We know frustratingly little about this Cahokia. This is partly because it went into severe decline centuries before European explorers set foot in the area, and partly because it does not appear to have had a written language. In the universe of Cahokia Jazz, however, it is something different and much greater: an indigenous urban center that has survived and thrived well into the twentieth century, joining the union decades before 1922, when the entirety of novel takes place. Cahokia Jazz is immediately recognizable as a work of alternate history.
Alternate histories are typically based on a single, clear, “What if?” What if the Nazis had developed the A-bomb first, asks Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle (1962), the Ur-text of modern alternate histories. What if Martin Luther had been awarded the papacy rather than excommunicated, asks Kingsley Amis’ The Alteration (1976). What if Charles Lindbergh had run against—and defeated—Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, asks Philip Roth in The Plot Against America (2004).
The answer is inevitably “Things would have been very different.” This is both the strength and weakness of alternate history as a narrative conceit. By showing us a profoundly different present (or recent past, or future), authors can make the case for the unique importance of particular events. For Dick, it’s the bomb. For Amis, the Reformation. But for Francis Spufford, in his ambitious alternate history, Cahokia Jazz, the central “what if” remains a bit of a mystery for a good long while.
It is not surprising that Francis Spufford would begin his first attempt at alternate history by bending and stretching the rules of the form. A successful memoirist and essayist, Spufford is best known by some for Red Plenty (2010), a series of fictional vignettes dramatizing the lives of the Soviet economists, scientists and planners who attempted, with limited success, to implement Nikita Khrushchev’s plans to liberalize the Soviet economy in the 1950s and 1960s. Intercut with lengthy—and fascinating—digressions on Russian economic history, it does not so much blur the line between novel and monograph as disregard it. To others, Spufford is best known as the author of Unapologetic (2012), a Christian rebuttal to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) that raised eyebrows for its use of blistering profanity. As he does with other styles of writing, Spufford will have his way with the alternate history.
It makes sense to assume that the “what if” of Cahokia Jazz is “What if Cahokia (as understood by archaeologists) had survived until the time of European contact?” Such an assumption would be wrong. The Cahokia of Cahokia Jazz was founded, Aeneid-style, by Aztec nobility fleeing the fall of Tenochtitlan in the early sixteenth century, built upon whatever was left of the actual Cahokia. It has evolved into a massive city-state, one that unifies much of indigenous America east of the Rockies. Cahokia in the 1920s is highly industrialized, Catholic (Thanks, Jesuits!), and has absorbed much of the immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe that would have otherwise gone to Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, etc.
This Cahokia has not prevented the development of an independent United States, but it has considerably altered the path of western expansion in the nineteenth century, before itself being absorbed into the union as a state, a sort of California on the Mississippi (the actual California is still an independent entity). There is also an independent Mormon republic. But wait, there’s more. Mississippi began as an independent outpost of the formerly enslaved but has recently, like Cahokia, joined the union. Oh, and the White Russians are holed up in Alaska, not unlike the KMT in 1950s Taiwan. Quite a lot is different in the world, and North America, thanks to Cahokia. Some things even appear to be, dare we say, better.
The United States, as a whole, is also very different, and as Cahokia Jazz proceeds, one comes to suspect that is Spufford’s central point. With Cahokia having welcomed in so many of Europe’s unwanted Catholics and Jews, much of the rest of the United States looks more like Canada–demographically, anyway. Politically, the Ku Klux Klan is ascendant. It is so ascendant, in fact, that it is has even established a foothold among Cahokia’s small white Protestant population and is making quite a bit of trouble for the city-state’s ruling class (a hereditary nobility who reign indirectly, as elected politicians, CEOs and ecclesiastical authorities).
This setting for the murder is important. Cahokia may have renounced aristocratic rule and legal, taxable alcohol sales (It’s the 1920s, remember?), but it has retained an important feature of its pre-statehood economy: Land cannot be bought and sold in Cahokia, only leased through the Land Trust, a public office. (Students of American history may recognize some parallels here with the Kingdom of Hawaii). The murder victim in question is a low-ranking white employee of the Land Trust and, we quickly learn, a paid-up member of the Ku Klux Klan. Who killed this guy? Is the ritualistic aspect for real, or a crude hoax? And what on earth was a Klansman doing working a menial office job in the heart of Cahokia’s indigenous establishment?
Cahokia Jazz, is very deliberately noir, a crime novel in the style of Hammett and Chandler. This is a matter of genre aesthetics–there are plenty of cigarettes, dark streets, and dirty fighting–but also more: Spufford appears to take very seriously Jean-Patrick Manchette’s admonition that the crime novel, especially the political crime novel (the néo-polar, in Manchette’s own language) is “moral literature.” We know this because Joe Barrow is a deeply troubled and conflicted soul, and the central conflicts of Cahokia Jazz take place as much in his head as in the streets of the titular city as he and his weathered–and increasingly erratic–partner, Phineas Drummond, navigate Cahokia’s criminal underworld, elite haunts, and everything in-between, attempting to identify the murderers and bring them to justice quickly, as sensational accounts of the crime in the local tabloid press bring the city’s nascent tensions to a boiling point. Whatever opinion one may form of the novel by its end, if one does not leave it feeling a deep empathy for Barrow and his plight, one has some looking in the mirror to do.
Barrow’s plight is this: abandoned as an infant in rural, midwestern America, raised in an orphanage, scarred by his military experience, and socially marginalized by his half-caste status, he has found his way to Cahokia, the one place in the United States where he can more or less blend in. Law enforcement is a job, not a vocation for Barrow. He is a gifted jazz pianist who lives in a guesthouse affixed to a speakeasy, where he occasionally performs. It is his fellow, mostly black, musicians who have dubbed him Indian Joe. The speakeasy is the one place Barrow appears to truly belong, and his fellow musicians are the one group who appear to truly accept him. He regularly declines offers to leave the police force and join them on tour. Why he refuses them, is as central a question in Cahokia Jazz as the question of who murdered some poor bastard on the roof of the Land Trust Building. Spufford engineers some impressively answers to these questions, but what is even more impressive is the degree to which he guides the questions and answers into a subtle, organic convergence.
Barrow’s interactions with the indigenous population of Cahokia are less convivial. His inability to speak or understand their language is a regular source of awkwardness. He is taunted as “thrown-away boy” by a high-ranking Cahokian royal. And the unlikely bond he forms with another member of the Cahokia aristocracy leads to tragedy. Indeed, Barrow’s inability to understand–or decide–where he fits into this remarkable society, whether to embrace his birthright—if indeed that’s what it is—or run as far away from it as possible is the most striking component of Cahokia Jazz.
Alternate histories allow writers to experiment with determinism and contingency. Which facts of our present world could not have turned out otherwise? Which could have? In Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), Western Europe is surgically removed from modern history by a simple and frightening alteration: What if Yersinia pestis had killed 99—rather than 50—percent of the population of Europe? In doing so Robinson poses the question of whether the worst (and perhaps best?) parts of modern world history were unique functions of European colonialism. The answer is yes. And no. And yes. The Americas, in Robinson’s telling, are still colonized, but colonized differently: Ming-era navies arrive first in South America. Subsequent encounters happen later and, as in Cahokia Jazz, with less deadly epidemiological effect. As a result, by the time the reader lands in the nineteenth century, indigenous polities are not just resilient at home, but players in global affairs abroad.
Another, more recent, novel to play the alternate history game with the moment of contact between European explorers and the indigenous population of the Americas is Laurent Binet’s Civilizations (2023). Binet takes readers on a wild ride in which Norse explorers leave a considerably larger footprint in Vinland, Columbus’ adventures in the Caribbean come to a very different end, and some exiled Incan royals make their way to Europe as the religious wars of the sixteenth century are going full blast. Binet is far less gentle than Spufford and enjoys settling scores with the dead. Martin Luther comes to an especially grisly end.
This brings us to what Cahokia Jazz has in common with both Civilizations and The Years of Rice and Salt: the conviction that the actual reality of European exploration in the Americas–and the seismic global shifts it brought about–are the worst possible thing that could have happened, the “darkest timeline,” to quote the late sit-com Community.
The strengths of the alternate history are many. The weaknesses also merit attention: Alternate histories offend one of the central tenets of professional historians–that one should never, ever deal in counterfactuals. Novelists are not historians (thank God), but this tension means that alternate histories always run the risk of appearing, on their own terms, unserious. “Everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn,” questionably talented and very high novelist Eli Cash tells reporters at a press junket in The Royal Tenenbaums. “What this book presupposes is…maybe he didn’t?”
Additionally, all writers of alternate histories ultimately face the same problem: How to shovel a mountain of exposition without burying the reader? Fully rendered alternate worlds, where every corner can be explored, are the stuff of video games. Novelists have to be picky. What is the correct number of historical details to make the parallel world appear complete, and how ought they to be doled out within the narrative? The solution is often epistolary: Breaks between chapters and sections are used to dole out bits of correspondence, encyclopedia entries, transcripts of meetings or interviews. Or the author provides the reader with a rather didactic character who simply explains things, whether the other characters want them to or not.
Francis Spufford takes an entirely novel approach in Cahokia Jazz. He cheats. Plenty of minor details are revealed by the conventional means listed above, but the central “what if” of Cahokia Jazz–that the conquistadors arrived in Mexico in the early sixteenth century carrying not smallpox variola major, but variola minor–is revealed by the author only in an afterword. As a result, fatalities were rare and immunity spread northward, preparing the populations of North America for the influx of European settlers they would experience in the seventeenth century. No laws are being broken here, of course, but it is an odd literary choice. As a result, Cahokia Jazz can feel, at times, like watching a complex battle scene in a demanding film in which the director has neglected to provide the audience with a wide shot and, as a result, the audience struggles to orient itself in the narrative. But it is a very Spuffordian solution: If one feels constrained by unwritten rules, one can simply ignore them. They are, after all, unwritten.
Cahokia Jazz, Civilizations and The Years of Rice and Salt all appear to be in direct dialog with one of the most important historiographical revolutions of the twentieth century, one that began in 1972 with the publication of Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, a book whose contents deliver exactly what the title promises: a highly interdisciplinary assessment of what was set in motion when European explorers first made landfall in the Caribbean. The most striking insight gleaned from Crosby’s work was that the pre-Columbian population of the Americas was much higher than previously thought, and therefore the death toll from European contact was much higher than previously thought. The most novel insight was that the primary cause of this devastation was not war, but microorganisms, Variola major, in particular. The second most novel insight was that the exchange turbocharged European agriculture, courtesy of indigenous American products like corn and potatoes, led to a demographic boom that powered the industrial revolution.
The Columbian Exchange was initially ignored. Famously rejected by dozens of academic publishers, Crosby’s work nonetheless became a foundational text in the field of environmental history. And as World History was supplanting Western Civilization as an undergraduate General Education requirement throughout the United States, Crosby’s thesis was a perfect fit.
Much of the credit for popularizing the central arguments of The Columbian Exchange goes to the science journalist Charles C. Mann who, in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005) and its sequel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011), expanded Crosby’s work onto a much larger canvas, introducing readers to, among other things, a fierce and longstanding debate between “high counter” and “low counter” archaeologists over the precise population of the pre-Columbian Americas.
Also under fire was the idea of the Americas as a “pristine wilderness” in which indigenous Americans played the role of light-footed environmental stewards. No, says Mann, building upon the work of Crosby and others, evidence abounds of heavy agricultural activity throughout the Americas, for millennia. In some places, like the Yucatan peninsula, the evidence is well-documented. In others, like the Amazon, the work of excavation has barely begun. And in yet others, like Cahokia–the actual Cahokia, not the Cahokia of Spufford’s ambitious imagination–the evidence is all around but we lack certain important tools to interpret it, like a written language or firsthand accounts.
As an indictment of European imperialism, the Columbian exchange model is a bit ambivalent. On one hand, it suggests the population of the Americas was far higher than previously thought, meaning the scale of the devastation was also much more massive. On the other hand, the primary culprit of that devastation is not the conquistadores (however bent on plunder they may have been, and neither Crosby nor Mann shy away on that point), but the microorganisms that accompanied them. One of Mann’s most interesting observations is that the North American woodlands observed by British and French explorers in the seventeenth centuries were in fact a post-apocalyptic landscape, a hundred or more years of arboreal recapture of once-cultivated farmland. Mann does not mince words in this point. The primeval forest described by Thoreau in the nineteenth century, he told an audience at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2012, was “not so much a forest as a cemetery.” There was nothing eternal about the woodlands of eastern North America, in other words. They were, in Thoreau’s time, a relatively recent development, made possible by a demographic catastrophe.
It is difficult to say to what degree Spufford, Binet, and Robinson before them, are in direct dialogue with Crosby and Mann, or simply operating in an intellectual and political climate saturated by Crosby’s ideas. But all three have set their alternate histories in an alternate modernity in which the central “what if” is, more or less, “What if the great die-off of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries didn’t happen?” The answer, of course, is that things would have been better.
Not necessarily better for everyone. Robinson gives us an alternate modernity in which Europe is simply removed by an earlier and even more comprehensive die-off. In Binet’s version, Europe is on the receiving rather than giving end of overseas empire-building. In Spufford’s alternative version of the Columbian Exchange, the most subtle and thoughtful of the bunch, European overseas expansion is not eliminated but constrained, compelled to share space with other geopolitical forces in the Americas, consumed with their own, distinct, great power games.
Alternate histories of the Columbian Exchange live happily, so far, under a big tent. Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz is the richest and most intriguing entry at present. There will hopefully be more. It is fair to wonder whether this state of affairs is possible because, despite its ubiquity, the Columbian Exchange, unlike other mass tragedies of early modernity, has largely been passed over by the so-called culture wars. It has remained in the domain of the curious, the questioning, the unsure.
Joel Harold Tannenbaum chairs the Humanities Department at Community College of Philadelphia. He occasionally finds time to write about the history of food and food science in journals like Gastronomica and Petit Propos Culinaires.
