Rooster's Table

"This is a story about how one evening I set out to burn down the restaurant of a friend of mine for righteous cause, how someone who happened into my life redeemed me and how I was anointed in ashes. Oh, and it's about the problem of knowledge. So says Robert Sherman Walker, the primary character and narrator of a multicultural apocalypse that unveils itself in a final fury of action at a table in a local dive in small town, Virginia. That unveiling is twined around characters like...
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"This is a story about how one evening I set out to burn down the restaurant of a friend of mine for righteous cause, how someone who happened into my life redeemed me and how I was anointed in ashes. Oh, and it's about the problem of knowledge. So says Robert Sherman Walker, the primary character and narrator of a multicultural apocalypse that unveils itself in a final fury of action at a table in a local dive in small town, Virginia. That unveiling is twined around characters like the African-American professor of philosophy, Jasmyn Parker, who happens into Robert's life and provides a counter point to Hank Williams and Johannes Brahms with Thelonius Monk and Billie Holiday. They in turn are threaded into dualities of North/South, male/female, gay/straight, locals/immigrants, mentally challenged/right minded, and Black/White. Their life world is chimed in religious tones from Baptist to Methodist, Episcopalian and Pentecostal with a strong note of Sikhism. Then at an apocalyptic moment, the multicultural experiment of 1980s America erupts one ordinary Tuesday at a restaurant called Rooster's. Southern Gothic meets Crash in Oak Station, Virginia, a three hour drive from Washington DC. Jasmyn has moved from DC and taken a job at the local community college. Robert has navigated his way out of grief for the death of his grandmother, Kate Rock Walker, and along the way, he is guided by an unlikely cast of characters that includes not only a beginning professor of philosophy, but whittlers who sit on a corner of a dying, small world, Pentecostals who helped bury his mother and a Sikh neighbor dedicated to peace. Andrew, a victim of familial violence, orbits the plot like a moon until that fateful day, when the depraved and the heroic face each other. It's fixin' to rain.