Inside Henry Cato: A Novel

Abstract

Inside Henry Cato is a modern bildungsroman and family saga that spans critical events in American history from the early 1930s through the mid-1970s, culminating in the mid-2000s. Told in three parts through the narratives of young Henry Cato, his mother Ida, and the family’s nurse and confidante, Annie Flynn, the story shows how one family’s dark and cloistered past launched three tumultuous journeys, leaving a stain of shame and self-doubt on all of them. As Henry grapples with what it means to be authentic while overcoming family trauma and navigating through historic social transformation, he eventually learns the truth of his family’s legacy. Ida struggles with the stigma of sexual assault and the power of religious zealotry; and Annie must reconcile her own African American experience with the white woman who needs her, at a time when her own agency and access to opportunity are cruelly out of reach. Henry also has a taboo obsession which is at the heart of his own story – a fascination with women’s shoes that he at first hides, then embraces and tries to understand at a time when the world is exploding with new possibilities – possibilities that will urge him to face what he inherited of his mother’s brittle past and Annie’s sacrifices and force him to peel back the dark curtain hiding a family legacy of deceit, lawlessness, and unorthodoxy. Henry’s journey takes us from Kansas to San Francisco to New York, opening with Henry’s childhood years in Atchison, Kansas. The story deals with themes that feel particularly relevant in today’s charged socio-political climate: gender identity, sexual confusion, rape, abuse, the politics of religion, reproductive rights, and themes of inequity in the African American experience. This thesis comprises the novel’s first thirty-six chapters and represents the bulk of Part One, Henry’s first person narrative, which opens in 1961.