Ever since I read S.A. Cosby’s latest novel All the Sinners Bleed, I’ve been working to read the rest of his work. Immediately after reading All the Sinners Bleed I read his debut novel, My Darkest Prayer. Now, I’m working through his third novel, Razorblade Tears. Like his other novels, it is violent, gritty, and fast paced. As well, like his other novels, during the lulls, typically conversations at a funeral, at a diner, or in a car, Cosby introduces moments where the characters explore deep issues impacting us today.

Razorblade Tears is a prime example because it is a novel with two, middle-aged protagonists, one Black and one white, seeking revenge on the person who had their sons murdered. On the surface, the set up of Ike and Buddy Lee looks like a buddy cop narrative with the Black guy and white guy learning about each other and growing to like each other. It is a well-worn trope, but Cosby’s novel is anything but well worn because what brings these two disparate men together is the murder of their gay sons who married one another. It is a novel where Ike and Buddy Lee must reconcile their feelings towards their sons and the ways they treated them when alive, and it also a story about the intersections of oppression and violence against marginalized individuals.

While the action reels the reader into the story, the conversations between the characters epitomize the issues mentioned above. One conversation that stands out takes place about halfway through the novel when Ike and Buddy Lee sit in the Swift Creek Lounge as they wait to meet Tariq at the barber shop. At this point, the men who killed their sons have attacked them, they’ve killed someone and turned him into fertilizer, and more. While both men work to come to rectify the ways they treated their sons, a racial tensions exists between them, and in this moment, after all of Buddy Lee’s offhanded racial comments and Ike’s side eyes, they talk about where all of the racism, homophobia, and other oppressive thoughts come from and how they perpetuate them.

Waiting for their drinks, Buddy Lee looks at Ike and tells him, “You know, I bet you thinking, He keeps saying he ain’t racist but he sure saying some racist shit.” Ike grabs his shot glass and tells Buddy Lee, “I’ve learned to always be ready to be disappointed by white people. Doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it don’t shock me anymore.” To steel himself, Ike prepares for the worst and hopes to be surprised when he someone like Buddy Lee proves him wrong.

Buddy Lee tells Ike about his past, and he begins by stating, “I ain’t trying to make no excuses, but when you grown up around people . . . all of them saying things that you don’t even think about as being wrong or right, you don’t put that title on yourself.” Buddy Lee is genuine, and he continues by relating a story where he, along with his family, watched The Ten Commandments at Easter and when a character tells another to look at “the Nubians,” his grandfather would say they aren’t Nubians but rather n******. Buddy Lee says he used to laugh at the joke, not knowing any better, but as he got older he “stopped thinking about it, because if that joke was fucked up, then what did it say about [his] granddaddy?” Buddy Lee also wondering what his laughter said about himself.

Here, Buddy Lee expresses the same feeling that the seventeen year-old camper did when she told Lillian Smith that she knew what they learned at Laurel Falls Camp for Girls was right but that learning it was right also meant that they would then have to look on their families and those they loved in a different manner. To avoid that, the girl told Smith she would raise her own children telling them to treat Blacks as inferior and to worry about nothing but money, to which Smith replied, “In other words, you’d make little Nazis of them.” The camper knew what was right, had learned what was right, but she chose to ignore it because the reflection she saw in the mirror blinded her.

At this point in the novel, Buddy Lee has taken an initial step to looking in the mirror. He has been looking in the mirror about the way he treated his son Derek when he told Buddy Lee he was gay. Yet, he has not done the same with his whiteness. Ike tells Buddy Lee, “It’s easier to keep your head in the sand than it is to try and see things from somebody else’s point of view. There’s a reason why they say ignorance is bliss.” Again, Ike is talking about race and whiteness here, but the things he says apply to him too and his thoughts about his own son, Isiah, as well his interaction with Tangerine, a transgender woman who knows the man who had Isiah and Derek murdered.

To this, Buddy Lee asks Ike if he thinks he is racist, and Ike tells him, “I think maybe for the first time in your life you’re seeing what the world looks like for people that don’t look like you.” Again, this constitutes one of Buddy Lee’s initial steps towards awareness. He sees the problem, and by actually acknowledging it, and his lack of knowledge, he starts out on a journey to fix it. Ike continues by telling him, “I mean you still ignorant as hell, but you learning.” This is the key. Buddy Lee is disentangling himself from the lessons he grew up with, the white supremacist, cis-gender, patriarchal lessons that formed him, and that learning makes him views himself and those close to him in a different manner.

Ike recognizes, as he tells Buddy Lee these things, that he is learning as well, working to understand who his son actually was instead of condemning his son. He tells Buddy Lee, “We both done said and did shit that we wish we could take back. I think if you figure out at one point in your life you was a terrible person, you can start getting better. Start treating people better.” This lesson lies at the core of Razorblade Tears, the lesson of openness and learning to confront our own prejudices and biases, no matter what those may be. It takes a first step, an acknowledgement of the problem, then all we need do it put one foot in front of the other and walk, learning as we go along. It may not be a straight path, an even path, or a pleasant path, but it is a path we all must take. But, we must begin by realizing we need to walk that path and then actually walk it.

Of course, there is so much more I could say. Make sure to go read S.A. Cosby’s work, and check out my conversation with him on Classics and Coffee. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.