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In the prologue to Darrin Bell’s expansive debut graphic memoir, The Talk, he illustrates, in comics, his memory of being six years old and coming face to face with a pack of snarling, snaggle-toothed dogs. The children around him kneel and hold out their hands to the terrifying animals, but in the moment young Bell can only freeze.
His wide eyes, drawn in simple cartoonish lines that seem nearly to jump off the page, enmesh readers in the scene. The child senses the dogs‘ continued pursuit of him for weeks after, though his older brother, Steven, assures him he is just imagining the threat. At the conclusion to this prescient opening, the curly haired boy is drawn sitting safely on a school bus, riding away from what he most fears. He crouches over a piece of paper, red crayon in hand, as the adult Bell recounts of his young self, speaking in the present tense: „I draw the beast I know I saw.“
Bell’s galvanizing new work is all about those two interjecting words, „I know.“ The Talk explores the question of how people — in this case, a precocious, geeky, and artistic young man, the child of a white mother and Black father — know what they know. How can you make sense of the world around you when your lived experiences don’t match up with the conflicting things people around you, particularly adults, say or do?
The first chapter tracks another pivotal, horrifying moment from the same year in the boy’s young life. Bell’s mom holds off on buying her son a water gun for fear of the racialized violence that daily puts Black boys and men disproportionately at risk.
