Frances Viglielmo

The Company We Kept: Tribes of No Continuing Place Frances Viglielmo

From the Introduction: The Company We Kept highlights the patriarchal manipulation by Zonian men of a group of young women athletes whose swimming and diving hopes to gain a place on the 1948 Olympics American team are threatened by the twists and turns of a trial wherein two criminals must be punished, accused and accuser, for unacceptable "miscegenation." This fictional trial fills in the bare outline of a real legal procedure in a Zone historic trial, highly problematic, which led to shifts in the political terrain. In the work of imagination the white woman's retraction of the allegation of rape comes as a consequence of a nightmare induced by the addition of an ingredient into her lunch by the West-Indian staff of the mental hospital in which she is placed for "psychosomatic laryngitis." In the dream she is tried by the rainforest creatures of Panama and brought to a high level of conscience by the nightmare lynching of her Jamaican lover.