Book Review: "The Miler"

by Parker Morse

"The Miler," Hap Cawood, Cimarron Books, 2003.

Like its hero, Jeremiah "J.J." James, Hap Cawood's "The Miler" wears the clothes of something from the mid 1950s, but is something else entirely on the inside. "The Miler" outwardly follows the pattern of a potboiler young-adult novel, in which the aimless teenager discovers track and field and, with ever more tremendous labors, reaches higher and higher in the sport until some great climactic race. The archetypical novel in this field, long since out of print, is Bert Nelson's book of the same name. Cawood, however, explores J.J., his family, and his town so intently that by the time the big race arrives, it seems unnecessary.

Cawood sets his tale in Harlan, Kentucky, a coal town in the mid 1950s, and it isn't until the fourth chapter that J.J. reaches the track team in a typical small-town way: "The track team is whoever wants to run in the district meet in May. Usually it's a basketball player or two coming off the basketball season. You could come off spring [football] practice," the football coach tells him. We follow J.J. through one season lost to a broken leg (football practice) before the two seasons he competes — and since he starts directly from the district meet, we end up seeing J.J. race the mile only six times.

No matter, because Cawood isn't interested in the usual storybook miler, a sort of spaceman whose workouts and races have no context and no support. J.J. has friends (including a quirky black-clad boy nicknamed "Zorro,") family problems, training partners (in his first season, J.J. occasionally does workouts with the sprinters from the town's Negro high school, Rosenwald, and their coach Wally Odell,) and a town so dense with characters and history the map in the front of the book seems too small to hold it all. No high school athlete arrives at a meet without these things spinning in the back of their mind, needing to be quieted before the race begins, and Cawood does not ignore them.

Underneath that, we find an almost mystical core of the book, suspended between two characters: the Native American courier known as Salaman, and J.J.'s eccentric coach, Miss Mira, his sister's dance instructor. Miss Mira would not normally be anybody's first candidate for a track coach, and she appears nearly as uncomfortable in this role, at first, as J.J. is to have her, but under her direction he not only organizes and improves his training, but squares away his thinking about his races in a way that allows him to make the most of the work he has done.

Cawood's picture of Harlan and its people is so fondly drawn that you visualize it in on a black and white television, with Elvis playing in the background. J.J. and his friends and rivals are earnest and honest, facing the problems of their day with their eyes open, but mostly just trying to enjoy what they have. The wonder of "The Miler" lies not in J.J.'s athletic achievements, but in how Cawood shows them lifting him away from the average and into the the world of aspirations and dreams.