Seeing Red

Seeing Red is a historical fiction novel by Kathryn Erskine. Set in Stony Gap, Virginia in the summer and fall of 1972, it follows Red Porter who struggles to keep his family’s store from closing. In order to do so, he tries to find out why some members of the community seem to hate his family. Porter makes his own mistakes along the way: he joins a gang and commits crimes to reach his goals. Porter eventually learns more constructive ways to grapple with difficulty and guilt. The novel received multiple awards for its exploration of the Deep South and the region’s enduring legacies of domestic abuse, systemic racism and sexism, and bullying.

The novel begins shortly after Porter’s father dies. Having lost her life partner and the family’s primary breadwinner, Porter’s mother struggles to take care of her twelve-year-old son. Suffering from chronic depression, eventually, she decides to sell their house in Virginia and move in with extended family in Ohio. Porter rejects this idea, becoming bent on preserving the business, a car repair shop called Porter’s. While looking for advice, he encounters some local gang members who convince him to join and benefit from their solidarity and mutual trust. He also realizes that his neighbors, the Dunlops, despise his family. He traces their hatred back to a feud that started between their great-great-grandfathers; Mr. Dunlop, however, wishes to prevent Porter from finding out what happened. Porter’s family is wary of Mr. Dunlop, especially because he routinely beats his kids.

Porter becomes so desperate to prevent his home’s sale that he vandalizes the yard sign advertising it, as well as the exterior of the house itself. He keeps working at Porter’s, taking a job to fix up Miss Georgia’s car. He runs into a roadblock when he discovers that the car needs an alternator that costs $200, a price she can’t afford. Using his own ingenuity and the technical knowledge he picked up from his father, he finds a solution for less than a dollar. Meanwhile, Porter’s little brother, J, struggles to come to terms with their father’s unexpected death. Porter misinterprets his grief and confusion as selfishness, until he finds that J is unwilling to take off a Band-Aid that their father put on him.



Porter makes progress with his investigation into his family history in relation to the Dunlops, learning that it implicates Miss Georgia’s family as well. Daniel Dunlop, the great-great-grandfather of Mr. Dunlop, struck a blood oath with Porter’s own great-great-grandfather to kill Miss Georgia’s great-great-grandfather, George Freeman. The objective was to steal the land on which he had built a local “Freedom Church” and split the spoils between them. Porter gets this information from a local lawyer, Mr. Reynolds. He resolves to make sure that the land is returned to her family, but succeeds only after Miss Georgia passes away from a long battle with lung disease. Still, the land is given to her daughter, helping to resolve some of the families’ guilt.

After Porter addresses the crime that had been a blight on his family’s history, his mother decides to move in with a close family friend, Beau. This move allows them to stay in Virginia instead of moving to Ohio. Porter leaves his gang, realizing that there are great personal costs to the activities they have pressured him to do. While Seeing Red does not suggest that white Americans can absolve their own oppressive family legacies, but that each successive moral action is always in our hands, and we are capable of proactively creating an environment in which everyone can live more equally and peacefully.