I’m halfway through The Reformatory by Tananarive Due.
It is a novel set in Jim Crow Florida that uses the backdrop of the Florida School for Boys aka Dozier School (fictionalized here as Gracetown) to blur the line between historical fiction and ghost story. But the real story is how the system is designed to crush twelve-year-old Robbie.
It was the opening moments of Chapter 2, before Robbie's sentencing, while his sister Gloria waits in the dark, that drew me in. With the incoming consequences hanging in the balance, Gloria constructs what we'll call a “Theology of the Blink.”
It is a desperate attempt to save God’s reputation by sacrificing his competence:
“Mama had kept most of her childhood stories locked in her eyes. Mama’s stories were unsuited for the ears of children — stories of evil without consequence and pain without cease — the unholy things that happen when God blinks. Or maybe sleeps. Surely God sleeps sometimes, Gloria thought; the evidence of slumber was all around...
Secretly, since Mama’s passing, Gloria wrestled with her father’s unshakable belief in God, but sometimes she made peace with the notion that Mama’s cancer had come while God’s eyes were shut. Mostly God’s eyes are open, but God blinks, there’s a hurricane, or, blink, there’s an orphan.”
the god who sees
In church, we’re usually comforted by the idea of an “all-seeing” God. In Genesis, Hagar — a woman on the run and mistreated — meets God in the desert and names him El Roi, “The God Who Sees.”
The narrative is filled with the language of the senses: Hagar sees God, and names her son as proof that heaven has heard her misery. The boundary between the messenger and the Divine blurs here, suggesting that heaven didn’t just watch from a distance but pulled close enough to be undeniable. Hagar is astonished to even have survived the encounter, discovering that the gaze of God is her preservation.
But in the world of The Reformatory, that preserving eye has squeezed shut. Hagar needed God to look at her to survive, but Gloria needs God to look away so she can forgive him.
Perhaps seeing does not obligate intervention, but for those inside the fence at Gracetown, that distinction offers very little comfort. If God saw the cancer eating away Mama and did nothing, what does that make God? If God watched everything leading up to Robbie’s arrest and just sat there, is he even worth worshipping?
Gloria’s “Theology of the Blink” is a fragile compromise in deconstruction. It’s much easier to believe in a God who is somewhat negligent (a God who takes naps, or who may miss the moment) than to believe in a God who is willfully cruel.
If God blinks, the hurricane is merely an accident. If he sleeps, then the orphan is a mistake that just so happened to slip through the cracks.
evil without consequence
The phrase Due uses — “stories of evil without consequence and pain without cease” — goes against everything the tradition promises. We want the Job ending where he gets his stuff back. We long for the Resurrection where death has no hold, craving the narrative where suffering results in restoration.
But reality, more times than not, looks more like Gracetown.
This is where the “Blink” idea falls apart. A hurricane might be explained as a mistake, nature having its way while the Creator was dozing off.
But what about Gracetown?
The Reformatory is a machine of white supremacy, not an accident that slipped through the cracks. A hurricane is chaos, but Gracetown is architecture.
The horror of the book is that the evil is not a malfunction, but the system working exactly as designed. Jim Crow was the wide-awake policy of an entire nation.
To believe that God “blinked” during slavery or Jim Crow is to suggest that God has been in a coma. The evil Gloria fears is structural, and when you realize that, the excuse of a sleeping God cannot bear the weight.
In Due’s Florida, the divine gaze seems focused on the comfort of white neighborhoods, while the “blink” lands right on the bodies of poor Black children.
after the asterisk
Deconstruction often starts when you get tired of making excuses for the blink. Gloria’s exhaustion mirrors the path of many who leave the faith, tracing the fatigue of watching the sky until we wonder whether it is empty. We spend years making excuses for God. Maybe he’s busy or he works in “mysterious ways.”
But eventually, we run out of excuses for the Divine’s silence.
Pastors and theologians have offered plenty of answers for this — theodicies, free will defenses — but those abstract arguments turn to ash inside the fence of The Reformatory. For Gloria and many others, this isn’t a philosophical puzzle to be solved, but the last leg of a failing survival strategy.
The “unshakable belief” of the father in the story feels like an outright refusal to see what’s right in front of him.
And this is the cost of clarity.
If it was just about losing doctrine or deity, it'd be a lot more simple. But no, this is about losing intimacy and hope. Gloria’s father needs his belief, as it functions as his last protection, the only thing standing between him and the total despair of a world that wants to destroy his son.
If he admits God isn’t watching Robbie, he might not survive that reality.
So, Gloria’s clarity creates a quiet, internal distance. To see the world as it is, she finds herself standing apart from the man who needs the world to be imagined as something else.
Eventually, the sky stays silent long enough.
We look at Gracetown, and we realize that whether the sky is empty or occupied by a God who refuses to act, the result is the same.
We are staring into the void, and the void does not blink.