Black Blood

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

In this, his fourth work, Paci offers us a new generation of
coming-of-age novel. Yet it is not just another “loss of innocence”
saga that is standard for this genre of writing. Instead, Paci invites
us to feel the magic of human existence; the tension between creation
and annihilation. This is the “black blood” that runs through the
veins of all humankind.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Marco, a young Italian
immigrant growing up in post-war Sault Ste. Marie. Marco’s first
encounter with a Canadian child results in a slur being hurled in his
face. “DeePee,” a young girl calls him. Neither she nor Marco even
knows what a DeePee is, except that it is not nice to be one. The irony
is that Marco actually is a DeePee—a displaced person. Abuse from his
own family drives Marco out onto the streets to run with a preteen gang
called the West End Mafia.

As puberty rearranges the constellation of loyalties within the gang,
Marco is caught between his sense of friendship and his sense of
rightness. Marco is displaced a third time when he finds he cannot
uphold his friendships and his principles with the same course of
action.

Although Paci’s novel is about a group of adolescents in the 1950s,
an inescapable scent of baby-boomer mid-life crisis permeates the work.
It is important to remember that we are not experiencing the story as it
happens but through the memory of someone now in the middle years. Paci,
unfortunately, never reminds us of this. Only an older Marco, halfway
between his own creation and annihilation, would see that loss of
innocence goes hand in hand with gain of knowledge.

Black Blood, then, is not just about an isolated group of children in
an isolated Canadian city. Paci’s Sault Ste. Marie is the garden
revisited. Displacement, for all of us, is inevitable.