Returning to the Tower II.C: The Song Was Always There

Ahh Susannah. From the moment she comes on the page, we know something transgressive is happening. Just consider for a moment that here in 2026 Stephen King is considered woke. Good gods. King was awake the moment he started writing. It used to be okay to praise a writer for being race conscious, and as far as I'm concerned it still is.

People keep saying that O/Detta is a problem for a contemporary adaptation, but honestly, after rereading this arc that's absolute bullshit.

King handles the development of Susannah masterfully. I'm just saying that Stephen King as a white able bodied male managed to write a woman who was a civil rights champion with a profound disability and severe trauma, and deliver us a whole ass human who has temporarily been split in half by race consciousness.

For a white dude writing in 1987, Sai King's writing of O/Detta is actually insanely durable.

Eddie tells us that she literally has a Freudian schizoid construct, and King embraces it. I will argue O/Detta and the birth of Susannah is the moment where The Dark Tower has its first real touch with science fiction. Much before and after this is absolutely science fantasy, but if there's one thing I learned from Ursula K. Le Guin it's that social science fiction is a unique sub-genre.

King shows us in this book that it can reach into fantasy and horror, and of course he does because King is constantly using horror as a mirror for the true horror of racism.

My point is that the moment where Roland uses Mort's death to literally instantiate Detta and Odetta is the point where the fiction is tapping deep into something real in terms of psychology.

Roland allows the child who was born as Odetta to reconcile her entire doubled existence (a major theme in the next book) and Susannah is born. This is some deeply Freudian and Jungian shit, but it is clearly something that resonates with people beyond any theoretical or clinical labels. I also wouldn't be surprised if King had read DuBois. Even if he hadn't, it's hard not to see "double-counsciousness" or the function of "the veil."

Anyone who has experienced trauma, or has enough empathy to understand another's trauma recognizes themselves in this moment.

The moment where you can forgive yourself

Maybe the moment where you have to

Anyway, I love this part of the book.

Later, when Susannah addresses Roland as Gunslinger, it makes me cry.

Roland does not know that he is far less closed off to his Ka-Tet than he thinks he is, and Susannah is the first one who makes us see it.