Revisiting History in Red Dead Redemption 2
Exploring the South with power and agency
“They killed my husband,” a grief-stricken Sadie tells Dutch Van Der Linde and his protégé, Arthur Morgan.
Fleeing from a heist gone wrong, the Van Der Linde gang has found themselves deep in a deadly blizzard, one crew member dying, the others not far behind if they can’t find food. With a dozen mouths to feed and provide shelter for, Dutch and Arthur set out to search for supplies and find themselves at a house taken over by a rival gang. The Adler homestead, where Sadie has been held captive for three days after her husband was murdered.
This story already feels familiar to Bess, my 96-year-old friend who has grown fond of video games. Bess’s husband was lynched in the 1950s, when her youngest children, twins, were still very young. Suddenly a single mother of seven kids and earning a meager wage as a housekeeper for a local shop owner, doing whatever needed to be done to feed your family was something Bess had grown accustomed to. While Sadie went to the Van Der Linde camp to start a new life after the murder of her husband, Bess moved her children to a public housing project in St. Louis.
My partner and I are avid players of Red Dead Redemption 2. One of my favorite games, I’ve played and replayed the story of Arthur Morgan four times, totaling over 400 hours spent in the game. My partner, while familiar with the story from my play throughs, enjoys the Online experience, having taken over her son’s account and character after he died from a COVID related heart attack in December 2022. Discovering games and getting her first console in May during a visit in which we played Breath of the Wild together, Bess was eager to experience the “wild west outlaw game” that both my partner and I have talked about with her.
There’s very little I have to show Bess about the rules and gameplay of RDR2 thanks to her familiarity with open world RPGs and Rockstar’s masterful onboarding. I show her what buttons do what on the Xbox controller because it’s slightly different from the Switch controller she’s used to, and she’s off to play in the fictional recreation of micro-America at the turn of the 19th century.
Initially turned off by the violence that feels far different from that of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom due to the realism of the graphics, Bess warms to the game when she sees the freedom of choice for Arthur. He can choose to be kind. Honorable or dishonorable. Like me, honorable is an easy choice for Bess.
We shoot fellers as need shooting, save fellers as need saving, and feed ’em as need feeding. — Dutch Van Der Linde
Bess encounters the homeless veteran named Mickey in Valentine not long after leaving the snowy tutorial area and is delighted that she’s given the option to let the man hug Arthur. “Everybody needs hugging sometimes, whether they admit or not,” she tells me, with a knowing grin. The reason for Bess’s visit this time around is, after all, to give me a hug because she felt I needed a “mom hug.” As much as I would not like to admit it, she was right, I did need a mom hug after starting HRT and not being able to share my joy with my own mom. Bess embodies Dutch’s belief in saving fellers who need saving and feeding those who need feeding in her daily life having flown up from Missouri to give me a hug and some cupcakes and play some video games. I soon found out though, the shooting fellers who need shooting is not something Bess shies away from in this fictional America.
After her discovery of Arthur’s ability to be kind, Bess walked Arthur through the town of Valentine, his horse close behind, and pressed X to greet every single soul she saw.
As much as she was enjoying the wholesome little bits of the game — greeting people, taming horses, the sweet way Arthur talks to his horse — it didn’t really feel like an important story for her (and an important experience for me to witness) until she made her way towards Rhodes. While exploring, Bess came across Braithwaite Manor, a former tobacco plantation turned moonshine operation.
Some things I can forgive, some things I can forget. What they did to Annabelle, I can’t do neither. — Dutch Van Der Linde
Before Bess began playing the game, I’d expressed to my partner that I was concerned about one specific bit of content Bess would encounter. There are three points at which Arthur can encounter the Klan and is free to dispose of them as he sees fit. Knowing that Bess’s husband was murdered by Klansmen after being accused of stealing from his employer in the 50s, I didn’t want to risk anything being triggering for Bess. My partner and I discussed it and arrived at warning her mom about the encounters and letting her make her own decisions. What I didn’t account for was buildings in the game being modeled after real world locations like the Oak Alley plantation in Louisiana and reminding Bess of her not-so-distant family origins.
Bess guided Arthur’s horse up the oak lined driveway and stared in awe at the plantation house and its striking similarities to the plantation her great grandparents were enslaved and gave birth to her grandmother, also born enslaved in Louisiana.
“My grandmother never really left the plantation. Her and her brother were freed when they were real young, babies still, but they went to work sharecropping with my great grandparents after, when they were still kids. We all kept on working for the same family that owned them until I got married and we left for Missouri thinking it’d be better,” Bess explains.
Pausing the game, Bess asks me if I have any idea how much her great grandparents and their two kids were appraised for back in the 1800s when one owner died and they became the property of his son. I don’t. Those points of our history of slavery were left out in my school lessons and the value of a life is not something I would hazard a guess at because I know enough to understand that whatever I might imagine, the truth is much worse.
Bess asked my partner to pull up on her laptop the slavery database for the plantation her family was enslaved at and I soon see the very limited ancestry of my partner and her mother, valued in total at $1,200. Not a whole lot more than my partner and I would soon charge to a credit card to get Bess her own Xbox and controllers so she can continue her game journey at home. This is a fact that has stayed at the top of my mind in the week since and I’m newly grateful for the medium of video games because they inspired a conversation and essential learning I likely would not have had otherwise.
The pasts we carry from our grandparents help shape us into the people we will become, for better or worse. From mine I learned who I don’t want to ever become— violent, bitter alcoholics or long-suffering from untreated mental illness. Bess, born in 1926, only the second generation born free, carries a very different past. She learned how to be free and not. She learned how to be two people; one when surrounded by friends and family, carefree and joyful, and someone else, a girl focused on safety and survival, silent and never disobedient when in the company of white people. Bess retells such fond memories of her grandparents’ love. A love she has passed on to her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and even former strangers like me.
Bess tells me of memories of playing with cousins at her grandparents’ small home, joyous holidays other special times spent together as an ever-growing family. Since we are sharing it all, good and ugly, I tell her one of my only memories of a cousin I have — the weeks she spent wanting to join the Klan when we were 18 and her parents failing to see what the problem was when I told them what I learned about their daughter. I never share these shameful bits of my family with people for fear I’ll be lumped in with the rest of the bad batch, but with Bess I don’t have that fear.
Once Bess sees that this game world is one she’s intimately familiar with, the story of Arthur began to feel disconnected. She told me she now wished she could experience it in her skin, not some white man she would have been afraid of in real life. So reluctantly, I introduced Bess to the online portion of the game in which she could create her likeness and explore the fictional micro-America as a young Black woman.
In character creation, Bess chooses the skin tone most closely resembling her own and makes customizations to her facial features and eye color. When choosing her hair, the long-standing problem of Black hair choices in games is immediately apparent to her. “I got more choices to customize a gun than a Black body?” She asks, rhetorically. Of the two options, Bess chooses the short natural style and sits down for her mugshot.
While Bess progresses through the tutorial mission for online play, I tell her about my own struggles as a trans masc person with character creation in games. My frequent inability to create an ideal body, always having to choose between the male and female binary when the truth of my body lies somewhere between the two. But I also tell her about the character creators that are making decent progress in both hair and body diversity, which she notes that she’d like to see.
After completing the tutorial mission, Bess is eager to take up the professions I told her about. My partner and I buy her the 350 Gold Bar package so she can purchase all of the professions and properly accessorize her character and she goes to town with both. Her first stop is the barber where her short hair is magically transformed into a long kinky braided style that Bess says is far more appropriate of the time. Next stop is the tailor where she buys a pink plaid blouse, pink silk pantaloons, a very large pink hat which she labels her church hat, and some nice boots and gloves. She’s gone from just-out-of-jail drab to the snazziest dresser in all of fake America.
Now properly outfitted, Bess sets out to begin her trades — moonshine and animal skin trading, with bounty hunting here and there as she needs some cash. Bess laughs at the historical improbability of how the moonshine and trader professions begin, with Cripps, your camp steward of sorts, writing a letter and your character reading the letter. “Where would somebody like Cripps learn to read? And I definitely wouldn’t be reading. I didn’t even learn how in real life til my kids were old enough to teach me after they learned in school,” she says.
It doesn’t take long for Bess to have her fun ruined by griefers, the very reason I was hesitant to show her the online portion of the game. Well into her first materials run for her Trader business, her horse loaded with a bison skin and a dozen deer skins, another player approaches her and shoots her. She dies and upon respawning all of her skins are gone. Not five minutes pass before it happens again. Fortunately Bess had some luck when starting her first co-op mission and was paired with a kind and patient player who didn’t give her any shit about being slow and not a great shot. They even allowed Bess to loot some of the downed enemy bodies instead of hoarding all the loot for themselves. The griefers remained a problem though and soon Bess gave up on online and returned to Arthur in story mode.
Back in Lemoyne, Bess has taken to unapologetically killing all the in-game racists. The first one Bess encountered was a Lemoyne Raider leaning on a fence near Rhodes. Arthur was riding into town with a Black NPC not far behind him. Bess heard the Raider say, “You think this Lemoyne air is free to breathe for the likes of you?” And she promptly got off her horse and shot the him in the head. The second encounter was with Joe Butler, homeless Confederate veteran, whom Arthur meets in Rhodes. Thinking he would be as pleasant as Mickey, Bess hopped off her horse and selected the prompt to give Joe some money. Only after did Joe begin talking about the “good ol’ days” before the Civil War and how everything was so much better back then. Once again, Bess shot him in the head and looted her money back from his corpse. I laugh as the lawmen come to arrest Arthur for killing Joe. “You’ve warmed up to the idea of shooting people in the game, then?” I ask her, jokingly.
Half-kidding, Bess responds, “Child, I’ve got 96 years of bottled up anger from hearing that mess said to me and not being able to say anything. You don’t even know.”
I have delighted in killing the Klan in this game in a multitude of ways, as one does, but until then, I’d not considered it might be a means of catharsis for a real lived experience. In my time with my partner, I’ve made the choice to not respond to racist remarks aimed at her to avoid making the situation worse or dangerous for her, but the idea of not being able to respond and enduring 96 years of it, that’s another lesson learned from Bess that was previously unimagineable to me.
During the end of Bess’s two-week stay, she had her first encounter with the Klan, in the woods southwest of Rhodes. She asked for tips on how to take them out and I responded with a litany of choices. Shoot them, trample them, blow them up, throw poison knives at them, burn them with fire bottles. Plenty of choices. She opted for the fire bottles.
“Where was Arthur when I needed him when my husband was dying?” Bess wonders as she sets her controller down and watches the fire bottles do their job.
Bess had previously shared with me how much she’d found playing video games helps her after she finished Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. She’d noted her hands were less stiff after some time exercising her fingers playing the games and that she was using logic and creativity in ways she never had before, feeling more mentally spry than she has in years. Now she’s adding to the list having gotten to experience her youth and the place she grew up with some power and agency. Yes, her responses to the actions of others were, at times, extreme, and yes, they’re purely virtual in a game, but they’re responses after 96 years of silence.
