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Standing on the Shoulders of Absence: Douglas Turner Ward's Influence

When I started writing what would become Empty Shifts, I kept returning to a play I'd first encountered in college: Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence, written in 1965 during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

In Ward's satirical masterpiece, all the Black residents of a Southern town mysteriously vanish in a single day. The white community—which has spent generations insisting these residents are inferior, lazy, dispensable—immediately collapses. No one to cook breakfast. No one to care for the children. No one to clean the offices, staff the hospitals or work the fields. The entire infrastructure of daily life grinds to a halt.

The play's genius is multilayered. Ward used the impossible (mass disappearance) to make the invisible (Black labor upholding white comfort) impossible to ignore. But he went further: in the original production, Black actors performed all roles in whiteface, creating another layer of satirical brilliance. The white characters fumble helplessly through a single day without the people they've rendered invisible, revealing the absurdist gap between their rhetoric of Black inferiority and the reality of their complete dependence.

Ward's central question haunted me for years: If you truly believe these people are inferior, why does your entire world collapse without them?

That question—the gap between rhetoric and reality, between dismissal and dependence, between what we claim to believe and what our behavior reveals—became the seed of Empty Shifts.

From Ward's Day to My Midnight

Ward set his absence in the Jim Crow South. I set mine in contemporary rural Iowa.

Ward's characters disappear for a day and return. Mine chose permanent transcendence.

Ward used biting satire designed to provoke uncomfortable laughter. I use something closer to elegy—a mourning for what's lost when people are pushed past endurance.

But we're asking the same fundamental question: What happens when the people you've taken for granted simply aren't there anymore? What does their absence reveal about your complicity, your carefully maintained blindness, your dependence on the very people you've refused to fully see?

In my novel, it's not Black residents of a Southern town—it's 280 Hispanic residents of a Midwest meatpacking community. Workers who rebuilt a dying town in the 1990s, filled the schools, kept the economy alive. For twenty-five years, they're needed. But they're never quite welcomed. The railroad tracks dividing east side from west side become borders more real than state lines.

When ICE announces Monday enforcement, these 280 feel a doorway opening. Not back to Mexico. Forward to somewhere they can finally be whole. At midnight, they transform—peacefully, collectively, completely—and step through to the other place.

And Millbrook, Iowa wakes Tuesday to absence it can never undo.

Fifty-five years after Ward's play, we're still asking the same questions about whose labor gets exploited, whose humanity gets dismissed, whose absence would make comfortable lives collapse. The setting changes. The specific injustices evolve. But the fundamental dynamic—a community built on exploitation suddenly confronting what it's lost—remains devastatingly relevant.