A ghastly, dizzying descent into the coldblooded clannishness of the Southern racist mindset.
A dogged pursuit takes a journalist into uncomfortable corners of her Southern family’s complicity in a small-town lynching.
Both a deeply personal narrative infused with a charming Southern flavor and a compelling historical journey, this work benefits stylistically from the distance Georgia-born Branan has attained from the protagonists, her relatives. Born in 1941 and raised in Columbus, Georgia, not far from her parents’ relatives in the small town of Hamilton, Branan was properly indoctrinated as a child in segregation and made racist assumptions about the black people she lived among and who worked for her family; these attitudes took decades to unlearn as a journalist committed to civil rights and equal justice. From hints over the years that her family let slip from their carefully “embroider[ed]” memories, Branan gradually put together the facts around a grisly lynching of four blacks—including the first African-American woman to be hanged in Georgia—on Jan. 22, 1912, in Hamilton by a white posse. The murders were especially painful for the author to investigate since they occurred under the watch of the new sheriff, her great-grandfather, and were perpetrated by a group of her ancestors. As the story goes, a moonshining ne’er-do-well, Norman Hadley, had made sexual advances toward a teenage black girl of the community, prompting his murder by her protectors and thus underscoring the role of miscegenation in the twisted edifice of Southern racist thinking. In this well-written, disturbing narrative, Branan reaches back to explore numerous similar lynchings and the complicity of the entire community. She also explores the tireless work of journalists like Ida B. Wells and activist Anna Julia Cooper, who resolutely exposed the lynchings, and the members of the Women’s Missionary Society, among other women’s groups, who finally restrained the murderous hands of their menfolk.
A ghastly, dizzying descent into the coldblooded clannishness of the Southern racist mindset.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1718-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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