THE DRY GRASS OF AUGUST

In Mayhew’s novel, a teenage girl confronts racist brutality in the 1950s American South.

In 1954, 13-year-old Jubie Watts leaves her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, to go on a Florida vacation with her mother, siblings, and the family’s longtime Black maid, Mary. There she meets Leesum, a Black boy around Jubie’s age, who helps open her eyes to the world of discrimination to which she, as a white girl, had been largely oblivious: “We been in different places, Miss June—Jubie. I been right here on earth an you been on the moon.” On the drive back to Charlotte, a minor car crash forces the family to stay overnight in the rural town of Claxton, Georgia. When a group of local men attempt to rape Jubie and her older sister, Stell, Mary offers herself up in their place. After Mary is later found beaten to death, Jubie struggles with her complex feelings of grief and guilt. But it’s when her father forbids her from attending Mary’s funeral that Jubie is finally forced to examine her own beliefs—as well as the flaws and failings of the various grown-ups around her. While there are a few brief moments of levity (“Stell got Young Life going in Charlotte after she’d been saved by Leighton Ford, the brother-in-law of Billy Graham, who is like God’s brother-in-law as far as Charlotteans are concerned”), Jubie’s story is largely one of tragedy and struggle—the text includes detailed descriptions of her father’s physical abuse and multiple uses of racist insults by white characters. While this novel is not for the faint-hearted, it does tackle its difficult topics with purpose. Mayhew’s smooth prose, while repetitive in places, provides a lingering sense of tension that propels the story forward as the characterizations largely manage to avoid stereotypes. The ending will likely prove a bit abrupt for some readers, but it effectively ties up most of the loose ends.

A taut tearjerker wrapping a coming-of-age story around an unflinching examination of racism and abuse.