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
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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