AMERICAN BLUES

A woman fights for racial justice and female ordination in Hilsabeck’s debut novel.

Lily Vida Wallace, who’s White, grew up in Greenville, Texas, where threats of violence against Black people were commonplace. In the early 1970s, the adult Lily moves to New York City to work with the Episcopal Church, whose members are known for assisting Freedom Riders and others working for the civil rights movement. In 1973, Sam Jefferson, a Black church sexton, is murdered in South Carolina, and Lily travels there on behalf of the presiding bishop to attend the man’s funeral, and she stares Southern racism in the face for the first time in years: “This whole history of violence,” she fumes. “It’s like exploding shrapnel. The pain has to be lodged in every American whether they realize it or not. How can life just go on when something like this happens?” The trip jump-starts Lily’s personal reckoning, which involves an engagement to a man that falls apart spectacularly; a new relationship with Rodney Davis, a Black lawyer and the brother of one of her co-workers; and her desire to break the tradition of exclusively male Episcopal priests. However, even as history marches on into the 1980s and ’90s, Lily and Rodney find out that familiar threats of violence remain. Over the course of this historical novel, Hilsabeck’s prose is vivid and urgent, as when Lily first arrives back in South Carolina and has a visceral reaction to those who surround her at the Episcopal church: “Looking around the nave at faces familiar as a family reunion, Lily panicked, as disjunction gave way to kinship, and disengagement to complicity.” The plot is slow-paced, although it effectively leads up to a truly shocking final act. Lily’s story of self-actualization feels uncomfortably shoehorned into the overarching narrative of racist violence. However, Hilsabeck does succeed at dramatizing the relationship between religion and activism in a particular era as well as the tensions surrounding the ordination of Episcopal priests.

An ambitious social novel that struggles to fold in its protagonist’s personal travails.