INHARMONIOUS

Unfair in love and war.

Huf, drawing on her own family’s history, sets her latest novel in 1940s Florida, where Black people face the indignity of Jim Crow laws and a vicious old-boy culture. Restricted in where they can live and work, buy gasoline, or find a water fountain labeled for their use, still, after the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, three friends—Benny North, Lee Peters, and Roscoe Crane—feel the call of duty, eager to stand up and prove their courage. Defying the vehement objections of the women who love them, they enlist. As Roscoe and Lee are dismayed to discover, the Army is strictly segregated, with Black recruits shunted to service postings and given “careless, lazy training.” For Benny, though, the Army proves life-changing: He’s assigned to a white troop by a sergeant who doesn’t want to be accused of trying to integrate the military by sending a light-skinned, blue-eyed soldier to a black battalion. From then on, Benny passes as white. Although as the war intensifies, Roscoe and Lee get a chance to participate bravely, they emerge from the trauma of battle into the same racist society they’d left. They can’t find jobs, and inequitable rules cut them out of the GI benefits that Benny gets as a “white” veteran. But his comfort and opportunity come at a cost. “I learned to take up space in the world and own my manhood,” Benny tells his distraught mother. “I can’t go back to boy and coon and the back of the bus.” Yet separation from his family and community are wrenching. Huf’s sympathetic, well-defined characters struggle with anger and frustration, desire and longing—and the betrayal of American democracy.

An intimate look at the nation’s racist history.