{"id":61616,"date":"2021-09-23T04:01:33","date_gmt":"2021-09-23T04:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61616"},"modified":"2021-09-23T04:01:33","modified_gmt":"2021-09-23T04:01:33","slug":"a-novelist-dissects-the-claustrophobic-evil-of-jim-crow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61616","title":{"rendered":"A Novelist Dissects the Claustrophobic Evil of Jim Crow"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Novelist Dissects the Claustrophobic Evil of Jim Crow<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2017-10-06<\/p>\n

Ayana Mathis<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nMelinda Beck<\/small><\/a><\/p>\n

Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight, A Novel<\/em><\/a> (New York: Ecco\/HarperCollins, 2017)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every couple of decades the nation revisits, publicly and painfully, its oldest violence. The wounds of race \u2014 still open, still weeping over the course of 400 years \u2014 preoccupy our literature for a time. This is a good thing, given that the wages of silence are most certainly death. At its best, historical fiction isn\u2019t a stump speech or a school lesson, but it sure does illuminate the past, give soul and body to our history so we can sojourn with it a while, in privacy and contemplation. As a useful byproduct, it gives us a fighting chance at recognizing the past\u2019s reverberations in our present. And reverberate it does.<\/p>\n

When plunging into the bloody abyss of the American racial past, as Eleanor Henderson<\/a> does in her second novel, \u201cThe Twelve-Mile Straight<\/a>,\u201d the stakes are high. The novel is set in 1930 in Cotton County, Ga. In its opening pages a black man, Genus Jackson, is lynched<\/a> for raping a young white woman named Elma Jesup: \u201cGenus dropped, his neck snapping like a chicken\u2019s, his body falling limp.\u201d<\/p>\n

We suspect that Genus is innocent, and indeed, he is. We hope his luridly described murder by lynching proves more than a mere point of departure for Henderson\u2019s sprawling Southern Gothic family drama. Genus was a field hand on the farm that Elma Jesup sharecrops alongside her father, Juke, and a mute black girl, 14-year-old Nan Smith. The girls live like sisters and, at least when they are home on the farm, the racial lines that divide them are blurred by affection and proximity…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Novelist Dissects the Claustrophobic Evil of Jim Crow The New York Times 2017-10-06 Ayana Mathis Melinda Beck Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight, A Novel (New York: Ecco\/HarperCollins, 2017) Every couple of decades the nation revisits, publicly and painfully, its oldest violence. The wounds of race \u2014 still open, still weeping over the course of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,20],"tags":[31967,31935,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-61616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-ayana-mathis","tag-eleanor-henderson","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61617,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61616\/revisions\/61617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}