Racism

SOUTHERN MAN . . . Between the covers

This is a massive book physically as it is over 900 pages long. Emotionally, it is huge, as it deals with suffering, death, revenge, remorse and corruption with relentless intensity. Politically it is intensely topical as it deals with the prospect of a Donald Trump second term as POTUS, and the mood of the voters who put him into the White House in the first place. Historically, it is deeply challenging, as it looks at the legacy of over two centuries of prejudice and cruelty in the southern states of America.

The title refers to a 1970 song by Neil Young where he excoriates the archetypal redneck southern male. The song may (or may not) have triggered a musical duel with Lynrd Skynrd, when their response was Sweet Home Alabama. The novel features Mississippi lawyer, politician and author, Penn Cage, who appeared in previous Greg Iles novels. Click the link for more information.

The back story here is complex, but in a rather large nutshell:

Penn Cage, has an obscure terminal cancer which is slowly killing his octogenarian mother.
Cage lost a leg beneath the knee in a road accident.
He is a civil liberties campaigner.
Dr Tom Cage, Penn’s father, a much respected physician, wrongly imprisoned, died in prison riot at Parchman Farm penitentiary.
Cage is a widower. His wife died of cancer and, much, later, his fiancée was murdered.
He has a twenty-something daughter called Annie, also a liberal minded lawyer.

The early narrative darts back and forth between current events and the days following Dr Tom Cage’s death in the prison riot. The reasons for Tom’s incarceration are complex, but Greg Iles spells it out with great clarity. Present day couldn’t be much more topical. Donald Trump is gathering momentum for a second bid for the presidency, but the almost unthinkable has happened. A charismatic war veteran called Robert Lee White is aiming to be the first independent candidate since Ross Perot in 1992, and he has a huge following via his Tik Tok videos and a very popular radio show. He came to national prominence when he led a special forces team searching for a notorious Taliban leader. They found him, and White administered the coup de Grace.

Present day. As Bobby White hones his media profile for TV audiences, he receives a boost. Attending a largely black music festival, he heroically rescues Annie Cage and several others, mostly black youngsters, who have serious bullet wounds after white Sheriff’s deputies open fire on the crowd after a shooting incident. However, Bobby White’s pitch for POTUS has a serious problem. He lacks the prerequisite adoring wife and clutch of tousle-haired children. Why? I can only direct you to the coded words at the end of many a Times obituary – “He never married.”

The deaths at the music festival have serious repercussions. Within days, a treasured pre Civil War mansion, is burned to the ground. and there is a calling card from The Bastard Sons of The South, apparently a militant BLM organisation. Penn Cage, as a white man, is thrust onto the horns of a dilemma. He is white with serious influence in political circles, but he is also widely respected with the black community, both for his own integrity, and the legacy of his late father. Can he prevent a bloodbath, as the calls for revenge lead to a disastrous polarisation on the streets between black and white factions?

The conflict is not just between black and white people. America has a bewildering number of layers of law enforcement. At the apex is the FBI. Their remit extends across the nation, irrespective of state boundaries. Then we have Sheriffs, appointed by vote. They and their deputies rule the roost over large state subdivisions, known as Counties. Large towns and cities will have their own independent police departments. Last, but by no means least, are the National Guard. They are volunteers, but basically members of the armed forces, and will usually have access to military standard weapons and vehicles. In Southern Man, each one of these agencies come head to head in the streets of Natchez, while the barge-trains and freighters battle against the Mississippi current, beneath the cliff top where thousands of black peace protestors stare in the muzzles of National Guard issue AR-15 rifles.

There is a substantive second story which emerges at different times in the novel. Penn Cage’s mother has been researching her family history, and has pretty much completed it. What it reveals is that Cage and his daughter are descendants of a woman who was the product of a union between a slave owner and one his female slaves. This document allows Greg Iles to explain the complex and often contradictory relationships between slaves (before and after emancipation), and their owners. He also makes the point that the members of the victorious Union army were all too often nothing like liberating saviours.

Cage’s declining health make him rather like Tennyson’s Ulysses:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

With an increasing sense of frustration, he tries to get to the bottom of who seems to be manipulating the perilous situation on the streets, as rival groups – militant Black activists, peaceful protesters, far right militias, City police and Sheriff’s Deputies edge ever nearer to a cataclysmic explosion of violence.

Greg Iles just doesn’t take sides. He is scathing and abrasive about everything to do with the concept of the honourable South. He has little truck with historians like the late Shelby Foote, who, memorably, appeared several times in Ken Burns’ magisterial documentary The Civil War, and attempted to explain that a typical Southern Man of the Confederate era was not always a brutal redneck bent on raping and brutalising black people.

In several ways, Penn Cage mirrors the real life author.

Both lost part of a limb in a road accident.
Both had fathers who were doctors.
Both had mothers who died of cancer.
Both have a rare form of cancer.

This is a brilliant novel, for sure, which rolls a rock away, and exposes all manner of nasty creatures scurrying away from the light. Is there any room for nuance in the north v south controversy? Greg Iles doesn’t think so, and his superb writing underscores his argument. Me? I am on the fence, not because I approved of the concept of slavery, or the horrors meted out to its victims, but because when you severely punish a nation – which the South thought it was – there are unintended consequences, as The Treaty of Versailles proved in 1919. Post Appomattox 1865, a long lasting sense of grievance was born, and it has yet to die of old age. So-called White Guilt looms large in the novel, as my occasional visits to North Carolina suggest to me that it does in real life.

Aside from the politics, Iles has written a powerful and gripping book in which, despite their number, the pages fly by. The descriptions of the simmering tensions between the communities are breathtaking and apocalyptic. I only hope that in the months to come, they remain fictional. if they play out in real life, there will be a second War Between The States, and America will suffer grievously. Southern Man is published by Hemlock Press and will be out on 6th June.

June 3, 2024 0

SMOKE KINGS . . . Between the covers

Titles of books and movies can be meaningless word pairings dreamed up by twenty-something publicists. Remember the scene in one of the Naked Gun movies at the Oscars? In the Best Picture shortlist were spoof films like Naked Attraction, Violent Lunch, Fatal Affair, Final Proposal, Basic Analysis..? So, what to make of Smoke Kings? A few moments spent on Google rewarded me with a poem written in 1905 by W.E.B. Du Bois.

The writer was an activist years ahead of his time, and by adapting his words, Jahmal Mayfield nails his colours to the mast, although his Amazon bio declares that Smoke Kings was inspired by Kimberly Jones’ passionate viral video, “How can we win?” After his cousin, Darius, has been been beaten to death by white teenagers, Nate plots his revenge. Rather than taking out the boys who killed his cousin, Nate targets the descendants of white men and women who, he argues, are responsible for lynchings, racist beatings and murders committed by their grandparents decades previously. Nate and three friends – Rachel, Isiah and Joshua – exact a kind of third party vengeance on a succession of targeted individuals. Most escape death only because they commit to paying sums of money every month to deserving causes in the black community.

Inevitably, the quartet bite off more than they can chew. One of their reprieved victims hires a former cop – Mason Farmer- on a ‘seek and destroy’ mission. He is freshly sacked from a private security firm after he fails to tick the right number of boxes on their Inclusion and Diversity check list, and he sets out to nail the quartet of avengers.

Nate and his buddies make another serious strategic error when they kill a random redneck called Chipper, and bury him in a remote grave. Sadly for them, Chipper’s brother Samuel is the charismatic leader of a violently racist gang, and they are determined to avenge Chipper’s death.

Mayfield is at his most assured when describing the complex relationships between the four would-be avengers, and how they sometimes bicker about how black they actually are. Mason Farmer, too, has his preconceptions about race and identity tested when, while searching for Nate and company, he meets a mixed race woman – a campaigner for justice – called Elizabeth, and falls for her, despite her antipathy towards him. Farmer’s attitudes towards race and identity are already complicated, as his estranged daughter has a son by a black father.

The racist gang term themselves The Righteous Boys: they are deeply unpleasant, and live even worse lives:
“He drove on into the night, past fields of wild grass, old farmhouse buildings slumping like stacks of damp cardboard boxes, useless tractor equipment rusted the colour of dirty bricks. A forgotten and desolate wasteland. No wonder The Righteous Boys had chosen to call the area home.”

I read the novel pretty much back to back with re-reading a couple of Harlem Detectives novels by Chester Himes, and it left me wondering if someone had written A Rage In Harlem or The Real Cool Killers today, whether or not anyone would publish them, such is the glee with which Himes portrays the eccentricities and sometimes deeply venal nature of some of the characters. Smoke Kings is very different, as there is little ambiguity about where good and evil reside. The narrative of the book raises all kinds of very contemporary questions about ancestral guilt, both on an individual and national level. Smoke Kings is a breathless journey down the bumpy track that leads to revenge, and is published by Melville House, available now.

February 8, 2024 0

WHEN GHOSTS COME HOME . . . Between the covers

Wiley Cash lives in North Carolina, and I reviewed his first two novels, A Land More Kind Than Home (2013) and This Dark Road To Mercy (2014). Both had an intense, brooding quality. The first was more of a literary novel but the second – while still thoughtful and haunting – sat more comfortably in the crime genre. You can read my interview with Wiley Cash here.

His latest novel is set, once again, in the writer’s home state. It is 1984 and Winston Barnes is the Sheriff of Oak Island, a town on the state’s southern-facing coastline. It’s separated from the mainland by the Intracoastal Waterway. Barnes is sixty, he is up for re-election and faces a wealthy and brash challenger who has money to burn on his election campaign. In the small hours of an autumn morning Barnes and his wife – who is suffering from cancer – are woken by the sound of an aircraft apparently heading for the island’s tiny airstrip. Barnes knows that something is wrong, as no legitimate aircraft would be flying in the dead of night. When he reaches the airstrip his flashlight reveals two things: a ditched aircraft, much larger than those the facility can safely handle, and a man, recently shot dead. The aircraft is devoid of clues as to its origin, and any fingerprints have been wiped. The corpse is, however, less mysterious. It is the twenty-something son of a local black teacher, and civil-rights activist.

What starts as merely a bad day for Barnes turns into a nightmare. His daughter Colleen, who lives in Dallas with her lawyer husband, and who is mourning a still-born child, turns up unannounced, an emotional wreck. The ditched aircraft case is summarily handed over to the FBI, and the local rednecks (including Barnes’s rival in the upcoming election) assume that the aircraft was carrying a drug shipment from South America, and that Rodney Bellamy – the murdered man – was part of the deal. Consequently, they turn up in the dead of night at Bellamy’s home, in their pick-up trucks, flaunting Confederate flags and shooting guns into the air.

Barnes knows that he unless he can cool hot heads, he is going to have a race war on his hands. No-one sitting here in Britain reading this can have the remotest idea of the intensity of the emotions stirred up in the southern states of America by the matter of race. There’s a vivid depiction of the issue in the Penn Cage novels by Greg Iles, and you read more about them by clicking this link. I have family in North Carolina and know – from a relatively recent visit – that public institutions are at great pains to distance themselves from the past. The whole business of statue-toppling and contemporary apologies for what some see as past offences is a contentious one. But this novel is set in 1984, almost four decades ago, and Wiley Cash paints a haunting picture of a community where the past still collides violently with the present.

Winston Barnes still has a murder to solve, and against the background of his wife’s illness and the mental fragility of his daughter, he has to summon up all his resolve to keep things on an even keel. The FBI sends a qualified pilot and engineer, Tom Groom, up from Florida to repair the aircraft’s damaged landing gear and fly it out so the the Oak Island airstrip can resume business. Barnes is asked to put Groom up for a few nights as the local hotels are all closed for the winter. Colleen, after meeting Groom, has a sixth sense that something is not quite right.

Wiley Cash is at his best when describing the complex social history of his home state, and the ways in which it affects families and relationships, and he is on good form here. Where the book didn’t work so well, for me at least, was in the ending. In literally two and a half pages, everything we thought we knew about what was happening on Oak Island is turned violently on its head. Abrupt? Yes. Enigmatic? Certainly. There’s no rule that says every plot has to end neatly tied up like a parcel with every question answered, and many readers may enjoy the ambiguity at the end of this book. You could say that Cash (right) gives us the dots and leaves it up to us how we join them up. When Ghosts Come Home is published by Faber and Faber, and is available now in Kindle and paperback. The hardback is due in February 2022.

October 31, 2021 0

THE AMERICAN SOUTH . . . A Crime Fiction Odyssey (4): The Natchez Trilogy by Greg Iles

Greg Iles was born in Stuttgart where his father ran the US Embassy medical clinic. When the family returned to the States they settled in Natchez, Mississippi. While studying at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Iles stayed in a cottage where Caroline ‘Callie’ Barr Clark once lived. Callie was William Faulkner’s ‘Mammy Callie’ and different versions of her appear in several of Faulkner’s books. Iles began writing novels in 1993, with a historical saga about the enigmatic Nazi Rudolf Hess, and has written many stand-alone thrillers, but it is his epic trilogy of novels set in Natchez which, in my view, set him apart from anyone else who has ever written in the Southern Noir genre.

Natchez, Mississippi. Just under 16,000 souls. A small town with a big history. It perches on a bluff above the Mississippi River, and some folk reckon they can still hear the ghosts of paddle steamers chunking away down there on the swirling brown waters. The central character in Natchez Burning, The Bone Tree and Mississippi Blood is Penn Cage. Cage is the classic enlightened white liberal character of Southern Noir. His background is privileged; his father, Tom, is a doctor who is hugely respected by the black community in the area for his colour blind approach to his vocation. Medical bills too numerous to mention have been written off over the years, and Cage senior is the closest thing to a living saint but, of course, he is regarded with a mixture of fear, distrust and loathing by Natchez residents who still hang portraits of Robert E Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest in their hallways. Penn says of him:

enn Cage, though, has made his own money. He is a hugely successful author, long-time DA for the County and now, after a bitter political struggle, The Mayor of Natchez. He has made many enemies in his rise to fame, not the least of which are the corrupt Sheriff Byrd and the deeply ambitious and oleaginous public prosecutor Shadrach Johnson. Cage is not without his own ghosts, however, and he is haunted by the death of his wife Sarah, crippled and then tortured by cancer. He has, however, established an unofficial second marriage with the campaigning journalist, Caitlin Masters.

The politically correct and socially comfortable world inhabited by Penn Cage and his family is about to suffer a brutal invasion. Hidden deep at the end of the rutted dirt road which leads away from the relatively polite discourse between liberals and conservatives in Natchez society, is a dark and dangerous place occupied by a group of men known as the Double Eagles. They are united by a bitterness provoked by their view that the Ku Klux Klan went soft. Their anger, however, was not limited to tearful and rancorous drinking sessions around some backwoods table, but was the match that lit the gunpowder trail to a devastating explosion of focused violence which resulted in the assassinations of the three Ks – Kennedy, Kennedy – and King.

f course, Iles takes a great risk here. We know – or think we know – who killed these three men. But do we? Iles is confident and fluent enough to turn history on its head and present a credible alternative truth. While the Double Eagles are concerned with matters of national importance, they also have time for vicious local issues. The bombshell which threatens to reduce to ruins the cosy edifice of the Cage family, is that Tom Cage fell in love with a black nurse who worked for him, fathered a son by her, but then sat back and watched as she fled north to Chicago in disgrace. When she returns to Natchez to die, riddled by cancer, what she and Tom Cage knew – and did – about the malevolent Double Eagles back in the day becomes a public shit-storm.

The Bone Tree is a terrible place. Deep in a snake and gator-infested swamp it is an ancient cypress tree where generations of slave owners and white supremacists have taken their black victims and executed them, For Tom Cage’s nurse, Viola Turner, it is a place of nightmares, because under its rotten and gnarled branches her brother was tortured, mutilated and executed.

Tom Cage is accused of mercy killing Viola. Unwilling to face the public disgrace, he goes on te run with a couple of a trusted former Korean War buddy, and they outwit the authorities for a time. Eventually, Tom Cage is captured and put on trial for murder. He refuses the help of his son and, instead, relies on the charismatic courtroom presence of Quentin Avery, a celebrated black lawyer. Mississippi Blood contains one of the best courtroom scenes I have ever read. I realise this feature is 700 words in with not a critical word, but each of the three novels is a lengthy read by any standards, being well north of 600 pages in each case.

o why are the books so good? Penn Cage is a brilliant central character and, of course, he is politically, morally and socially ‘a good man’. His personal tragedies evoke sympathy, but also provide impetus for the things he says and does. Some might criticise the lack of nuance in the novels; there is no moral ambiguity – characters are either venomous white racists or altruistic liberals. Maybe the real South isn’t that simple; perhaps there are white communities who are blameless and tolerant and shrink in revulsion from dark deeds committed by fearsome ex-military psychopaths who seek to restore a natural order that died a century earlier.

The world of crime fiction – peopled by writers. readers, publishers and critics – is overwhelmingly progressive, liberal minded and sympathetic to persecuted minorities, and so it should be. It is probably just as well, however, that embittered, dispossessed and marginalised white communities in Mississippi, Texas. Louisiana and other heartlands of The South are not great CriFi readers. Penn Cage fights a battle that definitely needs fighting. Greg Iles has given Cage a voice, and has written a majestic trilogy which sets in stone the chapter and verse about generations of Southern people whose hands drip blood and guilt in equal measure. Maybe the moral perspective is very one-sided, and perhaps the books pose as many questions as they answer, but for sheer readability, authenticity and narrative drive, Natchez Burning, The Bone Tree and Mississippi Blood have laid down a literary challenge which will probably never be answered.

May 12, 2019 0

THE AMERICAN SOUTH . . . A Crime Fiction Odyssey (2): Tropes, Tribes and Trauma

n opening word or three about the taxonomy of some of the crime fiction genres I am investigating in these features. Noir has an urban and cinematic origin – shadows, stark contrasts, neon lights blinking above shadowy streets and, in people terms, the darker reaches of the human psyche. Authors and film makers have always believed that grim thoughts, words and deeds can also lurk beneath quaint thatched roofs, so we then have Rural Noir, but this must exclude the kind of cruelty carried out by a couple of bad apples amid a generally benign village atmosphere. So, no Cosy Crime, even if it is set in the Southern states, such as Peaches and Scream, one of the Georgia Peach mysteries by Susan Furlong, or any of the Lowcountry novels of Susan M Boyer. Gothic – or the slightly tongue-in-cheek Gothick – will take us into the realms of the fantastical, the grotesque, and give us people, places and events which are just short of parody. So we can have Southern Noir and Southern Gothic, but while they may overlap in places, there are important differences.

I believe there are just two main tropes in Southern Noir and they are closely related psychologically as they both spring from the same historical source, the war between the states 1861 – 1865, and the seemingly endless fallout from those bitter four years. Despite having a common parent the two tropes are, literally, of different colours. The first is set very firmly in the white community, where the novelists find deprivation, a deeply tribal conservativism, and a malicious insularity which has given rise to a whole redneck sub-genre in music, books and film, with its implications of inbreeding, stupidity and a propensity for violence.

eal-life rural poverty in the South was by no means confined to former slaves and their descendants. In historical fact, poor white farmers in the Carolinas, for example, were often caught up in a vicious spiral of borrowing from traders and banks against the outcome of their crop; when time came for payback, they were often simply back to zero, or thrown off the land due to debt. The rich seam of dirt poor and embittered whites who turn to crime in their anger and resentment has been very successfully mined by novelists. Add a touch of fundamentalist Christianity into the pot and we have a truly toxic stew, such as in Wiley Cash’s brilliant A Land More Kind Than Home (2013).

No-one did sadistic and malevolent ‘white trash’ better than Jim Thompson. His embittered, cunning and depraved small town Texas lawman Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me (1952) is one of the scariest characters in crime fiction, although it must be said that Thompson’s bad men – and women – were not geographically confined to the South.

lthough not classed as a crime writer, Flannery O’Connor write scorching stories about the kind of moral vacuum into which she felt Southern people were sucked. She said, well aware of the kind of lurid voyeurism with which her home state of Georgia was viewed by some:

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Her best known novel, Wiseblood (1952) contains enough bizarre, horrifying and eccentric elements to qualify as Gothick. Take a religiously obsessed war veteran, a profane eighteen-year-old zookeeper, prostitutes, a man in a gorilla costume stabbed to death with an umbrella, and a corpse being lovingly looked after by his former landlady, you have what has been described as a work of “low comedy and high seriousness”

There are a couple of rather individual oddities on the Fully Booked website, both slanted towards True Crime, but drenched through with Southern sweat, violence and the peculiar horrors of the US prison system. The apparently autobiographical stories by Roy Harper were apparently smuggled out of the notorious Parchman Farm and into the hands of an eager publisher. Make of that what you will, but the books are compellingly lurid. Merle Temple’s trilogy featuring the rise and fall of Michael Parker, a Georgia law enforcement officer, comprises A Ghostly Shade of Pale, A Rented World and The Redeemed. I only found out after reading and reviewing the books that they too are personal accounts.

The second – and more complex (and controversial) trope in Southern Noir is the tortuous relationship between white people both good and bad, and people of colour. My examination of this will follow soon.

May 8, 2019 0