The Voice at the Back Door - A Novel (Paperback)

A novel with backbone, which may well serve ?? regard for the South and her struggles in the throes of racism, also centers about politics- ambitious and altruistic- in a small town in Mississippi. When Travis Brevard is shot down and dies, he gives his badge temporarily to Duncan Harper, one time football hero who now intends to carry the ball for a much larger team which includes the Negroes. Determined to stand or fall on an anti-liquor, pro-Negro equality platform, he works fast to crack down on illicit bootlegging operated by Jimmy Tallant. When a Negro veteran, ??Beck, to whom Jimmy is strangely attached by an inherited guilt, is noticed on the scene of Jimmy's shooting, the town refuses to listen to Jimmy's assurances of Beck's innocence and demands his blood. Duncan loses his life to keep Beck safe from the crowd which his own best friend, Kerney Woolbright, in a pathetic default to ambition, has turned against Duncan. Kerney Woolbright is thus assured of his election as state senator, and by other means of marriage to the girl of the right family, but his treachery separates him forever from those who loved Duncan-his wife Tinker and his mistress. The resolution is not wholly bitter for Jimmy Tallant grows to stature as Duncan's successor in love and public spirit. There is also a sense of the family feeling in the relations of contemporaries in an ingrown town from which only one person revolts but returns to play out her role. There is clarity of narrative and characterization here and it is a deserving and rewarding book. (Kirkus Reviews)

In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret.

In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice -- one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers -- finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect -- Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.

General

Imprint:	Louisiana State University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Voices of the South
Release date:	March 1994
First published:	March 1994
Authors:	Elizabeth Spencer
Dimensions:	216 x 140 x 24mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	367
ISBN-13:	978-0-8071-1927-3
Categories:	Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > Modern fiction
LSN:	0-8071-1927-X
Barcode:	9780807119273

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