Frank Lewis is a middle-aged Bridgeport, New Jersey, clerk not at
all interested in any large issues connected with the fact that he
is black. But in a black-history book intended as a birthday
present for his 18-year-old son, he finds a haunting picture of a
1937 lynching in Louisiana. The hanging, bloodied corpse is, he
learns, his own father. Frank's burning, relentless search for his
own roots in what was once the harshly segregated American South is
to be his education as a Louisiana black. Charters has written ten
volumes of music history, most of them about jazz and the blues, as
well as books of poetry and criticism and two novels, Mr. Jabi and
Mr. Smythe and Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn.
Here. although the novel is fundamentally a carefully drawn-out
short story without complications outside the central plot, the
contemporary South, with all the deep shifts in custom and attitude
that have occurred since the lynch-stained 30's, is beautifully
evoked. Frank's formless terrors, part imagined, part half. knoWn
from family tales, are real. And the clash of his determination to
uncover the truth about his father's brutal murder with the
confused defensiveness of those who might know that truth is
convincingly nightmarish. What his Black Power brother Jimmy can
never tell him, and what his white girlfriend, Inez, can never help
him to know he has to find out in Louisiana for himself and by
himself. A rich, and frightening story of a contemporary black
sensibility trying to repossess a bloodied family history. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Frank Lewis, a complacent, middle-class Black, is roused to action
when he recognizes a photograph of a lynched Black man in his son's
history book as that of his father.
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