Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.
When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. If you want to read a dramatic and persuasive retelling of Emmett Till’s tragic story, you’d do better to go to the history books.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Even the most sympathetic reader will be turned off by Black’s appetite for overkill. The (understandably) righteous anger is swollen beyond credibility by spasms of lurid violence and feverish fantasies of racial war.
The “army” marches into Money, faces down the town’s white populace and, in an exceedingly lame climactic scene, receives the demanded “apology,” then leaves, persuaded “that the war was not over, but…also, now, that they could win.” The book is a sermon, weakened by theme-driven editorializing (e.g., “Clement entered the General Store with an entitlement unknown to Mississippi Negroes in 1955”). Jeremiah calls a “town meetin’ ” in his barn, and he organizes local black families into an “army” that challenges their white oppressors, aided by the (very strange) efforts of guilty white liberal Edgar Rosenthal, who-as an almost unbelievably awkward subplot reveals-means to atone for having wronged a black fellow college student decades ago. In a melodramatic narrative hamstrung by numerous flashbacks, racist monster Sheriff Billy Ray Cuthbert assembles a posse and “avenges” Clement’s offense. When teenaged Clement-who’s visiting his mother’s sharecropper relatives, the Johnsons, in Money, Miss.-sasses a lady store clerk, Clement’s cousins fear the worst-as does their family’s stoical patriarch Jeremiah, who bears into old age the scars of a painful legacy of oppression, rape, murder and suicide.
The Kansas City author’s second novel ( They Tell Me of a Home, 2005) is based on the story of Emmett Till, a northern black boy who in 1955 “disrespected” a southern white woman, and paid for his impudence with his life.
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