Here is a novel that gains its power from the assumed authenticity of its portrayal, its attention to details of daily life, and its supposed basis in historical events. Despite writing that is at times powerful and provocative, the book is ultimately a fraud, as much for its phony depiction of Black helplessness and white helpfulness - as for its mistelling of history.

The novel is based on the killing of Emmett Till by white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955. The killing is at the beginning of the novel, and the rest of the story makes up the lives of those involved from 1955 to the present.

The real lynching

The Supreme Court had just released the Brown v. Board of Education decision that supposedly ended school segregation, and the white yahoos of Mississippi were pissed. They lynched Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black man from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. On a dare from friends, he had called a white woman in rural Mississippi "babe" after bragging about a white girlfriend up North. A few days later, he was abducted from his family's home, driven around and threatened for hours, beaten and finally shot. His body was found several days later in a nearby river, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire, his testicles cut off, his head crushed, and one eye gouged out.(1)

A white man's jury - who in real life (though not in the novel) drank beer in the jury box - returned a verdict of not guilty against the known perpetrators after an hour's deliberation.

Campbell moderates the lynching markedly. Her Till ("Armstrong Todd") is beaten and then shot right in the yard of his relatives. His body is not sexually mutilated or dumped in the river; he is not taunted and terrorized for hours.

Campbell is intent on humanizing all the players in the story, on making them real and likeable. She even paints the murderer himself as an emasculated poor white man who really only gets dragged into the crime by his goading older brother - a brother who has always held his father's attention more, who always seemed to do everything right.

While Campbell's murderer is dirt poor and only gets poorer after the crime, the real criminal was paid $4,000 by a white journalist to tell the true story after the trial, an event that doesn't fit into Campbell's scheme of things.

The killer's helpless wife, a crucial martyr in the story, is also a kindly and likeable woman, who really wants to be friends with Black people. Everything she says and does toward them is friendly except that she says "nigger" a lot. She is abused by her husband (not unlikely) and eventually moves in with her daughter, who by the 1980s is an integrationist labor activist.

In this depiction, the only benefit gained by white women from lynching and white supremacy is a fleeting sense of importance that is quickly dwarfed by guilt and humiliation. In words right out of a women's studies textbook, the white women in this story wake up and realize that white men don't lynch for them, but for themselves. This is to make clear that white women are really in the same boat as Blacks, and just need to get over some cultural barriers before getting down to some serious integration.

In real life, however, white women gain a whole system of privilege by virtue of their position on the elevated end of white-supremacist chivalry - even as they remain subordinate to the white men who wield the whips.

Perhaps worse, however, is Campbell's transformation of Blacks into emotion- dominated victims incapable of rational collective action. Local Blacks and national organizations, and even family members, militantly fought the Till lynching and others like it. Till's cousin's grandmother put her body between the lynch mob and the young man, before she was knocked out by a shotgun butt - an incident that also doesn't make it into the book. Because rather than take advantage of that militant history to turn the novel into an inspiring tribute to their heroic efforts, Campbell writes it out of the story to create needy and self-absorbed Blacks.

Till's mother, Mamie Till, fought to have an open-casket funeral for her son, so his mutilated body would be a signal to the world. In the novel, she sneaks his body out of town under cover of night.

Mamie Till spent several years touring and speaking on her son's death. In the book she becomes a recluse who devotes herself more than anything else to replacing her son. The most public thing she does is show up at memorials for her son and cry.

Black effort betrayed

In 1955, Medgar Evers of the NAACP and other anti-lynching activists dressed as sharecroppers to talk to local Blacks and collect evidence to be used at a trial, at great personal risk. They also worked to drum up support from the Black press to get the case publicized.

But in the novel a single white journalist, who happens to be the son of a rich plantation owner, takes it on himself to call the New York press and convince them to send reporters, which sparks nationwide press attention.

The kind-hearted liberal goes on to spend thousands of dollars helping local Blacks over the rest of his life, and even runs a small school out of his office. The white journalist who in real life paid the murderers $4,000 for their story somehow doesn't make it into the novel.

In the end, Campbell's Blacks emerge as weak and disorganized, incapable of escaping personal angst and their own rage in the face of overwhelming oppression.

Campbell is too concerned about bringing the Blacks and whites in the story back together to pay attention to the historical imperatives of the period and the events she treats. Historical fiction can be a great tool for changing reality. But in this case readers who want to learn from history would be better advised to read factual accounts and devote their imaginations - and their efforts - to making a better future more reality than fiction.

Notes:
1. This account of the killing is from Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam 1990. pp. 1-15. And from Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press 1984. p. 29.

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