Rather, it's a call to the white community for repentance and self-examination, to the black community to cultivate forgiveness without condoning wrong, and to everybody to extend our borders of love to the whole human community. But this is not a propaganda piece aiming to stoke the fires of angry racial grievance and reverse racism. :-( So protagonist Alena's world in 1919 here remains very relevant to ours in the 2020s. And while some things have obviously changed for the better in the more than a century that has elapsed since the time re-created here, sadly, in a great many minds and hearts there hasn't been much if any change. Foster casts an unsparing floodlight on the whole mentality of racial hatred and white supremacy, and the starkly ugly ways in which it expresses itself. Obviously, racial relations and attitudes are at the heart of this novel. In a plot that's set mainly from the late spring to the early fall of 1919 (the final chapter takes place in the following year) the lives of the author's fictional characters unfold against a real-life background of rampant lynching of blacks and of the racial riots during what history would remember as the "Red Summer." Evangelical Christian author Sharon Ewell Foster became the first (and so far only) African-American writer to win the Christy Award for this powerful historical novel, set just after World War I in rural Jim Crow MIssissippi and in Chicago (also not a paradise of racial brotherhood).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |