Eleanor Henderson's The Twelve Mile Straight

My sister and I were chatting on the phone last night when I mentioned that it had been a while since a new novel had really grabbed me. We both tend to the dark side in our reading but still I warned her that the book that had me at hello begins with a lynching. She said she was reading one that begins with a lynching. Sure enough...."The Twelve Mile Straight" held us both in thrall.

 

I kept asking myself, how could a writing professor from Ithaca College create such an evocative sense of place as 1920's rural Georgia. I went to Henderson's website for answers (http://eleanor-henderson.com/) and discovered that this amazing novel was informed by the lives of her father and grandparents who were sharecroppers in Ben Hill County, Georgia, during the same time frame.

Eleanor Henderson's outstanding book has much to say about the sin of silence. When Elma Jesup, the white daughter of a sharecropper in fictional Cotton County, Georgia, supposedly gives birth to twins, one black and one white, it is her silence that condemns Genus Jackson, the black farmhand accused of rape.

How else, town folk wonder, could Elma be carrying the white child of her fiancé, Freddie Wilson, who never intended marriage and now had a perfect out, and a black child too. Reporters from as far away as Atlanta flock to Cotton County to write about this miracle, doctors beg to study the twins, and the only people who know the truth remain steadfastly silent.

 Only a writer of considerable talent could turn this fantastical premise into a heartbreaking story about the interwoven lives of poor black and white southerners working the farms together to create wealth for the landowners. She exposes a precarious hierarchy of power. The Wilson family rules the county, the police, the politicians, even the local physician, Dr. Rawls, who keeps his practice afloat by performing abortions for the naïve young women who came to town to labor in Wilson's cotton mills.

Carrying the story are two marvelously drawn characters. Elma's mother died in childbirth so she is raised by the black midwife and housekeeper, Ketty, whose daughter Nan grows up as Elma's sister. Though Nan reads and writes and learns the trade of midwifery too, the balance of power between Nan and Elma is a constant. You see, Nan literally has no tongue, and though she and Elma have developed a nuanced means of communication, there are many times over the course of their lives together when the white girl, speaking for the black girl, gets it horribly wrong.

There are too many villains to count in Henderson's novel, yet she manages to imbue even the worst of these with a semblance of humanity. One especially powerful scene comes to mind. Elma's father Juke is in a jail cell awaiting trial for his part in the lynching of Genus Jackson. He is comforted by the sounds of gospel singing, low and strong, coming from the black woman in the adjoining cell. Later he hears her cries of anguish as she is raped by the jailer, so he sings a lullaby for her. In this one paragraph Henderson brilliantly opens a place in our hearts for forgiveness.

This strong novel, perfect for sophisticated book clubs, delves into the polio epidemic with a guest appearance from then Governor of New York Franklin Roosevelt, sickle cell disease and the dearth of funding for research, homosexuality, misogyny, class inequity, and of course, racism. At the same time this novel is a paean to the strength and resilience of women in particular, but to all who are victimized by the evil of discrimination in its many forms.