Review: Alex Cross's Trial
Title: Alex Cross's Trial by James Patterson
Pages: 380 pages
Rating: Whatever the lowest rating that this group gives is. I'm not sure if it's 0 or 1.
Genre: Courtroom drama/historical novel
This book fails at life.
First of all, the title? False advertising. Alex Cross, Patterson's favorite lead character, is NOT on trial, which was the notion that got me to pick it up in the first place. No, this is allegedly an trial that Cross is writing about, and which supposedly took place during the lives of two of Cross's ancestors.
But--and this is the important bit--although the story is supposed to be about Abraham Cross and his daughter Moody, the story is not about them but about a white lawyer named Ben Corbett. Ben Corbett spends his days and nights defending poor and black defendants pro bono. This means that Ben and his family are Hollywood Poor; they live in a bungalow in a lower-middle-class neighborhood instead of in a Victorian mansion and have no problem paying for carriages, servants and pretty dresses for the little Corbett girls. (Oh noes! Can we stand the horror?) In accordance with fictional genetics, one girl looks exactly like her mother and the other exactly like her father--presumably without a penis--and yet both manage to be attractive if not drop-dead gorgeous.
Also, despite being an obscure criminal lawyer who defends the poor and politically unimportant, Corbett served alongside Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. I feel the need to point out that there were about 1,250 volunteers in the 1st Cavalry Brigade (the brigade that became known as the Rough Riders) and that since Roosevelt was a Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel after the man who was in charge left to assume command of another brigade, it's highly unlikely that he would have been hanging around with the dogfaces.
Anyway. Colonel Roosevelt, now president of the United States (putting the book's range between September 14, 1901 and March 4, 1909), is aware of a number of lynchings taking place in the South. Second historical fail--lynchings have taken place EVERYWHERE in America--the South, the Midwest, the West and yes, in the North. Naturally, he's picked Ben Corbett to go down South--to his hometown of Eudora, Mississippi, in fact--and report on lynchings and Klan activities down yonder.
ETA: ravenclaw_eric pointed out,"The modern version of the Klan was not founded till 1915, in Georgia, and wasn't any kind of a really big deal until after World War I. The Reconstruction Klan was dissolved after ca. 1877." All of which is true. Patterson even admits that the Klan has been officially disbanded. However, it is his allegation that the Klan has continued to exist anyway. I have no clue if this premise, without which the rest of the book would not work, is even plausible.
Oh, and Roosevelt has appointed a black man named Abraham Cross to work with Ben down in Eudora. This necessitates the two of them spending a fair amount of time together talking, eating, socializing, etc. This, of course, doesn't worry Ben at all, for despite the fact that he grew up in the deep South around the 1880s and 1890s, he seems to be completely ignorant of what was customary or even legal in his own town or in his own time period.
And just to show us that Ben is a good guy and black at heart, we're told that he likes ethnic food and ragtime music. Because that's all there is to being black in America. Moody Cross is the only one who doesn't buy it, telling Ben and by extension the reader that he's never going to be black no matter how hard he tries.
In my opinion, he doesn't try very hard. Ben Corbett is the quintessence of the Mighty Whitey trope--the white male hero who comes crashing in and who assumes that he just has to save those poor minorities who, goshdarnit, just can't get out of their own way and solve their own problems with aggression and weapons, because THAT wouldn't have occurred to minority people at all.
Anyway, Ben noses around for a while. The town is remarkably forbearing about Ben's ignorance about certain facts of life--like, oh, the Klan's existence despite being outlawed and the fact that just about every man in the town of Eudora is a member. Corbett's own father, a judge, is a sympathizer, if not a member. You would think Ben would have absorbed awareness of the Klan's virtual omnipresence with his baby food, but no.
Ben Corbett appears to have grown up in a bubble. He gives the impression of being a time traveler who has gone back to the early 20th century with no awareness of what it is like. Even after he is taken to a Klan meeting by the best friend of his boyhood, who is now a Klansman, witnesses a Jewish accountant being lynched by every man in town and is then lynched himself and left for dead, he still refuses to believe that the Klansmen are lynching people because they WANT to lynch people. He manages to convince himself that there are only a few people behind this and they're forcing all the others in Eudora (and Mississippi, and presumably the country) to participate in all these lynchings because 99% of the Klan is too darned scared of the few pulling the strings to say no.
In other words, the bigots are merely victims who are being manipulated and are not responsible for their own choices or their own actions.
But wait! It gets BETTER.
Abraham Cross gets sick. Don't ask me why, he just comes down with a bad case of Fifteen Minutes to Live. It's stated that there are no doctors in the area who care for black patients, but Moody doesn't think of an alternative, like calling local women who are good at healing to find out what's wrong. No, she just fusses over her dying father. (Or, sometimes, grandfather. The text is unclear on that.) As Abraham lies dying, a group of five men called the "White Raiders" shows up ready to lynch a cousin of Moody's named Ricky who allegedly looked at a white woman and was thinking "dirty thoughts." "Guess some white men can tell what we're thinking," Moody says to an amazed Ben, who doesn't know what to make of this. (Personally, I was amazed that Ben was amazed. And that Moody found it worth commenting on. To me, both of these things rang false.)
Ricky isn't at Abraham's, but that doesn't matter; the White Raiders are just as happy to shoot Abraham, Moody and Ben. Things don't go quite as planned, however. One of the Raiders falls off of Abraham's roof and breaks his neck. A second grabs Moody around the neck with one arm and starts feeling her up with the other; Moody stabs him in the back. Ben goes charging outside, spots the sheriff--who, by now, it's been established, is a loyal Klansman who thinks that one law for whites and another for blacks is just ginger-peachy--and demands that the sheriff arrest the other three Raiders for attempted murder.
Which, believe it or not, the sheriff DOES.
Yeah. A loyal member of the Klan arrested three men who think just like he does on the say-so of a white man who defends blacks in court for a living and two black people, one of whom just stabbed one of the Raiders to death.
And he does this before Ben tells him that Theodore Roosevelt sent him to investigate. Because--and this is stated in the text--just for a moment, the sheriff realized what the law meant to him and it didn't matter who was making the accusation.
The sheriff, amazingly, is not subsequently fired or killed for his actions. Nor is Moody Cross, then or ever, arrested for manslaughter or murder. Because a black woman in the deep South in a town known for lynching blacks could completely get away with stabbing a white man to death. That was when I realized that we had left the world as we know it and had entered Pattersonland.
Well, no one wants the trial to go forward, but it does, presumably because everyone thinks that Teddy Roosevelt wants it to. No one even tries to find a legal excuse as to why it can't go forward, which lawyers and judges come up with all the time in every trial. Nope, there are no objections at all. And we get our second indication that we are now in Pattersonland when Roosevelt sends one Jonah Curtis to prosecute the case. Jonah is, of course, a black man.
It's not that Jonah's black and practicing law; the first African-American to be admitted to a state bar was Macon Bolling Allen. To quote from The Law Museum: "In July of 1844, the state of Maine gave him citizenship and license to practice as an attorney...[and] on May 5, 1845, Judge Merrick of the Boston Municipal Court endorsed his 'certificate of competency to practise as an attorney and counselor at law in the courts of Massachusetts'."
The problem is that Jonah is a black man who, between 1901 and 1909, apparently works for the federal government (Roosevelt has authority to appoint him, though why I'm not sure, as the case is tried in Eudora's town court, not in federal court) and is recognized by the state of Mississippi as an attorney.
To find a situation that's more or less analogous, the first black man to serve as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Mississippi since Reconstruction was Tyree Irving. He was hired by the Northern District of Mississippi in 1978.
Let me repeat that date. NINETEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT.
Patterson is not even trying.
So the trial goes forward, and Ben continues to be amazed that bigots and relatives of the men on trial are appointed to the jury (given that everyone in this town was a bigot and most people seemed to be cousins, I couldn't see how else it would work out) and that his bigoted father is appointed as judge over the trial. Which makes no frelling sense, as Judge Corbett, for all his snobbish airs, seems pretty low on the judicial hierarchy. Corbett tries traffic cases. And small claims cases between neighbors. Newsflash, Patterson: Corbett is a judge of a small-town CIVIL court, not the judge of a county or state CRIMINAL court. His court doesn't have jurisdiction.
No one ever, ever, notices this.
The trial, which made me think that Patterson did his research by watching the movie Inherit the Wind, lurches forward, despite the fact that the prosecution has no evidence beyond eyewitness testimony. The defense produces a fake warrant that says that the sheriff and his duly appointed deputies had a right to search the house and were attacked by the Crosses. Curtis does not ask why the Crosses found it necessary to attack these men, or why they felt themselves to be in danger, or, for that matter, why the Raiders were searching ABRAHAM Cross's house when RICKY Cross does not live with them. He doesn't try punching holes in their story at all. He does try objecting to a lot of what the defense attorney says, but Judge Corbett just overrules him no matter what.
Ben, that brilliant attorney, then gets an idea. He and one of his friends will break into the photography offices of Scooter Williams, who takes pictures of every single lynching, and steal the photos and the negatives. Then he will bring the stolen pictures into court as evidence.
Oh, let me count the ways in which this is wrong.
First off--stolen pictures = inadmissible. Ben is an attorney. He should know this. Second, even if they weren't stolen, the grisly pictures are horrible, yes, and they are certainly proof that lynching exists, which is what Roosevelt wanted Ben to find...but they aren't evidence of anything in this case. They DO prove that the men who went to the Crosses' house had attended lynchings. But they don't prove that these men went to the Crosses' to commit a lynching OR that they attacked the Crosses with intent to commit murder, and any first-year law student would argue as much...if the pictures weren't considered prejudicial to the jury and thrown out of the evidence list during preparations for the trial.
Anyway, Ben is more stupid than usual and tells the woman who he had a crush on when they were both little that he's going to commit breaking and entering and theft. The woman tells her husband, a state senator, and the senator tells Scooter. Ben and his friend are caught and the pictures are burned. Nothing happens to Ben and Friend, of course. It's not like they were caught committing a crime or anything.
Moody is called to the stand and perjures herself by saying that yes, the Raiders had a search warrant and she agreed to let them in, and my goodness, she doesn't know WHY they attacked after that. Ben thinks that this changes everything because now the official story isn't that the Crosses fought men who were performing their legal duty, but that the Crosses acted like good citizens and admitted the representatives of the law, who then attacked them. He seems unaware that a) the stories the Crosses told and that the Raiders told would have been recorded in the briefs both sides filed with the court, so changing the story now would raise all kinds of questions about "Why are you changing your story? Were you lying then or are you lying now?", b) the Crosses probably WOULDN'T be viewed as citizens at all, or at the very most not citizens the equal of whites, c) there is STILL no physical evidence that proves that the Raiders attacked the Crosses and not the Crosses the Raiders, and d) it doesn't MATTER what Moody says, because the end of this case is predetermined.
When it's time for closing arguments, Jonah Curtis tells Ben to make the closing speech. Never mind that Ben isn't listed as an attorney for the prosecution, but as a prosecution witness, and therefore has no right to make the speech.
The case finally goes to the jury, and Ben is shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you, that the Raiders are found not guilty. Because no one could have seen that one coming a mile away.
Ben then discovers that he is, surprise surprise, persona non grata in his little hometown, so he goes off to the black section, where he assumes he'll be welcome. Abraham is dying for real this time. As soon as he dies, Ben takes Moody into town, walking hand in hand with her and walking into restaurants and stores demanding that they be served. Because it's not like segregation and Jim Crow laws existed, or that an attorney would know about either. This whatever-it-is that Ben is doing culminates in his kissing Moody in public, apparently to get the townspeople pissed off. It succeeds. The whites attack that night with the intent of burning out every black in the Quarters. Mighty Whitey Ben convinces the blacks to mount an armed rebellion against the whites--after all, there's no way that THIS could lead to unpleasant backlash after he goes back to Washington.
So one guy is killed, the sheriff is almost beaten to death, and Ben has a pointless fight with his former best friend, the Klansman who got him lynched....which seems to have been the main reason that he wanted this battle to happen--to lure out Jacob Gill. And he points a gun at Jacob and then discovers that he just can't kill the man. I'm stunned. And he goes back to his wife and daughters, and the ending indicates that he lives happily ever after.
It doesn't say what happens to the blacks who attacked the whites at Ben's instigation. I presume their ending was considerably less happy.
Special mention must be made of the treatment of black civil rights leaders in this book. Leaders of the time, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells-Barnett, are mentioned, but the book doesn't say who they are or what they did. Consequently, all we have are names and no context. And in the end, they're reduced to leading a group of blacks through town, chanting. Although it's never stated, it's implied that they're doing this because that's what civil rights leaders do. It's not like they found things like the NAACP (which Du Bois did in 1909) or work as journalists for Chicago papers and write books and give lectures throughout Europe about lynching (which Wells-Barnett did starting in 1893).
This book gives the decidedly false and insulting impression that blacks did not so much need laws passed to guarantee them their rights as American citizens, but to stand up for themselves. And that they never would have stood up for themselves without a white man like Ben Corbett to push them.
I hate books like this. I hate them because they behave as if the past were just like the present, but with funny clothes, and that everything that was wrong could have been fixed by a good inoculation of 21st century values. And in doing so, they devalue the pain and suffering of the people who actually lived through those times for whom the issues were not quite so simple or clear-cut.
I especially hate such books because they claim to be historically accurate...and people will believe them.
Crossposted to gehayi and bookfails
***
Pages: 380 pages
Rating: Whatever the lowest rating that this group gives is. I'm not sure if it's 0 or 1.
Genre: Courtroom drama/historical novel
This book fails at life.
First of all, the title? False advertising. Alex Cross, Patterson's favorite lead character, is NOT on trial, which was the notion that got me to pick it up in the first place. No, this is allegedly an trial that Cross is writing about, and which supposedly took place during the lives of two of Cross's ancestors.
But--and this is the important bit--although the story is supposed to be about Abraham Cross and his daughter Moody, the story is not about them but about a white lawyer named Ben Corbett. Ben Corbett spends his days and nights defending poor and black defendants pro bono. This means that Ben and his family are Hollywood Poor; they live in a bungalow in a lower-middle-class neighborhood instead of in a Victorian mansion and have no problem paying for carriages, servants and pretty dresses for the little Corbett girls. (Oh noes! Can we stand the horror?) In accordance with fictional genetics, one girl looks exactly like her mother and the other exactly like her father--presumably without a penis--and yet both manage to be attractive if not drop-dead gorgeous.
Also, despite being an obscure criminal lawyer who defends the poor and politically unimportant, Corbett served alongside Teddy Roosevelt during the Spanish-American War. I feel the need to point out that there were about 1,250 volunteers in the 1st Cavalry Brigade (the brigade that became known as the Rough Riders) and that since Roosevelt was a Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel after the man who was in charge left to assume command of another brigade, it's highly unlikely that he would have been hanging around with the dogfaces.
Anyway. Colonel Roosevelt, now president of the United States (putting the book's range between September 14, 1901 and March 4, 1909), is aware of a number of lynchings taking place in the South. Second historical fail--lynchings have taken place EVERYWHERE in America--the South, the Midwest, the West and yes, in the North. Naturally, he's picked Ben Corbett to go down South--to his hometown of Eudora, Mississippi, in fact--and report on lynchings and Klan activities down yonder.
ETA: ravenclaw_eric pointed out,"The modern version of the Klan was not founded till 1915, in Georgia, and wasn't any kind of a really big deal until after World War I. The Reconstruction Klan was dissolved after ca. 1877." All of which is true. Patterson even admits that the Klan has been officially disbanded. However, it is his allegation that the Klan has continued to exist anyway. I have no clue if this premise, without which the rest of the book would not work, is even plausible.
Oh, and Roosevelt has appointed a black man named Abraham Cross to work with Ben down in Eudora. This necessitates the two of them spending a fair amount of time together talking, eating, socializing, etc. This, of course, doesn't worry Ben at all, for despite the fact that he grew up in the deep South around the 1880s and 1890s, he seems to be completely ignorant of what was customary or even legal in his own town or in his own time period.
And just to show us that Ben is a good guy and black at heart, we're told that he likes ethnic food and ragtime music. Because that's all there is to being black in America. Moody Cross is the only one who doesn't buy it, telling Ben and by extension the reader that he's never going to be black no matter how hard he tries.
In my opinion, he doesn't try very hard. Ben Corbett is the quintessence of the Mighty Whitey trope--the white male hero who comes crashing in and who assumes that he just has to save those poor minorities who, goshdarnit, just can't get out of their own way and solve their own problems with aggression and weapons, because THAT wouldn't have occurred to minority people at all.
Anyway, Ben noses around for a while. The town is remarkably forbearing about Ben's ignorance about certain facts of life--like, oh, the Klan's existence despite being outlawed and the fact that just about every man in the town of Eudora is a member. Corbett's own father, a judge, is a sympathizer, if not a member. You would think Ben would have absorbed awareness of the Klan's virtual omnipresence with his baby food, but no.
Ben Corbett appears to have grown up in a bubble. He gives the impression of being a time traveler who has gone back to the early 20th century with no awareness of what it is like. Even after he is taken to a Klan meeting by the best friend of his boyhood, who is now a Klansman, witnesses a Jewish accountant being lynched by every man in town and is then lynched himself and left for dead, he still refuses to believe that the Klansmen are lynching people because they WANT to lynch people. He manages to convince himself that there are only a few people behind this and they're forcing all the others in Eudora (and Mississippi, and presumably the country) to participate in all these lynchings because 99% of the Klan is too darned scared of the few pulling the strings to say no.
In other words, the bigots are merely victims who are being manipulated and are not responsible for their own choices or their own actions.
But wait! It gets BETTER.
Abraham Cross gets sick. Don't ask me why, he just comes down with a bad case of Fifteen Minutes to Live. It's stated that there are no doctors in the area who care for black patients, but Moody doesn't think of an alternative, like calling local women who are good at healing to find out what's wrong. No, she just fusses over her dying father. (Or, sometimes, grandfather. The text is unclear on that.) As Abraham lies dying, a group of five men called the "White Raiders" shows up ready to lynch a cousin of Moody's named Ricky who allegedly looked at a white woman and was thinking "dirty thoughts." "Guess some white men can tell what we're thinking," Moody says to an amazed Ben, who doesn't know what to make of this. (Personally, I was amazed that Ben was amazed. And that Moody found it worth commenting on. To me, both of these things rang false.)
Ricky isn't at Abraham's, but that doesn't matter; the White Raiders are just as happy to shoot Abraham, Moody and Ben. Things don't go quite as planned, however. One of the Raiders falls off of Abraham's roof and breaks his neck. A second grabs Moody around the neck with one arm and starts feeling her up with the other; Moody stabs him in the back. Ben goes charging outside, spots the sheriff--who, by now, it's been established, is a loyal Klansman who thinks that one law for whites and another for blacks is just ginger-peachy--and demands that the sheriff arrest the other three Raiders for attempted murder.
Which, believe it or not, the sheriff DOES.
Yeah. A loyal member of the Klan arrested three men who think just like he does on the say-so of a white man who defends blacks in court for a living and two black people, one of whom just stabbed one of the Raiders to death.
And he does this before Ben tells him that Theodore Roosevelt sent him to investigate. Because--and this is stated in the text--just for a moment, the sheriff realized what the law meant to him and it didn't matter who was making the accusation.
The sheriff, amazingly, is not subsequently fired or killed for his actions. Nor is Moody Cross, then or ever, arrested for manslaughter or murder. Because a black woman in the deep South in a town known for lynching blacks could completely get away with stabbing a white man to death. That was when I realized that we had left the world as we know it and had entered Pattersonland.
Well, no one wants the trial to go forward, but it does, presumably because everyone thinks that Teddy Roosevelt wants it to. No one even tries to find a legal excuse as to why it can't go forward, which lawyers and judges come up with all the time in every trial. Nope, there are no objections at all. And we get our second indication that we are now in Pattersonland when Roosevelt sends one Jonah Curtis to prosecute the case. Jonah is, of course, a black man.
It's not that Jonah's black and practicing law; the first African-American to be admitted to a state bar was Macon Bolling Allen. To quote from The Law Museum: "In July of 1844, the state of Maine gave him citizenship and license to practice as an attorney...[and] on May 5, 1845, Judge Merrick of the Boston Municipal Court endorsed his 'certificate of competency to practise as an attorney and counselor at law in the courts of Massachusetts'."
The problem is that Jonah is a black man who, between 1901 and 1909, apparently works for the federal government (Roosevelt has authority to appoint him, though why I'm not sure, as the case is tried in Eudora's town court, not in federal court) and is recognized by the state of Mississippi as an attorney.
To find a situation that's more or less analogous, the first black man to serve as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Mississippi since Reconstruction was Tyree Irving. He was hired by the Northern District of Mississippi in 1978.
Let me repeat that date. NINETEEN SEVENTY-EIGHT.
Patterson is not even trying.
So the trial goes forward, and Ben continues to be amazed that bigots and relatives of the men on trial are appointed to the jury (given that everyone in this town was a bigot and most people seemed to be cousins, I couldn't see how else it would work out) and that his bigoted father is appointed as judge over the trial. Which makes no frelling sense, as Judge Corbett, for all his snobbish airs, seems pretty low on the judicial hierarchy. Corbett tries traffic cases. And small claims cases between neighbors. Newsflash, Patterson: Corbett is a judge of a small-town CIVIL court, not the judge of a county or state CRIMINAL court. His court doesn't have jurisdiction.
No one ever, ever, notices this.
The trial, which made me think that Patterson did his research by watching the movie Inherit the Wind, lurches forward, despite the fact that the prosecution has no evidence beyond eyewitness testimony. The defense produces a fake warrant that says that the sheriff and his duly appointed deputies had a right to search the house and were attacked by the Crosses. Curtis does not ask why the Crosses found it necessary to attack these men, or why they felt themselves to be in danger, or, for that matter, why the Raiders were searching ABRAHAM Cross's house when RICKY Cross does not live with them. He doesn't try punching holes in their story at all. He does try objecting to a lot of what the defense attorney says, but Judge Corbett just overrules him no matter what.
Ben, that brilliant attorney, then gets an idea. He and one of his friends will break into the photography offices of Scooter Williams, who takes pictures of every single lynching, and steal the photos and the negatives. Then he will bring the stolen pictures into court as evidence.
Oh, let me count the ways in which this is wrong.
First off--stolen pictures = inadmissible. Ben is an attorney. He should know this. Second, even if they weren't stolen, the grisly pictures are horrible, yes, and they are certainly proof that lynching exists, which is what Roosevelt wanted Ben to find...but they aren't evidence of anything in this case. They DO prove that the men who went to the Crosses' house had attended lynchings. But they don't prove that these men went to the Crosses' to commit a lynching OR that they attacked the Crosses with intent to commit murder, and any first-year law student would argue as much...if the pictures weren't considered prejudicial to the jury and thrown out of the evidence list during preparations for the trial.
Anyway, Ben is more stupid than usual and tells the woman who he had a crush on when they were both little that he's going to commit breaking and entering and theft. The woman tells her husband, a state senator, and the senator tells Scooter. Ben and his friend are caught and the pictures are burned. Nothing happens to Ben and Friend, of course. It's not like they were caught committing a crime or anything.
Moody is called to the stand and perjures herself by saying that yes, the Raiders had a search warrant and she agreed to let them in, and my goodness, she doesn't know WHY they attacked after that. Ben thinks that this changes everything because now the official story isn't that the Crosses fought men who were performing their legal duty, but that the Crosses acted like good citizens and admitted the representatives of the law, who then attacked them. He seems unaware that a) the stories the Crosses told and that the Raiders told would have been recorded in the briefs both sides filed with the court, so changing the story now would raise all kinds of questions about "Why are you changing your story? Were you lying then or are you lying now?", b) the Crosses probably WOULDN'T be viewed as citizens at all, or at the very most not citizens the equal of whites, c) there is STILL no physical evidence that proves that the Raiders attacked the Crosses and not the Crosses the Raiders, and d) it doesn't MATTER what Moody says, because the end of this case is predetermined.
When it's time for closing arguments, Jonah Curtis tells Ben to make the closing speech. Never mind that Ben isn't listed as an attorney for the prosecution, but as a prosecution witness, and therefore has no right to make the speech.
The case finally goes to the jury, and Ben is shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you, that the Raiders are found not guilty. Because no one could have seen that one coming a mile away.
Ben then discovers that he is, surprise surprise, persona non grata in his little hometown, so he goes off to the black section, where he assumes he'll be welcome. Abraham is dying for real this time. As soon as he dies, Ben takes Moody into town, walking hand in hand with her and walking into restaurants and stores demanding that they be served. Because it's not like segregation and Jim Crow laws existed, or that an attorney would know about either. This whatever-it-is that Ben is doing culminates in his kissing Moody in public, apparently to get the townspeople pissed off. It succeeds. The whites attack that night with the intent of burning out every black in the Quarters. Mighty Whitey Ben convinces the blacks to mount an armed rebellion against the whites--after all, there's no way that THIS could lead to unpleasant backlash after he goes back to Washington.
So one guy is killed, the sheriff is almost beaten to death, and Ben has a pointless fight with his former best friend, the Klansman who got him lynched....which seems to have been the main reason that he wanted this battle to happen--to lure out Jacob Gill. And he points a gun at Jacob and then discovers that he just can't kill the man. I'm stunned. And he goes back to his wife and daughters, and the ending indicates that he lives happily ever after.
It doesn't say what happens to the blacks who attacked the whites at Ben's instigation. I presume their ending was considerably less happy.
Special mention must be made of the treatment of black civil rights leaders in this book. Leaders of the time, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells-Barnett, are mentioned, but the book doesn't say who they are or what they did. Consequently, all we have are names and no context. And in the end, they're reduced to leading a group of blacks through town, chanting. Although it's never stated, it's implied that they're doing this because that's what civil rights leaders do. It's not like they found things like the NAACP (which Du Bois did in 1909) or work as journalists for Chicago papers and write books and give lectures throughout Europe about lynching (which Wells-Barnett did starting in 1893).
This book gives the decidedly false and insulting impression that blacks did not so much need laws passed to guarantee them their rights as American citizens, but to stand up for themselves. And that they never would have stood up for themselves without a white man like Ben Corbett to push them.
I hate books like this. I hate them because they behave as if the past were just like the present, but with funny clothes, and that everything that was wrong could have been fixed by a good inoculation of 21st century values. And in doing so, they devalue the pain and suffering of the people who actually lived through those times for whom the issues were not quite so simple or clear-cut.
I especially hate such books because they claim to be historically accurate...and people will believe them.
Crossposted to gehayi and bookfails
***