The Twelve-Mile Straight, by Eleanor Henderson
The Twelve-Mile Straight in 1930 is an unpaved Georgia
road leading from a cotton mill town to the poor Negro wards at the
impoverished end of the county. It is
also the scene of the bloody murder of negro labourer Genus Jackson, accused of
raping the daughter of the white share-cropper who employed him on the farm
owned by the most powerful man in the county. Despite his innocence, he is
lynched first, then dragged behind a pickup truck along the twelve-mile, and
dumped broken and unrecognisable outside the sheriff’s office. His boots are missing, stolen by the driver
of the pickup, who has since lit out for parts unknown.
So begins Eleanor Henderson’s explosive novel of Southern
Georgia during the Depression, a state that would always be part of Old Dixie,
regardless of the Civil War, Emancipation and all the other hard-won racial
concessions: in 1930 white privilege,
fear and hatred still rule, and the only difference from being slaves is that
the coloureds are reluctantly paid starvation wages – if the cotton crop
doesn’t fail. Elma Jesup, daughter of
the share-cropper who made the accusations against Jackson has ostensibly given birth to twins, a girl
red-headed and freckled like herself, and a boy who is obviously mulatto: she is a Jezebel! There she was, engaged to the grandson of Mill-owner
George Wilson (also red-headed and freckled) but she done crawled into bed with
a nigger! The town ladies vow never to
associate with her or her wild, nigger-loving father Juke, even though they
know the same could be said of their own feckless husbands; they can’t seem to stay away from them
coloured gals and the number of ‘terminations’ that Doc Rawls has to ‘arrange’
is proof of that fact.
In prose that should be the envy of all aspiring writers,
Ms Henderson describes Elma’s attempts to make something of her young life and
circumstances against the backdrop of racism and unchanging views as old as the
hills beyond her home: the writer’s
voice is clear and sweet when she describes Elma’s undying sisterhood with her
mute negro housegirl Nan, and harsh as a crow’s call when she writes of incest
and unspeakable cruelty on the farm, and the hypocritical lengths that Southern
society will pursue in order to preserve the old, comfortable way of life. As we all know nearly ninety years later, old
attitudes die hard, and sometimes don’t die at all. ‘The Twelve-Mile Straight’ is a monument to
all those who struggled for dignity and change – and are still doing so. SIX STARS
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