Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Highway 59 bisects the United States down its middle. As it dives through East Texas the division between white and black America is a long fuse waiting for a spark. Attica Locke describes what happens in a small waystop along the highway: in one end of town a poor black and elderly Geneva Sweet serves tired, hot, mostly black customers, and on the other end, a bar serves alcohol to tattooed members of the Aryan Brotherhood. When a black man is murdered before a white woman is murdered -- inverting the expected sequence of events -- a black officer in the esteemed Texas Rangers, Darren Matthews, is sent to investigate. Opening a murder mystery with a reminder that whenever a white woman in the south is threatened, a black man is selected to pay the price is a reminder that pervades the book. On its heels is the important, and too often overlooked point, that for every black man unjustly imprisoned by a southern white jury there is a black person victimized by crime that remains