Ghosts of the South
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a novel about race and the South must be in want of a Faulkner comparison. And, to be fair, Eleanor Henderson’s excellent second novel, “The Twelve-Mile Straight,” possesses many Faulknerian elements.
Henderson begins with a lynching — an event crucial to many Faulkner stories, and to our nation’s history, brutally condensing as it does the American bent toward racial anxiety, often centered on sex, and extrajudicial violence. The novel’s first sentence reads, “Genus Jackson was killed in Cotton County, Georgia, on a summer midnight in 1930, when the newborn twins were asleep.” Genus was killed because of these babies, not really twins but claimed as such by Elma Jesup, an unmarried — and white — daughter of a bootlegger. Genus was killed because the supposed twins look different, “the girl ... pink as a piglet, and the boy ... brown”; because this racial confusion calls for a scapegoat; and because Genus, a black man who has been an object of Elma’s unrequited desire, is a convenient victim.
In its early sections, the novel jumps between times and characters. Now we’re with Elma, now we’re with her father Juke, who could “talk the hind legs off a donkey” and whose sexual exploitation of his black servants drives the novel’s complex unfolding. Now we’re with Genus, now we’re with his lover, Nan, the Jesup’s black teenage servant who is also Elma’s closest friend and the victim of Juke’s lust. Nan is also mute: her mother, for reasons that emerge later, cut her daughter’s tongue out when she was a child.
One of the novel’s focalizing characters, Nan is fully alive and fully particular. She secretly hoards books from the big house, “nibble[s] on white clay,” and thinks that “having no tongue was a mixed blessing.” It allows her to play dumb when necessary but also prevents her from saying no to Juke. “But would a word have stopped him? Was it better to have no tongue if a tongue was no protection?” Nan also clearly echoes Philomela, the princess from Greek myth who was raped and had her tongue cut out so she couldn’t tell the tale. In Henderson’s hands, time blurs and characters refract into one another: Nan is doubled by her dead mother Ketty, the domineering Juke by the even more domineering mill owner George Wilson. This is Faulkner territory — and Morrison territory, too — through and through.
“The Twelve-Mile Straight” centers on a mystery — who are the twins’ actual parents? — that isn’t a mystery for very long. Early on, we know that Juke is at the center of it all. More specifically, we know that Juke’s sexual relationships with both Nan and her deceased mother will untie the knot of parentage. The characters in the novel know this, too. But they don’t want to know it, or they want to pretend they don’t know it, or they convince themselves that they’re the only ones who do know it. When it comes to race and sex and the relation between the two, Americans are champions of denial. After Genus’ horrid death, all the local papers declare, “It was a tragedy ... a shame.” But only “one of those big-city dailies” names it for what it was: a lynching.
This is Henderson’s second superb novel. The first, “Ten Thousand Saints,” was tighter, arguably more perfect, marred by a clunky epilogue but fantastic on almost every page and in most of its sentences. “The Twelve-Mile Straight” is a grander, meatier novel, as befits its subject matter. The tangled plot might be the stuff of melodrama, but so is American racial history. Besides, the writing is precise, not purplish. Note how amazingly, and without show, Henderson captures physical appearance: “He was a white-mustached man who’d begun to stoop, the pale, shaven flesh of his neck wrinkled as a rooster’s comb. He wore a black suit and a black Homburg hat and carried a black satchel, listing to the left with its weight, his right ear listening toward the sky for some signal.” That last musical detail, the ear listing and listening, is perfect, and the novel contains many such fillips of the real. A middle-aged character stricken with polio as a child, for instance, possesses “a contained kind of comfort in his own body, as though it were a jalopy only he knew how to drive.”
But these details are in the service of a larger project. One night, as Juke abuses Nan, we read, “What was happening in Nan’s room was beyond Elma’s imagination. She would have sooner imagined that the noises came from the wall itself, the house coming to life, growing a mouth, giving voice to its ghosts.” But such happenings aren’t just the stuff of the imagination, they’re the stuff of American history, and Henderson’s book gives this history, with all its ghosts and secrets and desires, powerful voice.