Locke’s ‘Bluebird’ is a sharp take on race, injustice
A rich sense of place and relentless feeling of dread permeate Attica Locke’s heartbreakingly resonant new novel about race and justice in America.
The setting in Bluebird, Bluebird (Mulholland Books, 303 pp., eeeg out of four) is East Texas, a place with which the author is more than familiar, tracing her family roots through the red dirt, on both sides, to slavery.
The novel, which Locke ( Pleasantville and The Cutting Season) calls “a love letter to black Texans,” is an emotionally dense and intricately detailed thriller, roiling with conflicting emotions steeped in this nation’s troubled past and present.
At the story’s center is Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger with a host of unresolved issues including his marriage, a drinking problem, a looming suspension and, not least of all, his feelings about his Lone Star State roots. But when two bodies — one a black lawyer from Chicago, the other, a young, local white woman — are pulled from a bayou in Lark just days apart, Darren heads up Highway 59, believing the two killings are somehow connected.
All signs point to trouble in Lark, a town where the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas holds sway, local law enforcement resents Darren’s presence and his own superiors do not want him to be at all. He’s not welcome, either, at the black-owned café where both victims were seen and a place with as many secrets as the Brotherhood’s favored watering hole.
In between swigs of Jim Beam, Darren tries to makes sense of a couple of murders that don’t “fit any agreed-upon American script.” Meanwhile, the clock ticks away on his marriage and his career as the threats to his life escalate.
It’s rural noir with a message, but not the one you’d expect.
Locke (a former writer and producer on Fox’s Empire) makes sure early on that readers don’t slip into a false sense of security, reminding them that this book is set in the very real present where justice for some is not justice for all.
It’s a lesson that has been drilled into Darren, in particular by his uncles, one of whom was a Texas Ranger.
“Even his Uncle Clayton, a one-time defense lawyer and professor of constitutional law, was known to say that for men like us, a pair of baggy pants or a shirttail hanging out was ‘ walking probable cause,’ ” Darren recalls.
And then Locke concludes the thought with this: “Darren had always wanted to believe that theirs was the last generation to have to live that way, that change might trickle down from the White House. When in fact the opposite had proved to be true. In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself.”
Bluebird, Bluebird is no simple morality tale. Far from it. It rises above “left and right” and “black and white” and follows the threads that inevitably bind us together, even as we rip them apart.