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Inspired by true events, The Vain Conversation reflects on the 1946 lynching of two black couples in Georgia from the perspectives of three characters—Bertrand Johnson, one of the victims; Noland Jacks, a presumed perpetrator; and Lonnie Henson, a witness to the murders as a ten-year-old boy. Lonnie's inexplicable feelings of culpability drive him in a search for meaning that takes him around the world, and ultimately back to Georgia, where he must confront both Jacks and his own demons.
In this stirring and incisive narrative, Anthony Grooms seeks to advance the national dialogue on race relations. With complexity, satire, and surprising moments of levity, he explores what it means to redeem and be redeemed. Deeply probing the issues of American race violence, The Vain Conversation also speaks to the broader issues of oppression and violence everywhere.
Foreword by poet, painter, and novelist Clarence Major.
Afterward by bestselling author T. Geronimo Johnson.
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
November 12, 2021 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781611178838
- File size: 585 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781611178838
- File size: 1144 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from February 1, 2018
A real-life racially motivated mass killing from 1946 is boldly and deeply reimagined--as are its long-term reverberations.It is the summer of 1946, and 10-year-old Lonnie Henson, a young white boy living in the rural outskirts of Bethany, Georgia, is picking blackberries toward twilight when he stumbles upon a horrific sight: a crowd of white men and women, some of whom he recognizes, gathered together to shoot and bludgeon two African-American couples to death; one of the dead he recognizes as Bertrand Johnson, a family friend who'd found communion with Lonnie's late father, an ex-GI traumatized by what he'd witnessed during World War II. From that jolting opening, Grooms (Trouble No More, 1996, etc.) gradually weaves his narrative back and forth to the days, months, and years preceding and following the murders, which are drawn from a real-life lynching of two couples that same year in the same region. (No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.) With dexterity and compassion, Grooms takes the full measure of his characters, white and black, including Lonnie's parents and great aunt Grace; Bertrand's outspoken wife, Luellen, and stoic mother, Milledge; Maribelle Crookshank, owner of the local diner and town gossip; Vernon Venable, the wealthy white businessman who sets the ugly events in motion by attacking the wife of Jimmy Lee, one of the four victims; and Venable's friend Noland Jacks, who is one of those Lonnie remembers most in the lynch mob even after he's grown up and left to join the Navy, forever agonized and conscience-stricken by what he's seen. Grooms' novel presents racism as a self-perpetuating monster piling large and small atrocities atop one another. No one is immune from those atrocities or their consequences, the book strongly asserts--though it also implies that redemption, at whatever cost, may be accessible to those who, like Lonnie, feel deeply enough to escape their grim legacy.That Grooms' incisive, gripping, and empathetic novel dares to probe beneath the humiliations, customs, and fears that sustain injustice implies that our seemingly eternal conversation on race, to which the title refers, may not be as vain as it often seems.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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