American Ghost
by Janis Owens
This
is a powerful but not preachy novel about race and racism centered in
a Florida swamp town famous for a horrific 1938 lynching and based on
a true incident. This is a fascinating insider's depiction of the
insular and entangled world of southern “crackers”—poor whites,
often Pentecostal, some with Native American blood—and the strict,
convoluted rules of engagement between poor whites and poor blacks.
This is a story mingling the past with the present to depict the
lingering cultural, economic, and psychological impacts of slavery.
It's a look at how class and race overlap. And it is a revelation
about ties that bind, and codes of silences, and the simple fact that
ignoring something does not make it go away.
But
it couldn't be about all these Big Important Things and
still be a captivating novel unless it was also about individual
people and their desires crashing up against each other. And so, it's
also a love story, about a fierce and exceptional young white woman,
Jolie Hoyt, the preacher's daughter, who is both proud
and ashamed of her people and their ways. The young man Jolie falls
for is not only an outsider, a Jew, and a college boy, but he is also
harboring a secret past of his own: his great-grandfather, a
shopkeeper, was shot and killed during the 1938 incident. With these
four strikes against him, it's only a matter of time before he, too,
get shot—though not killed, he is run out of town. Then, years
later, he gets recruited to help an elderly black businessman who's
got his own connection to the lynching—and who's headed back to
Hendrix to settle some old wounds before he dies.
A
Florida native and daughter of a Pentecostal preacher, author Janis
Owens has crafted a page-turning story with compelling characters
that dramatizes essential truths—about cruelty and injustice, and
also about the deep human need for love, connection, and closure.
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