THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607220212
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: 75 lines
THE GETTIN PLACE
SUSAN STRAIGHT
Hyperion. 488 pp. $22.95.
The air around him is thick with blood and smoke, and Hosea Thompson is instantly transported back to Tulsa, Okla., in the 1920s, when whites burned down the town's black community.
He wakes long enough to realize it is years later; he's on his own land in Rio Seco, Calif. Then a bullet rips into his shoulder and slams him to the ground.
This is the opening scene in The Gettin Place, the latest novel from Susan Straight, author of Aquaboogie, I Been In Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots and Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights.
The Gettin Place is a complex mystery tale of family relationships, tangled intentions and ganglife. Straight knows the territory and takes readers into the heads of characters ever conscious of their race and of how the world is reflected back to them because of it.
Straight is white; petite, blonde and blue-eyed. Yet she writes with a keen understanding of the language, the thoughts and the world of the black families who people her fictional universe. She seems comfortable, having lived there before in her other books.
The vivid word pictures in The Gettin Place create images so strong that they are hard to let go. Straight's language is fresh and evocative. Her characters are believable.
Hosea had stopped talking to most white people long before two dead white women showed up in a burning car on his land.
Now he finds himself in a hospital, being treated for a shoulder wound inflicted by a police bullet, under scrutiny by detectives anxious to pin a double homicide on him. Soon the count will reach three.
He shrinks back from the touch of so many white hands.
``Sometimes he saw a mouth as small as a piggy-bank slot, and a pair of blue eyes fringed with pale lashes. He would close his eyes again. Marbles. He'd always hated eyes like marbles, hated marbles, the way they sat in the dirt like floating eyeballs with detached filaments of blue or green inside.''
Only one of the six children Hosea had with his half-Mexican wife knows how to negotiate the white world. Marcus is a history teacher who lives in the predominantly white downtown. For him, the battle is how to convince black women that he has not sold out. He finds himself always acting, always lying, trying to stay grounded with only one foot in each world - not belonging to either one.
Yet, Marcus is all strength and dignity. He is the backbone of the family, the one who must solve the mystery. As he does, he comes to understand what it is to be a young black man in the 1990s. His thoughts are simple, honest and telling.
``Squatting down to rub his palm across the warm mud, he saw his hand disappear. The same color. He smiled, remembering that day he'd been coloring in school, seeing a nutty reddish-brown slant across the page near his hand. He'd asked the teacher, `What's this color?' She'd read the label, frowning. `Burnt siena,' she'd said. Marcus had seen his mother's eye-high cheeks in the color. Marcus had studied all the crayons, asking the teacher to read the colors. `Flesh' she'd read patiently from the crayon the color of Band-Aids and old gum.''
Through five generations of the Thompson family, Straight examines the toll of violence, the imprint of hatred and what it breeds. She writes about a time not so long ago when Rodney King was beaten by white officers who were then set free.
Straight's tale is so complex it can be difficult to follow. Her writing is at once polemical and lyrical. She spares no detail, skirts no sensitive issues.
The Gettin Place re-creates the real-life emotions and gut reactions of racism, even as it counters racial stereotypes and breaks down walls. No doubt Straight, a talented white writer married to a black man, has more compelling stories to tell. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer. by CNB