THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702180456
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY JULIE HALE
LENGTH: 77 lines
SOUTHERN JOURNEY
A Return to the Civil Rights Movement
TOM DENT
William Morrow. 381 pp. $25.
``Blues truths'' are what African-American poet Tom Dent grew up calling sensitive racial issues that went undiscussed in his family during the 1950s. A native of New Orleans, and author of the new nonfiction work, Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement, Dent spent his boyhood surrounded by the grim realities of racism. Railroad tracks that split whole towns into racially divided halves, and his father's ``sixth sense'' for maneuvering the minefield of the segregated Black Belt, were part of the author's early education in the Southern culture of separatism.
Dent passed part of the '60s as press attache' for Thurgood Marshall's NAACP Legal Defense Fund. During that time, while the flames of racial conflict rose, he worked with men such as Medger Evers on a process that had only barely begun: the revolution of the South from a ``Heart of Darkness'' into a land of inheritance, a place, according to Dent, that African Americans can now call home.
This evolution - violent, tragic and imperfect - is chronicled in Southern Journey, a travel narrative mixed with a pinch of memoir and a strong dose of bittersweet history. Starting in January 1991, Dent hit the highways and back roads of the South to visit towns that were significant during the civil rights movement, and to discover what changes had occurred as a result of the struggle.
His narrative journey begins in Greensboro, N.C., the site of the first sit-ins, and ends on the Mississippi Delta. In between, Dent's itinerary - towns in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Alabama - provides a structure for the work. But the real body of the book comes from countless interviews he conducted with the participants and witnesses of the civil rights era.
Consequently, the narrative has an air of oral history about it. ``We're suffering from the demise of a sense of community,'' says one black Mississippian. ``What used to hold us together was apprehension - churches, families . . . The last time I remember this kind of support system existing was during the civil rights movement.''
Nostalgia for the unity of the movement days is common along Dent's route. What also prevails is a sense that blacks are still struggling to gain economic and political footholds in society. In Selma, Ala., public schools remain essentially segregated, and in nearby Wilcox County, students are so poor they have to bring their own toilet paper to school. Contemporary problems like drugs and crime have replaced the old ills of the black community.
These are some of the social realities Dent discovers on his way through a South that still suffers from post-segregation growth pangs. He hits all of the high points of one of the lowest periods in American history, and the stories spun by the people he encounters are often dramatic. But Dent relies heavily on extended, direct quotations. He lets his subjects talk for pages at a time, a technique that doesn't exactly tax a writer's creative powers or make for great reading.
Also disappointing is the lifeless Southern landscape he renders. In writing Southern Journey, ironically, Dent seems to have chosen two shades for his palette: black and white. His impressions of Charleston, S.C., truly a sensuous city, evoke none of the color and vibrancy of the place. Here, as elsewhere, his prose verges on the dry: The Battery ``is an attractive sea wall with a walkway which you can slowly drive along,'' and the City Market ``consists of rented shops and stalls selling all kinds of stuff, from jewelry to leather to pottery to ceramics . . . ''
Of course, Dent isn't a tourist on this trip. He sees each town through the filter of civil rights, and as a result, history and artistry are at odds in his book. Respect for the era he revisits may have checked Dent's poetic powers. Yet the reader can't help feeling disappointed that his odyssey wasn't recounted with more style and vitality.
Dent's book is valuable for the history it recounts and the changes it records. But thanks to lackluster writing and an absence of artistry, Southern Journey is no pleasure trip for the reader. MEMO: Julie Hale is a writer who lives in Norfolk.