Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Review of Olympia Vernon’s A Killing in This Town

2008; Vanderbilt University; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15695/amqst.v6i1.142

1553-4316

Dana A. Williams,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

As the lines above, which open and close the first chapter of Olympia Vernon's A Killing in This Town (2006), suggest, Vernon immediately makes the reader aware of the what of this novel-Adam Pickens has come of age; he must find him a nigger to drag; Earl Thomas is that nigger, and he knows it.Yet we are compelled as readers, first by the story, then by the language, to keep reading and to keep thinking about the why and the how that might at least begin to explain the fictional world that is Vernon's Bullock, Mississippi.Inspired, at least in part, by the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, by three white men (two well-known white supremacists, who received the death penalty for the murder, and a third man, who was sentenced to life in prison), A Killing in This Town is a highly structured investigation into the cycle of racism and violence all too characteristic of the old (and the not-so-old) South.At the center of the novel are the intimately connected black and white families who populate the small town of Bullock.There is Earl Thomas, whose role as the only pastor in the town has ensured that he will be the target of the next dragging; his wife, Emma New, who rejects Earl's belief that God sent him to "take it"; their widowed friend Sonny Willow, whose husband Curtis was the victim of the last dragging; Gill Mender, the man who "called out" Curtis Willow and who has now returned to Bullock to redeem himself; Adam Pickens, the young boy who is about to come of age and whom Gill intends to save; Adam's father, Hoover Pickens, and the other white supremacists, most of whom are dying of an unknown lung disease Earl Thomas tries to warn them of; and these men's wives, who not only support their husbands' racist agendas but who participate willingly in the ritual.Lenora Bullock, for instance, is not only the Klan seamstress; she is also the reason Curtis Willow is called out.In a scene that harkens back to Richard Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home," Curtis encounters Lenora after he has taken a swim in the river.Unlike the river scene in "Big Boy Leaves Home," however, the scene in this novel narrates, explicitly rather than implicitly, the sexual implications that materialize when a naked black male body encounters a white female body: "he had come from the river-naked and alarming-the emaciated, hungry stream of the Mississippi dripped down the lead of his penis" (166).