The Bright, Swampy South Where I Come From

Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle: a Novel

A young Black boy in a small Mississippi town is accused of crossing a stark line: he speaks with unforgivable freshness to a well-off White woman. The woman’s husband, rich but damaged from fighting in Korea, can’t let that stand. So he hires a representative of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi’s vast White trash community to make it right. But like vengeful husbands everywhere, he can’t control what he’s put in motion.

There’s two ways to write about America’s largest nation within a nation, the Solid South. Flannery O’Connor and Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner wrote while living in the South, describing their neighbors in terms those neighbors might’ve described themselves, even if the product was often unflattering. Erskine Caldwell and Harper Lee fled the South, resettling elsewhere and writing for a primarily Northern audience who didn’t share their expectations.

Lewis Nordan, a critical darling who nevertheless escaped a commercial breakthrough and toiled in anonymity, takes the second approach. Though born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, which he thinly camouflaged as Arrow Catcher, he spent his career teaching, mostly in Pittsburgh. Like Harper Lee, he presents a South populated by stereotypes and authorial sock puppets, who enact a plot largely designed to reassure Northerners that they could never stoop this low.

A Chicago teenager, identified only as Bobo, is visiting kinfolk in Arrow Catcher. Being a Northerner, Bobo doesn’t understand Mississippi’s intricate rules for how “colored” youth should comport themselves in mixed company. His boasting and strutting gets perceived as a sexual advance on a married White woman: witnesses accuse him of directing the titular Wolf Whistle at Sally Anne Montberclair. Soon the story travels throughout town.

History readers will recognize this premise. Yes, Nordan has created a fictionalized retelling of the Emmett Till lynching. To his credit, Nordan avoids low-hanging fruit, staying away from maudlin depictions of the actual events; he cares more about the soap-operatic inner torment of the characters surrounding the violence. But that doesn’t absolve Nordan of responsibility for a major misinterpretation: he depicts lynching as a crime, like a Northerner would.

Lewis Nordan

People who don’t read racial history might mistake my meaning when I call lynching something other than a crime. But Nordan, like Harper Lee, depicts lynching happening in the heat of anger, under the cover of darkness. Most important, though Nordan says the lynching happens at the instigation of Arrow Catcher’s richest man, that’s as persuasive as a fishnet condom, since a walking Po’ White Trash stereotype does the killing.

Lynchings usually happened in broad daylight; killers often photographed themselves with the corpse, and printed the pictures as penny postcards. Because the entire point of lynching was to remind survivors that the perpetrators didn’t fear consequences. Emmett Till’s lynching was an unusually private affair, but it wasn’t secret. His killers admitted their actions, because they knew no Mississippi jury would hold them culpable. And they were right; they were acquitted.

Nordan, like Harper Lee, paints lynching as impetuous, drunken, and hasty. Not something undertaken with forethought, Bobo’s murder is fraught with a tragicomic level of infighting and slapstick incompetence. (Randall Kenan’s back-cover blurb compares Nordan’s writing to Shakespearean comedy, which isn’t unfair.) By contrast, Emmett Till’s lynching was planned for three days in advance. In real life, lynchings were grotesquely ritualized affairs.

I struggle while reading this book. Because I’ve just spent several paragraphs describing how Nordan misrepresents lynching, in ways presumably designed to reassure Northern readers that only hickish trailer trash would do something so horrible. I keep mentioning Harper Lee, who did something similar. These authors want audiences to understand that their White Trash protagonists are different, are outliers. You and I could never do something this disgusting.

But despite this historical slovenliness, Nordan presents interesting characters. They express the kinds of rambling, morally contradictory inner monologues for which O’Connor and Faulkner became famous, creating justifications for their own awfulness. These inner struggles are moving and frequently, yes, comical, as they can’t see past their own noses. I might’ve appreciated these characters, and Nordan’s writing, in a different story, one that didn’t try to score political points.

Simply, I wanted to like Nordan’s book, but I couldn’t ignore how he’d anchored his entire story to historical self-justification. By falsifying how lynchings happened, Nordan assures readers that we couldn’t possibly participate in something so revolting. Equally importantly, he assures readers that Lewis Nordan couldn’t possibly participate. He holds his story’s central event at arm’s length, trying not to get the stain of responsibility on us, or himself.