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Race relations

Go Set a Watchman. By Harper Lee. Harper, 2015. 278p. HB, $27.99.

Scout Comes Home Again

As admirable and courageous as the film’s Atticus is, this lionization goes way too far in construing the novel’s Atticus in our memory as some sort of social reformer. 

“A Deeper Place in Themselves”

This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. By Kay Mills. Dutton.$24.00. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story. By Elaine Brown. Pantheon. $25.00. To understand Fannie Lou Hamer and Elaine Brown, one has to go back to the road leadi [...]

Lucas Beauchamp

He knew Lucas Beauchamp—as well as any white person knew him. Better than any maybe unless it was Carothers Edmonds on whose place Lucas lived seventeen miles from town, because he had eaten a meal in Lucas's house. It was in the early winter four years ago; he had been only twelve then, and it had happened this way: Edmonds was a friend of his uncle; they had been in school at the same time at the State University, where his uncle had gone after he came back from Harvard and Heidelberg to learn enough law to get himself chosen county attorney, and the day before Edmonds had come in to town to see his uncle on some county business and had stayed the night with them and at supper that evening Edmonds had said to him: