Black Water Rising, and The Cutting Season, by Attica Locke
Houston-born Attica Locke is a screenwriter and director who started writing novels in 2009. Her first two novels, Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season are in the mystery-noir genre, set in different locations and time periods but both featuring black protagonists who stumble into situations involving dead bodies. What ensues thereafter is shown to the reader through the prism of race relations in America: the interactions between the protagonists and the police, and between the characters, are very much coloured by ethnicity, background, and history.
Set in Houston in the Reagan years (1980s), Black Water Rising is Locke’s debut novel. Jay Porter is a struggling black lawyer who rents a boat to take his pregnant wife Bernie out on a bayou boat trip for her birthday. They hear a cry for help and a splash, and Jay dives into the water to rescue a white woman in expensive clothing. They drop her off at the police station, only to hear later that a dead body was discovered near the place they found her.
Lawyer or not, Jay is a black man in a white person’s city. He also has a police record dating back to his radical college days, and a well-founded fear of being dragged into whatever problems the woman is mixed up in.
Jay has powerful friends, though this is very much a mixed blessing. Cynthia Maddox, the current mayor of Houston, is a white woman who was closely associated with Jay’s radical past, and Jay has kept this information firmly under wraps. Jay’s father-in-law, the Reverend Boykins, is close to the black unions, and wants Jay to intercede on behalf of a young black union activist who was beaten up by white men. And Jay has Rolly Snow, a part-time private detective who can find almost anything and anyone.
The atmosphere of this novel is well done: Jay’s fear of the white establishment, his forays around the sprawling Houston area. Houston’s landscape is not as well-known as Chicago’s or New York’s or San Francisco’s, so at times it seemed that Locke was struggling to name-check places that readers might find familiar. Such as Gilley’s, the bar where the Travolta/Winger Urban Cowboy was set.
Jay is the most interesting character in the novel, and the flashbacks to his past are nuanced and informative; the reader gets a sense of his continued paranoia dating back to his squeak-through acquittal when he was in college. He is appropriately flawed as befits a literary amateur detective: in this case, he is thoughtlessly quick to react and seems to often miss the big picture. The rest of the characters are rather flat, and Cynthia Maddox is one of the more opaque. The plot is complicated and hard to follow, with big-oil interests, union battles, and a rather watery conclusion. Race relations in Houston in the 80s are the main subtext:
“A colored lawyer?” he asks.
Because it’s the easiest answer and because he doesn’t have time to rehash the entire civil rights movement on this man’s front porch, Jay says, “Yes.”
The old man nods, as if this is perfectly acceptable to him.
He pushes the screen door open in a wide arc, opening the house to Jay. “Well, come on, then,” he says. “I guess you’re as good as any other.”
The Cutting Season, Locke’s second novel, is set in upstate Louisiana, 2009, with a female protagonist, Caren Gray. Caren manages an antebellum plantation, with a largely black staff. There is a cook and assistant, and a troupe who perform a play for the tourists and events. Caren is a single parent and lives with her daughter on the property. It turns out that she grew up on this plantation: her mother, also a single parent, was a cook for the white family who owned the property.
A dead woman is found near the slave quarters. She is Hispanic, not one of the staff, and likely a worker at the nearby sugar plantation. Complexities appear: Caren’s 9-year-old daughter has a shirt with an unexplained bloody sleeve, at least one of the Hispanic gardeners on the plantation is an illegal immigrant, a shady-seeming journalist starts showing up, and the police are constantly suspicious of Caren’s motives and statements. Caren’s history with the Clancy family who own the property is another complication, and when her ex, Eric, a DC lawyer, comes to help, her personal situation gets even harder to navigate.
As with Black Water Rising, interracial interactions are the main focus, barely under the surface, and often tense. At times the mystery seems like a plot device to keep the novel moving forwards. Locke’s sense of atmosphere shows up:
The play was, admittedly, bad. [..] It was as soapy as Gone With the Wind, full of belles and balls and star-crossed lovers, noble Confederates and happy darkies and more dirty Yankees than you could count. And the tourists loved it.
Caren walked ahead of Eric, who was studying the face of each cabin as he passed, the hollow windows like eyes behind which lay a glimpse of the soul of slave life; and they, in turn, seemed to be watching him, too, this black man in wool gabardine and dress shoes, a five-hundred-dollar watch on his wrist.
Despite the change in locale and protagonist, the two novels are similar: atmosphere and race are the core of the novel, it’s great to read a southern novel with a black-history background, the plot seems like a mechanism rather than intrinsic to the story, the protagonist is not always understandable or empathetic, and the final denouement is disappointing from a literary or mystery perspective.
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