This debut novel is truly impressive, powerful and original, dealing with the civil rights movement in ways I had not read before. Minnicks has created a fictional town west of Montgomery, Alabama, near the Tombigbee River. We learn its history: In the late nineteenth century, Jessup was a town with a black and a white section. The freedmen expended herculean efforts and grew and improved their section of town. “Negro Jessup was modern and thriving and building ever closer to the whitefolks’ side of town and making whitefolks wonder who was living on the other side of the tracks from who.” “Negroes opened a hospital and a savings and loan” and paved their streets. They created what was later called in Tulsa a “Black Wall Street.” Then, in 1903, the white community, angry, envious, raided the prosperous black section with shotguns and torches, drove away the Black citizens and seized their property. With heroism and enormous faith and endurance, the Blacks bought the swamp they had been driven into and, pooling their meager financial resources, began again and created New Jessup, with black businesses, professionals, schools, workers, all miles from the white town.
It is not a socialist enterprise but interestingly, they rejected the current idea of being led by the talented tenth. All voices, laborers and lawyers, were equal, decisions made by voting. Our narrator, Alice, on the run from Rensler, Alabama where her white landlord tried to rape her, falls in love with New Jessup, where there are no white or colored signs, and then falls in love with Raymond, who operates a car repair and towing business. Soon, however, she realizes the old problems of prejudice, segregation and civil rights are inescapable, but are being addressed here in a new way.
Raymond belongs to a secret organization, NNAS, The National Negro Advancement Society. He had participated in the Montgomery bus boycott and was actively for civil rights, but not integration itself. He is working for legal incorporation for New Jessup. Then the citizens, all Black, will have control over what happens in their town. Although never mentioned, the reader understands that Raymond wants to reproduce the town of Eatonville, the all-black village in Florida where Zora Neale Hurston grew up, and we should remember, Hurston was chastised for her skepticism about “Brown v. Board of Education,” which she saw not as unmitigated improvement but as an insult to black schools and teachers and damaging to the Black business community.
As plans proceed, white Jessup must not hear of any “agitation” or organizing by the SCLC or SNCC or NAACP. Any organizing might bring another fiery raid, even though Raymond and his group want no integration in their schools, no mixing, no white people around at all. They have had all the contact with white folks they care for. Not all the Black citizens of New Jessup agree with Raymond. Minnicks demonstrates how the stresses and dangers run in several directions simultaneously and, as the sixties roll along, violence threatens.
