Guardian
I just finished reading Guardian by Julius Lester and feel somewhat disappointed. To be fair, I’m not the best person to judge this book because I’ve spent more than a decade focusing on representations of racial violence; I haven’t read *every* novel about lynching, but I’ve read quite a few, and this one didn’t quite live up to my expectations. At times it reminded me of two short stories I teach: “Blood Burning Moon” by Jean Toomer, and “Mob Madness” by Marion Cuthbert (the latter describes a lynching from the perspective of a white mother who later commits suicide and infanticide). Yet those short stories had more complexity, despite being much shorter than a novel. I think Lester accurately depicts the depravity of Southern white men, and I particularly appreciated the way he exposed southern chivalry for the lie that it was; white women in the novel are objectified, degraded, and treated only as disposable sexual objects. But all of the characters simply appear in the narrative–they don’t quite evolve, and so their relationships to one another are flat. Also, at the end of the day, all Southerners who participated in lynchings weren’t *exactly* depraved, evil, or immoral individuals. Or they weren’t ONLY those things…Lester showed some ambivalence on the part of Ansel’s father, Bert, who allowed a black man to be lynched for a crime he clearly didn’t commit. But I would like to have seen more complexity, more ambiguity. It’s too easy to say one wealthy white woman in the town hated racism, hated her family, and carried the white protagonist off to Massachusetts. It’s too easy to say Zeph Davis, the actual murderer, was just a sadistic sociopath. The truth is, lynching was in keeping with what Jacqueline Goldsby refers to as “cultural logic”–these horrific murders weren’t “out of the ordinary,” they were, in fact, in keeping with the values that made mob members identify as patriotic Americans. They weren’t “not themselves” in that moment–they were more fully themselves than in any other moment. If you haven’t read James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” please do! It’s not fair to expect any author to live up to Baldwin’s standard of brilliance, but in order to understand mob mentality, you’ve got to consider the psychology of lynching. In a way, Lester’s novel would have been more compelling to me if he had doubled its length and taken the time to show how blacks and whites lived intimately in the South, and loved one another–went to church, committed acts of kindness and generosity–and STILL joined mobs and cut the fingers, ears, and genitals off lynching victims. If this novel is a teen’s introduction to lynching, I’m afraid it doesn’t DO enough. The white men are all despicable, the black characters say next to nothing, and the white women are hard to comprehend: how do you grow up white in a small southern town with racist parents and yet somehow develop sympathy for blacks? Usually that’s the result of having some intimate relationship with a black person–the family cook, housekeeper, nanny, etc. Just being abused, neglected, and labeled “white trash” doesn’t make you see blacks as your allies. If anything, it’s more likely to make you desperate for someone else to look down on. Anyway, it’s a short read and still compelling, just not truly satisfying for me.
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