Synopsis
In the autumn of 1955, at the height of America's concern over the murder of Chicagoan Emmett Till, 14, by white racists and in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation, Bill Skyles, Rachel Feigen's editor at the Associated Press in Baltimore, sends her to eastern Tennessee to investigate a missing person case. Feigen, the daughter of a distinguished New York judge, had already reported about the snail-like pace of desegregation in the wake of the previous year's Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Guy Saillot's last contact with his family was a postcard from the Tennessee Bend Motel, a place catering to hunters and fishermen near scenic Cherokee Lake. She has counted innumerable "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards driving in her brand new cream-colored Chevrolet hardtop to the motel from Baltimore in those pre-Interstate days. But she finds no record that he ever stayed there. She's at the motel because the young French-American man, who is gay, apparently stayed there on his way to Knoxville to meet a friend. Feigen learns that the motel caretaker, a deaf-mute black man named George, may know something about the missing man. George's consuming interest is the Tennessee Bend's arresting rose garden--its only truly positive quality--and she gains his favor by showing her appreciation for his beautiful roses. Feigen quickly finds herself caught up in the bigotry she expected to observe as an outsider when three local extremists, led by the motel's manager Barney Vidone, decide to teach a lesson to this "uppity jewgirl" from the North who's poking around in things that are none of her business. Their plan? Kidnap two black men and lock them and Feigen in Room 10 of the Tennessee Bend, complete with its two-way mirror voyeur's window, and let nature take its course. They're confident the men's "jungle instincts" will take over and she'll get her comeuppance, after which they'll give the "boys" a good whipping for messing with a white woman. But the two men taken at gunpoint, an Army sergeant just back from Korea and an Urban League attorney from Philadelphia, don't play the game the way their captors expect. Charlie Monroe, the venerable FBI man from Knoxville whose Southern roots run deep, provides probably the best summation of the pervading evil of this time and place: "It's easy to condemn. But prejudice is an unpastured dragon . . . Let it loose, nurture it with a little ignorance and fear, and pretty soon it's in all the dark places and if we're not careful we'll all be devoured in its ugly flame." Monroe provides the novel with a great deal of humor with his rhyming stories...Look for them! "Blood on the Roses" is a frank and honest story that does justice to its splendid east Tennessee setting. The ugliness of so many people in the novel is in sharp contrast to the region's scenic beauty, but Rachel encounters many people who are good at heart; they're overwhelmed by decades of institutionalized racism and turn away in denial from the acts of violent racism carried out by a few.
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À propos de l?auteur
Robert Hays has been a newspaper reporter, public relations writer, magazine editor, and university professor and ad- ministrator. A native of Illinois, he taught in Texas and Missouri and retired in 2008 from a long journalism teaching career at the University of Illinois. He has spent a great deal of time in South Carolina, the home state of his wife, Mary, and was a member of the South Carolina Writers Workshop. His publications include academic journal and popular periodical articles and ten books, including his collaborative work with General Oscar Koch, G-2: Intelligence for Patton, and one published in paperback edition under a different title. Robert and Mary live in Champaign, Illinois. They have two sons and a grandson and share (long story!) a cat named Eddie with the family next door.
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