Historical Novels

"Scottsboro," by Ellen Feldman, is a perfect example, and a timely one. Seventy-five years ago this month, the state of Alabama convicted Haywood Patterson of the rape of a young white woman. He and eight other black men were sentenced to death - affirmed not once but several times as Patterson's case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. The final verdict changed how US juries are selected and enshrined the name Scottsboro in civil rights history.

Feldman re-animates that drama in a novel that is based on archival records, court records, and first-person accounts but that succeeds overwhelmingly as a work of imagination. "A white foot came down on a black hand," Ruby Bates recalls of that April day when a fight between white and black drifters broke out on a freight train in Alabama. Ruby and her friend Victoria were also riding the rails that day, and when an Alabama posse rounded up the black men, the women, fearing arrest for prostitution or vagrancy, accused the nine of rape. Outside the county jail, a lynch mob formed, then dispersed, but the threat did not warrant national attention. "In 1931, a lynching or two in Alabama did not make headlines," narrator Alice Whittier, a budding reporter, explains, "not when sixteen million American men could not find work; and more than a quarter of the population was trying to survive without any income at all."

Through the eyes of Ruby and Alice, her two narrators, Feldman depicts not only the case itself but also the world of the rural poor and of the urban sophisticate in 1930s America, realities that intersect when Alice travels from New York to interview Ruby and her co-accuser, Victoria. "You want to know about me?" Victoria challenges Alice. "Well, I'll tell you. All my life I been trash, but I ain't been so low that colored folks could treat me like trash."

The Scottsboro case is the novel's core, but there are also the political and emotional education of ambitious Alice, the rise to brief celebrity of cunning Ruby, Depression-era politics, all distilled, with great subtlety and wit, into a story worth retelling and remembering.