Sippi: A Novel - Softcover

In this impressive testament to the civil rights movement, originally published in 1967 and long out of print, Killens (d. 1987) recreates the cultural mores, caste stratifications, racially-linked sexual compulsions and brutal repressiveness of a backwater, bigoted Southern county in the 1950s and '60s. The story begins in 1954 as a jubilant Jesse Chaney, black sharecropper, comically confronts his comrade and benefactor Charles Wakefield, a rich, white Mississippi plantation owner and so-called "friend of the Negro," when Jesse learns that the Supreme Court has struck down the "separate-but-equal" doctrine. Jesse wants to address "Mister Charlie" as Charles and to use the front door, and an angry Wakefield calls him "nigger." With humor, irony and complexity, Killens delineates how, in the Old South, whites and blacks formed relationships based on a foundation of vacuous sentimentality while their every encounter was riddled with black emasculation and white self-delusion. Killens (And Then We Heard the Thunder, etc.) depicts a time when the effort to register to vote became, for black and white, an existential act fraught with imminent death and unlimited possibility.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.