1959 - Hardcover

A black girl comes of age amidst rising interracial unrest--in an accomplished and captivating first novel by a poet, playwright, and native of Virginia. In 1959 Billie Holiday died, rhythm and blues played day and night on the airwaves' ``race stations,'' Martin Luther King, Jr., raised political consciousness in black churches across the South, and Willie Tarrant, this novel's nosy, bright and imaginative heroine, turned 12. Teetering wildly on the brink of adulthood, Willie is more concerned with whether she'll be able to roller- skate in a straight skirt on her first date than in the increasingly aggressive anti-discrimination activities her widowed father, a college professor, and his adult peers are up to. Nevertheless, history and circumstance catch up with her as Willie is singled out as a possible test case in the black community's push for school integration and finds herself forced to conceal her normal 12-year-old personality beneath proper Sunday clothes and Mary Janes. Aware for the first time of the existence of a hostile white community just next door, Willie is caught between her embittered grandmother's tales of the terrible past and her own hopes for a happy future, and she alternately wonders about and celebrates her widowed father's sudden zeal for confrontation with local racists. Before the year is over, Turner, Virginia, experiences its first instance of civil-rights-inspired violence and Willie learns that growing up black in America means something different from simply growing up. Throughout, Willie's intelligence and youthful naivet‚ inform these familiar stations of America's past with humor and humanity. Her voice--frank, amusing and passionate by turns--insists on being heard. A powerful, impressive debut. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this resonant debut novel, 1959 is the year that Willie Tarrant, a young black girl in Turner, Va., turns 12. Civil rights activism, coming to this small town in the form of sit-ins, boycotts and voter registration drives, shatters the false peace between black and white inhabitants. The decision to integrate galvanizes the black community, but it also terrifies Dixon, Willie's beloved father, as the girl is among the handful of blacks chosen to attend the white school. Dixon knows that in a county where a black teenager is murdered because he asks a white man for a match, Willie's safety isn't guaranteed. Turner's black residents, whether or not they are involved in the Movement, endure beatings and daily harassment by the Klan (aka the police department). Willie learns the subtle art of subversion from her elders as church services become civil rights rallies; housewives joke about dodging attack dogs; young and old go to jail together. Witnessing the changes in her community and, internally, in her pubescent body, Willie develops a crush on the new boy at school and discovers the writings of James Baldwin, all the while registering her neighbors to vote and secretly reading her great-aunt Fannie's diary. The depiction of a woman who lived in the Virginia of the 1800s is as vivid as that of Willie living a century later. Davis celebrates everyday heroes whose defeats and triumphs she describes with hynotic dexterity.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.