Actress-turned-author Denise Nicholas in STL on Monday, Oct. 10
By Gerald Early
For the St. Louis American
Any serious reader is bound to look upon any book published by a celebrity – athlete, actor, musician, CEO – with skepticism. After all, books written by the famously non-literary have largely been bad, ghostwritten autobiographies, bad potboilers and dime novels, bad advice books (that tell people what they already know in an endless string of platitudes) and, most recently, bad children’s literature. (The motto being, in this instance, if you can’t write a “real” book, write for children as they are an audience that needn’t be taken seriously.)
So, it is with both surprise and delight that one stumbles upon actress Denise Nicholas’ first novel, Freshwater Road. Nicholas co-starred in the comedy-drama Room 222 (1969-1974) and in the police drama In the Heat of the Night (1989-1994). She has also appeared in other television shows and in films.
Nicholas’ novel deals with Freedom Summer 1964, the major civil rights initiative to reshape southern Democratic Party politics when a group of young college student-activists, black and white, went south (mostly to Mississippi) to register blacks to vote. It was a harrowing experience, as Southern whites fought back with violence, intimidation and legal harassment.
It was the summer when three young civil workers by the names of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which became one of the most sensational and shocking crimes of the era.
Mississippi’s reputation as one of the most racially repressive states in the union was acknowledged in songs of the period like Phil Ochs’ “Here’s to the State of Mississippi” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.”
Nicholas’s book, based on her own experiences as a young civil rights worker in Mississippi during the summer of ’64, is welcome simply because there are so few novels that have dealt with this material (although a number of nonfiction books have). But what the reader appreciates even more is that Nicholas has chosen to respect her subject by writing a serious novel about it, not an inept book meant simply to exploit her celebrity to fuel public interest.
Freshwater Road tells the story of Celeste, a pampered black college student from Detroit who decides to go to Mississippi to help register black voters and run a Freedom School. It is largely a coming-of-age tale, not unusual for a first novel, as Celeste grows from being a self-centered school girl to a young woman with a more realistic understanding of the world and of her relationship with people much unlike herself.
The book’s chapters alternate between Celeste’s experiences in Mississippi and her relationship with her father, Shuck, a tavern owner and numbers runner in Detroit.
This binary structure suffuses the novel: the transformation of Pineywood, Mississippi versus the transformation of Detroit; the tavern world of Shuck versus the dry world of black Mississippi; the secular Northern Shuck versus the pious Southern Reverend Singleton; the courageous Mrs. Owens, the woman Celeste stays with in Pineywood, versus Wilamena, Celeste’s selfish, status-seeking mother; J.D., Celeste’s white college boyfriend who is a self-absorbed Bohemian artist, versus Ed Jolivette, her black boyfriend, a dedicated civil rights veteran.
The novel’s great strengths are the author’s ability to recreate the sense of terror and foreboding in small-town Mississippi in 1964 with chilling exactitude; her fine etchings of black Southern life, unromanticized yet deeply humanized; and the highly emphatic rendering of the often clumsy but well-intentioned actions of her heroine.
The novel is highly crafted, perhaps sometimes wearing its craftsmanship a bit too much on its sleeve. There are moments when it is a little too mannered. Also, the marriage of Shuck and Wilamena seems a bit implausible and Wilamena’s selfishness a bit overdrawn, predictable, even caricatured.
Nonetheless, despite some shortcomings, this is a fine novel, well worth reading for both the subject matter and the style. Nicholas’s work is fresh, thoughtful, and skillfully executed. Indeed, in some respects, it is an important novel about an extraordinary time in American life when black people began a dramatic process of redefining themselves.
Denise Nicholas will read from her novel at 7 p.m. on Monday, October 10 at Left Bank Books, 399 North Euclid Avenue.
Gerald Early is director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University and the award-winning author of many books.
