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I can’t see Karl reading ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife.’ ” — A member of “Karl and Clayton’s Summer Book Club,” hosted by Karl Rove and Clayton Morris of Fox News at goodreads.com. Putting it to a vote, the club opted to read Brad Thor’s “Foreign Influence” over Audrey Niffenegger’s bestseller.


HISTORY REVIEW BY MICHAEL KAZIN BLINDED JUSTICE


At the same time, the CRC connection enabled the authorities to charge that McGee’s defense was a prime example of subversive meddling by “the Reds.” Missis- sippi’s governor at the time was Fielding Wright, a severe former judge who, in 1948, ran for vice-president on the States’ Rights ticket with Strom Thurmond. There was as much chance that Wright would commute the death sentence of a convicted black rapist as there was that Abzug would ex- press a fondness for the quaint racial mores of the Old South.


At ideological loggerheads, 1951 ASSOCIATED PRESS Demonstrators chained themselves to the Lincoln Memorial in 1951 in support of Willie McGee.


he bare facts about the case of Willie McGee seem to fit the dreadful im- age of a legal lynching in the Deep South back when white supremacy ruled. In 1945, McGee, a handsome black truck- driver, was jailed for allegedly raping a white housewife named Willette Hawkins in Laurel, Miss. — while her husband slept in a nearby room and a small child slept beside her. Despite the improbable cir- cumstances, McGee was convicted by an all-white jury and, after two appeals, was electrocuted in 1951. On the night of the execution, a cheer-


ful, all-white crowd gathered by the court- house, and two local radio stations broad- cast the event live. When she heard of her client’s fate, one of McGee’s defense coun- sels “cried at the notion of the human deg- radation that could kill a man because of his color, because that’s what it was.” The tale may remind one, as a blurb on the dust-jacket says, of “a real-life To Kill a Mockingbird.” But Alex Heard, a veteran journalist who


grew up in Mississippi, uncovers a story that is a good deal more intriguing, if less dramatic, than Harper Lee’s iconic South-


ern novel. The McGee case was fought out on a global terrain. That tearful young law- yer’s name was Bella Abzug. Years before she became a politician famous for big hats and robust feminism, Abzug worked for the Civil Rights Congress, a small but aggres- sive group with close ties to the Communist Party. The CRC, with aid from the Soviet bloc, whipped up an international outcry against McGee’s execution. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Dmitri Shostakovich dis- patched cables of outrage, and a band of protesters chained themselves to one of the columns at the Lincoln Memorial.


few of the key actors cared to acknowledge that the facts of the case were actually quite murky. Heard sifts carefully through dozens of contradic- tory accounts — including long interviews with the chil- dren of both the defendant and his accuser — and emerg- es with a sad recognition that, under the Jim Crow order, blind justice was, in essence, impossible. Every black Mis- sissippian believed McGee and Hawkins had a consensu- al affair that somehow went bad; hardly anyone on the other side of the color line be- lieved a respectable white mother could stoop so low. “That’s just what the Russians were using to stir up trouble in our country,” one white housewife told a local paper. With no physical proof that a rape had


THE EYES OF WILLIE MCGEE A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South By Alex Heard Harper


404 pp. $26.99


text of historical truths. He describes other, clearly unjust capital trials of black men in the period and several horrific lynchings. He details the friction between the Civil Rights Congress and the much larger Na- tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose leaders were suspi- cious of any defense campaign in which communists had a dominant role. And he sketches the biographies of the local white attorneys who tried to save McGee, includ- ing a former boxer who had big political ambitions before decid- ing “to give the black man in Mis- sissippi the full advantage of his rights under the law.” On occasion, the lengthy back- stories obscure the travails of McGee himself, a frightened man who appeared to go mad for a spell when he thought his cause was hopeless. Still, Heard has produced a book that, in arrest- ing prose, captures a significant slice of the past and a case whose verdict was all but preordained. There were signs in the late


1940s and early ’50s that the long night of official racism was be- ginning to end. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby integrated the major leagues, Harry Truman in- tegrated the armed forces, and black men and women with sta- ble jobs joined civil rights groups


occurred or any eyewitnesses other than Hawkins herself, McGee would likely have been acquitted by a fair-minded jury. But he had initially confessed to the crime — after several police beatings. Hawkins stood firm by her story, even suing the Communist Daily Worker for libel. In the end, a divided U.S. Supreme Court refused to take the case. While Heard is unable to decide who was the honest party, he surrounds the le- gal narrative with a rich and knowing con-


in unprecedented numbers. None of this was enough to help Willie McGee. But, in his final letter, he asked his wife to “tell the people to Keep on fighting.” Four years lat- er and two hundred miles to the east, by refusing to ride buses in Montgomery, Ala., thousands of black people did just that. bookworld@washpost.com


Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Dissent and the


author, most recently, of “A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.”


MEMOIR


MY QUEER WAR By James Lord Farrar Straus Giroux. 344 pp. $27


Before there was “don’t-ask-don’t-tell,”


there was “don’t you dare.” That was what James Lord, who grew up to write books about Picasso and Giacometti, told himself in college when he felt longings for his male classmates: “I vowed that I’d nev- er, ever succumb.” Like so many oth- er men who have served their country in wartime, however, Lord found out that he was not one of a kind, and one night, as he wittily puts it, “The sexual ABCs [ran] through to XYZ.” His war was queer in other ways,


too. On the one hand, it took the life of his be- loved younger brother, killed in action in the Philippines; but it also allowed Lord to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, where Stein read some of his writing and gave him some advice: “A real writer must be very sure of his emotions before putting a pen to paper, so that is what I advise you to do, to consider your emotions more carefully.” Lord, who died last year, seems to have


taken that advice: This is a book of complex and mixed emotions, as when the author marvels at how “while my homeland was at war to destroy the Third Reich, [to] do away with its criminal rulers . . . at the same time I was deeply in love with things profoundly German, the music of Beethoven, the imagi- nation of Thomas Mann.”


—Dennis Drabelle drabelled@washpost.com HISTORY


97 ORCHARD An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement By Jane Ziegelman Smithsonian/Harper. 253 pp. $25.99


Modern American cuisine was born in 19th-century New York when immigrants forked over their varied gastronomic habits. So says Jane Ziegelman in her delightful book “97 Orchard.” The subtitle, however, is a bit misleading. Ziegelman does check in with five immigrant families in one Lower East Side apartment house, but they are only bit players in a broader exploration of New York’s culi- nary evolution. Throughout we see the rudiments of modern Ameri-


can cuisine. Here’s the sphere of ground beef that will one day become hamburger, and over there a vendor selling 15-cent pails of cabbage and corned beef — early takeout. Immigrants also contributed wursts, matzoh balls and spaghetti, among other staples. As Ziegelman writes, “Native-born Americans, wary of foreigners and their strange eating habits, pushed aside their culinary (and oth- er) prejudices to sample these novel foods and eventually to claim them as their own.” —Timothy R. Smith


smitht@washpost.com


BIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY LESLIE T. CHANG


The woman who wrote Chinese I


PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Journey to “The Good Earth” By Hilary Spurling Simon & Schuster. 304 pp. $27


n the winter of 1930, an American missionary’s wife wrote a novel about a Chinese peasant family. Showing the manuscript to no one, she sent it to a small New York pub-


lisher. The book was selected by the Book- of-the-Month Club, became a bestseller and won a Pulitzer Prize. So obscure was the author that until she lectured at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, some people wondered if she existed at all. Pearl S. Buck’s extraordinary journey from obscure missionary to global celebrity is the subject of Hilary Spurling’s new book. This elegant, richly researched work is at once a portrait of a remarkable woman ahead of her time, an evocation of China between the wars, and a meditation on how the secrets and griefs of childhood can shape a writer. At a time of heightened in- terest in China, Spurling’s biography is a compelling tribute to the woman who first focused American attention on the country. The daughter of Presbyterian mission- aries stationed in the port city of Zhen- jiang, Pearl grew up wearing loose Chinese trousers and cloth shoes, attending Chi- nese plays and funerals, and speaking a street slang her parents did not under- stand. “When I was in the Chinese world,” she later wrote, “I was Chinese, I spoke Chi- nese and behaved as a Chinese.... When I was in the American world, I shut the door between.” Spurling perceptively explores the influences on young Pearl’s imagina- tion: Chinese folktales, the novels of Dick- ens, her mother’s stories of an America Pearl had never seen. Before the girl was 10, she knew she wanted to be a writer. After attending Randolph-Macon, the


women’s college in Lynchburg, Va., Pearl returned to China and married John Loss- ing Buck, an agricultural economist. She proved an indispensable partner in his ru- ral surveys, interviewing farmers and de- veloping a deep sympathy for them. When she wrote “The Good Earth,” she claimed that the story was fully formed in her mind and poured out in a rush. “Its energy was the anger I felt for the sake of the peasants and the common folk of China,” she said. “My material was . . . close at hand, and the people I knew as I knew myself.” Reading “The Good Earth” today, one is struck by how little it has aged. The story of the farmer Wang Lung’s struggles in an unforgiving world is as lean and finely wrought as a fable. Details linger in the mind — the preciousness of a handful of tea leaves, the absolute quiet of a village when starvation comes. Spurling makes clear how revolutionary Buck’s achieve- ment was. Most Chinese intellectuals and writers were embarrassed by their coun- try’s poverty; that a foreigner was expos- ing it distressed them all the more. “It is al- ways better for the Chinese to write about Chinese subject matter, as that is the only way to get near the truth,” said the famous writer Lu Xun, expressing what became the standard Chinese judgment on Buck’s


1935 FILE PHOTO


work. When she won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, China’s delegation with- drew from the ceremony in protest. In contrast, Buck became enormously influential in the United States. Long be- fore most observers, she warned of dis- affection with Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. “Unless something happens to change it,” Buck wrote in 1928, “we are in for a real revolution here in comparison to which all this so far will be a mere game of ball on a summer’s afternoon.” She set up a founda- tion to promote East-West exchange and organized wartime relief for China. She at- tacked discrimination against women, blacks and the disabled long before such views became mainstream. Spurling makes clear that the boundless


energy Buck brought to public causes hurt her as a writer. For decades, she turned out one or two books a year but did little to de- velop her craft; her working method was to produce a first draft at phenomenal speed and leave all revision to her editors. Her best books, including “The Good Earth” and biographies of her parents, came early. After 1934, she never lived in


China again — and as her distance from her subjects grew, her novels turned di- dactic and stale. A final attempt to revisit China in 1972, the year before she died, was turned down; long after her death, Spurling notes, it came out that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had personally signed the order banning her return. In our age of intensive China-watching,


what does Buck have to teach us? She es- chewed ideology; she avoided taking sides; she steered clear of experts and officials. Her understanding of the country was built on years of patient observation, living in backwater cities and befriending stu- dents, housewives, servants and farmers. She did not let her affection for the country cloud her judgment. But in her best work, she insisted on seeing the Chinese as indi- viduals, and she made us see them, too. bookworld@washpost.com


Leslie T. Chang is a longtime China


correspondent and the author of “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China.”


“When I was in the Chinese world, I was Chinese, I spoke Chinese and behaved


as a Chinese.” Pearl S. Buck


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