Mildred D. Taylor: The Road to Memphis (1990)

Mildred D. Taylor is sometimes mentioned as a writer of young adult fiction, but this novel certainly doesn't read that way. The Road to Memphis is set in 1941 and belongs to Taylor's Logan family saga, concerning the situation of blacks in mainly rural Mississippi, where they are very much second class citizens in a segregated society, where there are restaurants and toilets strictly for whites and blacks only, and where blacks sit or stand at the back of buses, and the seats at the front are for whites only.

Taylor was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1943, and although her family moved to the North, as a child she frequently re-visited the South, absorbing the many stories she heard, later incorporating them into her novels, and The Road to Memphis is a fictional representation of archival and family research.

The author painfully depicts a world in which blacks must call whites 'Mr' and are daily forced to accept different kinds of intimidation that whites mete out with (usual) impunity. Jeremy Simms is a young white man who is an exception to these rules, though, as he believes that 'folks are folks', and is generally respected by the black community. Until, that is, he joins his racist cousins the Aames in chasing Harris, who badly breaks his leg as a result. However, Jeremy redeems himself when Moe snaps and beats up the Aames, and he not only hides Moe in his truck but secretly drives him to Jackson, from where he escapes in Stacey Logan's car to Memphis and by train to the safety of Chicago.

But there are no easy endings. There can't be.

Hillary Jordan: Mudbound (2008)

Mudbound is the first novel by Hillary Jordan, who grew up in Dallas, Texas and Muskogee, Oklahama. The book is almost entirely set on and around a cotton farm in the late 1940s in the Mississippi Delta not far from Greenville, and takes the form of a multiple narrative in six voices – three from the white McAllan family, and three from the black Jackson family:

Laura McAllan is a warm, tolerant city woman from Memphis, Tennessee and a 31-year-old virgin when she meets the man who will become her husband. She is shocked when several years later her family is forced to move to a primitive shack in Mississippi, on a farm prone to isolation by flooding. Things are made worse by the fact that her husband's father, a racist and a misogynist, also lives with them.

Henry McAllan is Laura's husband and is steady and reliable but a little too conventional, a little too accepting of old ways and of his father in particular. The land is in his blood.

Jamie is Henry's beloved brother. A handsome man who has women flocking to him, he first greatly impresses Laura when he dances with her at the famous Peabody in Memphis. He will later return from the war to live with the McAllan family, somewhat traumatised and with an addiction to whiskey.

Hap Jackson is a share tenant on Henry's property who is keen to get justice for his family but is aware of the dangers of stepping too far over the line in a Jim Crow society where the whites hold all the trump cards.

Florence Jackson is Hap's wife and the local midwife who also helps Laura out with household jobs. She is an intelligent woman who is also a good psychologist.

Ronsel Jackson is Hap and Florence's son and – transgressively – forms a close friendship with Jamie. He too comes with mental baggage from the war, part of it caused by a love affair with a white German woman. He finds it very difficult to adjust to a society which eagerly uses blacks as cannon fodder to protect itself but will not even acknowledge that they should have the same rights as anyone else.

Bit by bit, the six voices unravel into a powerful story of mindless racial violence, adulterous sex, and parricide.

Prejudice, and Harper Lee's and Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird

Over the holidays I chanced upon the DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird, and although I'd seen the movie before and read the book two or three times, as it's always been a favorite of mine I decided to buy it. At the time I didn't realize that the main theme of the narrative – the obscenity of prejudice – would prove to be so topical this week, when two Englishmen were finally found guilty of a horrific racially motivated murder commited almost two decades previously.

We have fictional, smalltown Maycomb (loosely modeled on Monroeville), Alabama in the Jim Crow era of the early 1930s, and real Eltham, suburb of bigtown London, UK, in the early 1990s. Ostensibly, there are huge differences in time, general culture, etc, and yet I don't see much difference between the poison of Bob Ewell and the poison of Gary Dobson and David Norris.

Disturbingly, Norris, who lived in a £300,000 mansion and whose family had never been short of money in his sixteen years, had rarely left south-east London, and had never been north of the River Thames. Insularity breeds contempt.

To return to Mockingbird, there is of course a parallel narrative that feeds into that of Tom Robinson's toward the end, and just as Robinson is the outsider in the powerful white world of the South, Boo Radley with, to quote Sheriff Heck Tate, 'his shy ways' is very much the white outsider in a more extroverted world he can't fit into.

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the great novels of 20th century American literature, and the movie – strongly endorsed by Lee – also has a power which, as director Robert Mulligan suggests, it would not have been possible to display in a world fed on MTV, in which many people would be easily bored by the long scenes.

Mulligan made that remark during the Director's Commentary, a special feature on the DVD where he and producer Alan J. Pakula discuss the actors and the events in the film. What I hadn't considered before is that the movie (which in spite of a number of small differences is largely very faithful to the book) is a real oddity as the book is essentially uncinematic, and apart from the courtroom scene the major events take place offstage and we learn of them (the killing of the black Tom Robinson, the killing of of the crazed racist Ewell) secondhand.

Pakula would go on to direct his own films, and a preoccupation with technology is apparent in virtually all of them. This is particularly so with his characters' use of the phone, which is frequently employed as a dramatic device to increase tension, often being the harbinger of important news. But perhaps the Pakula movie that springs to mind most is All the President's Men, with the Watergate tapes which proved so damning to Nixon. Significantly, of course, it was technology in the form of the police bugging of Dobson's flat that helped in bringing (as yet just two of) the murderers of Stephen Lawrence to justice. Technology was a little too primitive in the days when Mockingbird is set, although the insane primitiveness of racial prejudice is still with us.

Mary Dutton: Thorpe (1967)

There are several reasons why I didn't give up on this book: sheer determination, the enticing obscurity of it, and the endearing fact (to me as least) that this is one of those rare animals — an only published novel. It was also something of a discovery, being a Southern book (set in Arkansas, where Dutton was born) of which I was previously unaware.

The single novel element, plus the racial issue and the (eponymous) young female protagonist with a father of great integrity, almost inevitably lead to comparisons with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and memories of Scout and Atticus Finch, so it's hardly surprising to read the front page of the dust jacket announcing 'A Story of Innocence and Terror...As memorable as TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD'.

However, although this book is undoubtedly well written, Dutton's novel just doesn't merit any other comparison with Mockingbird: the pace is too slow, the power isn't there, and — crucially — I had (at least until the end) severe problems deciding if race was the main issue, or just family difficulties. It seems to lose its path for a very large number of pages.

The blurb on the rear flap quotes Dutton: 'I think what I was trying to say is that a "little bit" of evil cannot be isolated. It grows and touches, like the rain, both the just and the unjust — those who ignore it and those who are unaware of its existence.' Er, certainly it is clear that racism in the Jim Crow South of the mid-thirties was unavoidable, and that there was much social and often economic pressure for people to at least go through the motions of supporting the Ku Klux Klan. Not too sure about that meteorological analogy though.

On a lighter note, the cow called 'Dammit' is a nice touch, and reminds me of the euphemistically-named dog 'Cough' in Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger.

The rear cover tells me that Mary Dutton was born in El Dorado, was living in Borger, Texas at the time of publication, and was a school teacher. I'm not too sure why she published nothing else: as I have a book club edition, and as there are a number of copies of this book for sale online, the suggestion is that it was popular enough. But then, if she took ten years over this, how many would she take to complete the usually difficult second one?