Like Trees, Walking: A Novel
Ravi Howard
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0060529601
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Based on the true story of a modern-day lynching in America, Ravi Howard's widely acclaimed debut novel exposes one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the American South.
On the morning of March 21, 1981, in Mobile, Alabama, nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was found dead, his body badly beaten and hanging from a tree on Herndon Avenue. Brothers Paul and Roy Deacon of the Deacon Memorial Funeral Home are called upon to bury their close friend and classmate, and the experience will leave them forever changed. Along with other residents of their hometown, the Deacon brothers must struggle to understand the circumstances surrounding Donald's murder—the city's first lynching in more than sixty years and a gruesome reminder of racial inequalities in the New South.
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scalding water. On the way to church that morning, a radio sermon came through the speakers behind my head. As the preacher rattled on about heaven, Paul stared into my father’s headrest mouthing the memorized scriptures—blessed are the persecuted, blessed are the meek—as if two voices made them twice as true. We passed a dozen churches between our house and Bethel. I’m sure all of those pastors prepared to do the same thing the preacher on the radio did, wrapping Michael Donald’s body in the
Near my mother’s crates of front-page birthdays, she has a small filing cabinet where she stores her important papers. Among them, news clippings and mementos from watershed days. Facts to share with her fourth-graders. First black man elected to some office. First black woman to reach some milestone. Lest we forget, she still likes to say. Files and files of monumental days, each labeled in neat schoolteacher handwriting. Some of those days don’t need mementos. It would be nice if forgetting
wounds were burned to a crisp. The charred flesh of his right hand left exposed the slim bones at the end of the smashed forearm. His severed left arm lay wrapped in plastic. Though the skin was jagged around the wound, the arm didn’t have a scratch. I don’t remember letting go of that plastic, but my side of the gurney was again covered while Paul kept holding on. He stood frozen with the edge of plastic wrinkled in his fist, his face twisted like he’d stared at the sun. “Paul. Let go.” He
sitting and helped them pack everything to leave. Before Paul and I headed home, we took the boat up into the delta. We had a chance to enjoy the early-summer days, when the afternoon sun was still comfortable. Paul sat facing me with his head against the bow and his legs over the front seat. With his mirrored sunglasses, I couldn’t tell if he was awake until he started patting his stomach, having once again eaten way too much. While he relaxed, I wove through Polecat Bay and Coffee Bayou. Once
When the cops arrived, they sealed off the area with barricades at both ends of the street. The latecomers pressed against the barriers a good thirty, forty yards from the tree, but they closed the distance with their voices, talking back to that ax every time it landed. Within the perimeter, three officers sat on their horses. A dozen others stood nearby in riot helmets, chin straps unbuckled. No demands for us to disperse. No sirens. Wilcox was there, talking into his radio. He didn’t say
