|
Loading... Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands▾Recommendations LibraryThing recommendations▾Will you like it?
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.
|
|
| Series (with order) |
|
| Canonical Title |
|
| Original publication date |
|
| People/Characters |
Reesa, Vaylie, Marvin, Armetta, Luther, Thurgood Marshall, Warren, Elizabeth, Ren, Emmett Casselton, Harry Moore, J.T. Bowman  | |
|
| Important places |
|
| Important events |
|
| Awards and honors |
|
| Epigraph |
|
| Dedication |
For Dad, Mother, and Gam. And for all those whose time in the fire was Florida in the early 50's. | |
|
| First words |
Luther's on the back porch knocking on the door. | |
|
| Quotations |
"With the Klans attack on two white boys, the rules have abruptly changed; their evil is no limited to Negroes, Jews, and Catholics. The Klan's crossed it's own hate line." pg 195
"If you're not lucky, if you have the unfortunate luck of living directly in its path, the center of the storm, the eye, engulfs you in terrifying silence. You wait, and watchk and wonder when it will pass, when the crack of old trees, and the rain, and the winds, and the barrels of water will return, all over again.....Mrs. Moore's death is the first sign that this hurricane's overquiet eye has passed. A flurry of increasingly loud events follow....Florida Crackers bearing the badges of Mr. Hoover's F.B.I....it's lear the other side of this hurricane has begun to blow. chapter 23.
"There's a bit of rattler in all of us. But as far as I've seen, human snakes are a whole lot meaner than the reptile kind." pg 128
"...the Klan was nothing to be afraid of, just a bunch of good ole boys playing boogey-man." pg 14
| |
|
| Last words |
|
| Disambiguation notice |
|
| Publisher's editors |
|
| Blurbers |
|
▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
One orange-blossom-scented night in 1951, Reesa McMahon woke to find her world shattered by violence and hatred. Her friend and mentor, nineteen-year-old Marvin Culley, had been brutally murdered by the local Klan. The killing of this innocent black man, who worked in the McMahon's orange grove, will forever change Reesa's life and the life of everyone in the genteel town of Mayflower, Florida, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a conflict that would ultimately divide a nation.
Against this backdrop, Reesa draws strength from her indomitable grandmother "Doto," who drove hell-bent down from Chicago in her new blue DeSoto...Warren, her slow-to-anger Yankee father, who never quite fit in to the closed society of Good 'Ol Boy citrus growers...Miss Maybelle Mason, the elderly postmistress, who knew a rattlesnake when she saw one-and the bitr of heartbreak as well-and Luther and Armetta and the black community of Mayflower. Through Reesa's painful search for meaning, we experience the unforgettable rites of passage of a young girl's and of a small town's shattering confrontation with racial prejudice, injustice, and-ultimately-truth.
| |
|
▾Book descriptions
In the turbulent spring of 1951, central Florida became notoriously linked to a vicious series of Ku Klux Klan activities. The racial, religious, and political mix that populated Reesa McMahon's childhood hometown of Mayflower that same year was, as her Northern-born father remarked, "the social equivalent of a Molotov cocktail." The upheaval her family experiences in the coming-of-age novel Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands by Susan Carol McCarthy--which is based on actual events from her own life--abruptly ends Reesa's girlish sense of security. When her friend Marvin Cully, a black orange-picker who works for her father, is killed by the local Opalakee Klan, she realizes how much her liberal family stands out in opposition to the men with white sheets and guns who, unmasked, served as the pillars of the local community. While making sense of Marvin's death and slowly realizing the extent to which her fellow townsfolk brandish their racist attitudes, Reesa watches her own house become the unofficial center of the resistance. The author notes her arguably sensible reasons for fictionalizing her accounts, but the resulting story doesn't move beyond the confines of a young girl's mind. --Emily Russin (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:02 -0400) (see all 2 descriptions) ▾Open Shelves Classification The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
 Google Books — Loading...Popular covers 
|
)
)
