Wolf Whistle

Lewis Nordan works on the edge of magic. In Wolf Whistle the harsh reality of deeply ingrained racism and outright murder blends into fantasy and beauty and back again to real and ugly. In Arrow Catcher, Mississippi a black boy from Chicago named Bobo makes a weak and unsuccessful proposition to a wealthy white woman. She gives him a ride home to get him safely away from the scene of what she knows is considered a crime in the south.

Bobo turns up dead and two white suspects are put on trial, including the woman’s husband. That’s not the entire story. Nordan intertwines the lives of several of Arrow Catcher’s residents. Glenn Gregg is a nine year-old that severely burned himself trying to set his daddy, Solon, on fire. Alice, the new and innocently adulterous fourth grade teacher takes her students on a field trip to visit their burned classmate, as well as to the morgue, a sewage treatment plant and the murder trial. She’s still in love with an old college professor and although she feels almost like Jesus, being surrounded by children, she has “excellent reason to believe that Jesus never would in one million years have slept with a married man.”

Wolf Whistle combines the horrific with black humor and makes it sing. The blues of course, like Robert Johnson would. ( )

Good: the description and characterization were excellent. Everyone had their own believable backstory.
Bad: the plot didn't really go anywhere. It was more of a slice-of-life picture than a story.
Certainly worth reading, but I'm not sure I'll actively search out other books by Nordan. I'll be curious to see what the next person thinks of it. ( )

Nordan's writing was masterful. A surreal look at the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi led me, of course, to seek out some of the real facts. But the book itself, with it's unusual "magical" aspect (Till's 'demon eye' viewing the murder scene and his murderer) kept me anxious to finish reading the book. Comical scenes (the parrot in the courthouse, "Peter Skeeter", Sally Anne's purchase of feminine products at Red's Good Lookin Bar & Gro) juxtaposed with unexpected poignant ones (Solon--the 'bad' guy-and family playing wash tub music for the dying son) made this a fine book in spite of the depressing historical background of the Till lynching. This is a book I would have never chosen to read if not for the local library's program "Let's Talk About It" discussion funded by the N. C. Humanities Council. ( )

Wolf Whistle is based on the true story of a young black man who was murdered for having had the temerity to whistle at a white woman. It's not at all earnest or preachy but is a light and entertaining read which nonetheless never allows the reader to forget the seriousness of not only this case, but the many other similar ones that took place in the America of the 50s and 60s. ( )

I wonder what a native Mississippian who was around when Jim Crow was in full force would say about this novel. Thankfully, I was not around during that hateful time, so I can only perceive what it must have been like to live in a world where the murder of a teenaged boy was deemed justifiable to grown men. What happened to Emmett Till is an unutterable shame that will haunt my home state for years to come, and since I did not come from that time I have no idea what it was like to live in that shadowy world.

Lewis Nordan's writing has a way of seizing you by the collar and giving you a good shake. It's almost as if he's standing beside you at a particularly dark scene of one of his novels pointing and saying, "this is what it was really like. Pay attention."

I highly recommend this novel, but it's not exactly a barrel of laughs. I don't think that was Nordan's intention, so no harm done. ( )