1.5*

Originally published in the United Kingdom as The Ballad Of Lee Cotton

Leifur Nils Kristjansson Saint Marie du Cotton (called Lee) is born to a mixed-race mother and an Icelandic fisherman father. From his father he gets his white complexion, blond-white hair and startling blue eyes. From his mother he gets his identity as black. Born in segregated Mississippi in 1950, it’s the “black” that counts, not his white skin. Lee also inherits a gift for “seeing” from his Grandmother Celeste. He can hear other people’s thoughts and while this sometimes helps him it mostly confuses him.

I was intrigued by this idea of a “white-skinned black boy” in the segregated South of the mid-20th century. I wanted to see how his special gifts would help him as he moved through life. But the novel took a decided turn for the weird.

After he is nearly beaten to death, Lee awakens in a Missouri hospital. He’s without identification and his head injury makes him rather incoherent. Going along with the assumptions of the hospital staff, Lee begins life as a white man. Until another accident …. Let’s just say that Lee changes skin color and/or gender like some women change hair color. Oh, wait ... he does that, too.

Wilson is a British man, living in London. I’m not sure how – or why – he chose to write about America’s segregated South. While the premise was intriguing, for me, the execution failed to deliver. I will say this about the writing. Wilson gives Lee a unique voice – with an odd mixture of local dialect and educated English. Lee’s a great reader and student of literature, sprinkling his observations of life with references to a variety of works from Huckleberry Finn to Madame Bovary.

On the whole, however, I found this just too fantastically absurd to be believed. I never warmed up to Lee or any of the other characters, and I found it a chore to finish. ( )

AUTHOR: WILSON, Christopher
TITLE: Cotton
DATE READ: 07/26/2014
RATING: 4.5/B+
GENRE/PUB DATE/PUBLISHER/# OF PGS Fiction;/2005/Harcourt Books/314 pgs
SERIES/STAND-ALONE: S/A
TIME/PLACE: 1949-1980's
CHARACTERS: Lee Cotton McCoy
FIRST LINES: " When I finally slither out mewling, I've already given Mama hard labor, because she's bneen cussing & screaming seventeen hours."
COMMENTS: Lee is born to a young black woman in a small town in Mississippi in the year 1949 from a liaison she had in New Orleans w/a Nordic sailor. Lee was born w/ white skin & white hair and no one quite knew how to classify him. And this goes on throughout the book as Lee has many transitions from black to white, man to woman … and all in all we come to understand the essence of the person is really not defined by any labels. I enjoyed the writing style of this book and would look for another book by this author. The story was very interesting … you just never knew what the next change/chapter in Lee's life was going to be. ( )

SLJ Reviews 2006 February
Website: http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com


Adult/High School -Before he is 30, Lee Cotton experiences life as a black boy, a white man, a white woman, and a black woman. The son of a black woman and a white Icelandic sailor, he was born in 1950 in Eureka, MS. White skin and blond hair notwithstanding, he was raised to know his place in the world. When he has a relationship with the daughter of a local bigot at age 15, he is beaten up by the Ku Klux Klan and left for dead. The staff at the St. Louis hospital to which he is transferred knows him only as a brain-damaged John Doe, and he gets his first taste of life as a white person. His memory returns just in time to be drafted for the Vietnam War. A car accident and misplaced whiskey bottle result in a sex-change operation by a disbarred physician, and, after several years as a white woman, his genes catch up with him and his skin slowly darkens. Farfetched though the plot may be, Wilson writes with an easy grace and humor that make Lee a thoroughly delightful protagonist. The author paints such a compelling picture of the South in the mid-20th century that it is hard to believe that he is British. In introducing Lee, he does far more than spin an irresistible tragicomedy that combines history with flights of fancy-he challenges us to look at what truly defines us if it is not our race, gender, or socioeconomic status.-Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA
( )

In which a wonderful child is born white to a black mother, gifted with clairvoyance, and cast adrift into a world where he wanders about making wise and folksy observations about the human condition. The first half of this novel is a pearl of great price, with its Huck Finn-meets-Candide succession of brilliant little twistings of everyday situations and extraordinary events. Alas and alack, after that midpoint a plot twist led the book into some territory which this reviewer felt was substantially less fecund, as well as bringing plot more to the forefront, and it was easier to hear a few gears grinding. ( )

The story of Lee Cotton. He (she) was born son of a black woman and a white man in small town Jim Crow Mississippi. As a white kid with black blood he faces discrimination from all sides. The book has a similar feel to Forrest Gump the movie. The main character is a half-wit who somehow makes it through some incredibly bad breaks and retains his innocence without feeling bitter. There is even a similar love interest weaving its way through the story. The last 10-20% of the book was pretty anticlimactic. ( )