Your Blues Ain't Like Mine

Who was the first person to say the truth hurts? Never is this more true than within the pages of Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. The premise of Campbell's 1950s story could have been ripped from the headlines of yesteryear or buried in the back pages of yesterday's online paper. Armstrong Todd is a smart fifteen year old who knows a little French. Being from Chicago, he does not realize life in rural Mississippi is racially divided and prejudicial hate runs deep. One slip of the tongue in the direction of a white woman ends up costing him his life. Never mind that it was an accident; the teen was not speaking to Lily. Never mind that the white woman did not understand what Armstrong had actually said in her direction. Suddenly, justice for show more a black teenager in southern Mississippi becomes a political fire starter around the topic of desegregating schools. Campbell doesn't contain the perspective to just one side of the color story. Lily, the "offended" (and extremely ignorant) white woman, is a poor young mother with an abusive husband. She only understands debilitating poverty, a screaming newborn, a whiney toddler, and the urgent need to keep on her husband's good side. She desperately walks a fine line of taking care of her starving family while scrambling for the little pleasures in life like a new tube of ruby red lipstick.
Beyond civil rights Campbell makes interesting connections between the lines of color. Women can be abused, regardless of race. A fist can bruise or split open any color of skin. Along those same lines, Campbell points out that women of any color use sex as a weapon to get what they want. Lila and Delotha are no different when it comes to using their bodies to manipulate their men.
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine spans generations. Moore guides the pace through political and pop culture cues like which president is in office and what songs are playing on the radio. Occasionally, a historical event will make an appearance like the Kent State University shootings. show less

Whenever I hear someone rave about The Help, I suggest they read Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. The Help has good parts, but on the whole Your Blues Ain't Like Mine -- a novel based on the Emmett Till murder -- seems so much more realistic and honest about how horrible conditions were for African-Americans in the 1950s South.

Here's a post I wrote about the novel for Newsworthy Novels, a blog that matches novels to today's headlines and events (this entry was for Black History Month): http://newsworthynovels.blogspot.com/2013/02/black-history-month-campbells-your....

Well written novel, loosely based on the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. I particularly liked the characterization and depth the author imparts to both her protagonists and villains. Helped me connect with the tragedy in a way I never would have otherwise.

www.barnesandnoble.com
Annotation
Set in the recent American past, this is a timeless tale of racism, murder, and redemption. A black Chicago-born teen goes Deep South for the summer and is murdered for saying the wrong thing to a white woman. Repercussions are felt by everyone involved, both black and white, for generations.

From the Publisher
Repercussions are felt for decades in a dozen lives after a racist beating turns to cold-blooded murder in a small Mississippi town in the 1950s. Bebe Moore Campbell's affecting memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad, was hailed by The Philadelphia Inquirer as "a remarkable achievement." "Ripe with family stories, lush with images, suffused with emotions," said the Kansas City show more Star. "It is probably one of the more overdue books about and for the black community," wrote Nikki Giovanni in The Washington Post. Now Campbell turns her abundant talents to fiction in an evocative first novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. Chicago-born Armstrong Todd is fifteen, black, and unused to the segregated ways of the Deep South when his mother sends him to spend the summer with relatives in her native rural Mississippi. For speaking a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, Armstrong pays the ultimate price when her husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law decide to teach him a lesson. The lives of everyone involved in the incident - black and white - are changed forever, and the reverberations extend well into the next generation. Resonant with the sorrows of poverty and racial prejudice as well as the triumphs of love and social justice, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine marks the debut of a powerful, clear voice in contemporary fiction. show less