Bluebird, Bluebird of Attica Locke Review

Darren Mathews is a smart, well-educated, dedicated man. He knows where he comes from and where he belongs. He was born four decades ago in rural East Texas, but his pedigree goes back to the time before the Civil War. a benevolent White his “favorite slaves” left not only his name but also fertile farmland, but that did not change the skin color of Darren’s family – indeed has – so goes the legend Mathews. Like all other blacks were exposed to permanent discrimination, which “could transform the everyday behavior of a black man in a matter of life and death,” all of a sudden.

By noticed the “old rules of life in the South,” she followed their path and passed through determination and hard work to education, wealth and prestige, were teachers, doctors lawyers.

Darren had a law degree from the quit elite Princeton University and can be a lawyer. But it has shaped the example of his uncle William, the first colored Texas Rangers .

As he wanted to fight in the everyday life of his fellow African-American as an upright fighter for the cause of colored racism and injustice. As a member of a special unit of the FBI Houston he will be called back to the countryside to a mistrusted crime educate, possibly “some kind of racial thing” that will cover the local sheriff. Within a week, has drawn two battered bodies from the Attoyac Bayou in Shelby County. Michael Wright, a black lawyer from Chicago in transit, and Missy Dale had late hours together leaving the bar, where worked the White as a waitress.

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At the scene of the crime, in the 178-inhabitant Kaff Lark, come despite its tiny size each other all the forces that determine the climate of hostility for a long time. The author has settled the fictitious place right on US Highway 59, a “paved hope” for many medium and dead-colored, which took advantage of this north-south route to cut down and to seek a better life in the north. Strong-willed landowner as the Mathews remained dear and held her head high. Who had neither enough nor energy fields had to stay and suffer. Such poor colored ( “cotton pickers who had traded their lives as slave labor for a life with overwhelming lease debt, only a jump from the open fire in the frying pan, the certainty of hell in the slow agonizing torture of Hope”) are in the café of the old Geneva Marie Meeks just off Highway welcome. In the strange, unchanged for fifty years roomful of old rubbish the colored owner offers its guests “Black-eyed peas and oxtail” or stuffed dumplings on.

The counterpart to “Geneva’s” is the rundown tavern “Jeff’s Juice House” on the “white” side of the highway, a meeting the other, where resources and initiative for a fresh start missing elsewhere: the poor white farm workers, uneducated, stock conservative, openly racist and hysterically against everything foreign and new. This “rednecks” pass the time at billiards, pinball, dart boards with loud country music from the jukebox and fanned by the Confederate flags on the walls.

While Darren in his truck over the red earth of his beloved home rolls him jump into the dull-drab landscape provincial curiosities in the eye: “Lighthouses in corn fields, life-size gingerbread houses, a barn with Donald Trump’s face on it,” finally “almost perfect replica of Thomas Jefferson’s estate Monticello” together with a reduced edition of ” white house “as a spacious home for a little black to unruly Labrador in the garden. This elegant property is the residence of Wally Jefferson, son of a plantation owner Dynasty, also owner of the “Juice House”, distantly related to the third president of the nation and mighty proud of it. He poses as a distinguished Boss and gentleman of the old school, and he never would in mixed company the word “nigger” use.

Lark blowing Darren, who was instructed to hold back in his investigation, the icy wind opposite. He must not get in the way the local sheriff and his clear principles of law and order. The Rednecks eyeing the black Texas Ranger – for them a contradiction in terms – with unmistakable condescension. “They Hab’n lost?” throws out her busty barmaid in “Jeff’s Juice House”. Missy Dales husband turns out to be particularly zealous racist, and from Chicago

Darren feels flying the capricious widow Wright one to find out what happened to the lawyer. From the beginning, that it is racist “hate crimes acted “is. His suspicions soon attract some men who band together in the evenings in dive, to indulge their racist sentiments. Whose symbols they can significantly under the skin prick: A dagger, flanked by the black-rimmed letters A and B, and a jagged double S on the wrist that identify them as members of the “Aryan Brotherhood of Texas” from. The dreaded clan of “Aryan Brotherhood” is financed by drug and arms deals teaches with his gruesome murders even the FBI fear and.

So strictly, the Company separated the little Lark also is, yet it is also a complex interwoven microcosm of white and black, somehow held together by a tangle of family ties and dependencies, through open and secret love relationships through years of practice and unspoken secrets. The arrival of the black lawyer is the spark that explodes the long time seething volcano of resentment, jealousy and hatred. The hypocritical order of the provincials will explode, and the accumulated over generations of dirt from oppression, humiliation, hubris and power is suddenly evident. To the right lanes to find Darren so must go many steps in the past of the family and the place and return from there to the present.

Attica Locke with ” Bluebird, Bluebird < "Attica Locke: "Bluebird, Bluebird" at"

deservedly the book published in 2017 and now by Susanna Mende was translated into German, awarded in 2018 with the prestigious Edgar Award for the best crime novel of the year and with the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger . Its action takes place in 2016, the last year of the Obama administration. What had not aroused the election of this president to hopes, especially with its colored compatriots! With his successor, who redeemed so many of Obama’s performance with a few high-handed strokes of the pen, America took a backward role as Darren experiencing it yourself. He, too, had “always want to believe that they were the last generation that was so life had to [their ancestors] that change would unfold in the White House its effect. But in reality was just the opposite happens. As a result of Obama America showed its true face. “<

This book I have on the list Zu my 20 Lieblingsbüchern”