Manacles

When the young soldier pushes open the door, he freezes in place. There is his mother in a wheelchair, legs amputated above the knees. Behind her, eyes replaced with scarred sockets, stands the white man he’s come to kill, the Klansman responsible for his father’s death. The soldier, unable to comprehend what he is seeing, turns and runs. So opens Manacles, a story of interracial love set in the small town of Pine Grove, Mississippi, during the Jim Crow era. Nell McClenden and Roy Alexander meet as small children in a meadow between their homes and develop an inexpressible bond. Because romance between the races is impossible in their place and time, they remain platonic friends, marry others, and raise families of their own. But the pressures of the racist society in which they live eventually combust in wave after wave of senseless violence, entwining their fates and throwing them into each other’s arms. By turns funny, surreal, and heartbreaking, Manacles vividly evokes the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of an era. In folksy prose, Fred Davis Jackson fills his novel with stunning plot twists and unforgettable characters, from the head- and heart-strong Nell to confused but devoted Roy, with a supporting cast that includes bridesmaids, Klansmen, pastors, blues musicians, army officers, a lazy sheriff, a talking doll, a shoeshine man, and Reverend Moonshine, an itinerant preacher who speaks outlandish riddles of wisdom. Jackson’s saga reaches as far as New York and California, but it centers on Pine Grove. There, when tragedy strikes, the entire community is called to account for its deeply entrenched code of segregation. The author doesn’t spare the reader pain, but he conjures a world rich in love and the possibility of healing.