Lunch-Box Dream (11 page)

This story began with memories: my grandmother, mother, brother, and I did take such a battlefield tour in June 1959, and we witnessed several instances of Jim Crow in action, both among ourselves and more publicly in the South. Many parts of this novel are reflections of that trip. Since, however, my memories formed only a fragmentary narrative, other parts of the present story are necessarily fictional.

The system of racist customs and laws known as Jim Crow existed in varying degrees in the Southern states from roughly the fall of Reconstruction in 1877 to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965. It was, in effect, a continuation of the slavery that had been abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and over which the Civil War had been fought. Jim Crow, named after an early nineteenth-century minstrel song, was pervasive, a way of life that governed every public action of African Americans in the South. They were not allowed to mix with whites in restaurants, railroad cars, buses, waiting rooms, theaters, restrooms, water fountains, parks, and pools. Factories, stores, banks, and other institutions had elaborate rules governing the intermingling of the races.

The realities of life under Jim Crow have been well documented, and some recent and widely available books include
Sons of Mississippi
, by Paul Hendrickson;
The Race Beat
, by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff;
The Promised Land
, by Nicholas Lemann;
Trouble in Mind
, by Leon F. Litwack; and
There Goes My Everything
, by Jason Sokol. An essential volume of oral history transcripts (and audio recordings) of victims of the period is
Remembering Jim Crow
, edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, among others.
Sweet Land of Liberty
, by Thomas J. Sugrue, addresses, as its subtitle states, “the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North.” Richard Wright's 1937 autobiographical sketch, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” has not been surpassed.

In
Lunch-Box Dream
, Hershel Thomas refers several times to the 1955 killing in Money, Mississippi, of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. Emmett lived in Chicago and was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he allegedly whistled at a white woman. He was later kidnapped and his body recovered in the Tallahatchie River, identifiable only by his ring. To document the brutality of his murder, Emmett's mother displayed his body in a glass-topped coffin and allowed now-famous images to be published in
Ebony
magazine. By their own later admission, the white woman's husband and a relative had in fact killed Emmett, but had already been acquitted by the (usual for the time) all-white jury. The publicity surrounding Emmett Till's death, his funeral in Chicago, and the subsequent trial in Mississippi, strengthened immeasurably the civil rights movement in both the North and the South.

As a side note, Emmett's coffin was rediscovered in 2009 in a shed at the Chicago cemetery where he was buried and is now in the possession of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Further information about the shotgun death Hershel refers to in chapter 26 can be found in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
from that week in June 1959.

I want to thank several friends who read this story at various times in its development and who offered many insightful comments and comfort, too: Nora, Elise, Dennis, Pat, Tami (thanks, also, for the photo of El Siesta), Karen, and Floyd. Thank you to Sarah Salomon, whom I do not know but who read the manuscript at a crucial stage. From the very beginning of my work on this book, my wife, Dolores, has been my conscience, inspiration, and sounding board. I am as ever grateful to my unstoppable agent, George Nicholson, for just that, not stopping until he found the perfect editor—Frances Foster, whose intelligence, grace, and imagination at our first meeting told me my story had found its true home. Every encounter since then has been a joy. Thanks are due also to Susan Dobinick, whose careful shepherding of the manuscript has made me long to stay at that new home for a good while to come.