Ginny Gall

Summary (from the publisher): A sweeping, eerily resonant epic of race and violence in the Jim Crow South: a lyrical and emotionally devastating masterpiece from Charlie Smith, whom the New York Public Library has said “may be America’s most bewitching stylist alive.”

Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother flees their home in the Red Row section of Chattanooga, accused of killing a white man. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town’s leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved, the promise of transcendence in the written word, and a rare peace in a hostile world. Yet tragedy visits them near-daily, and after a series of devastating events—a lynching, a church burning—Delvin fears being accused of murdering a local white boy and leaves town.

Haunted by his mother’s disappearance, Delvin rides the rails, meets fellow travelers, falls in love, and sees an America sliding into the Great Depression. But before his hopes for life and love can be realized, he and a group of other young men are falsely charged with the rape of two white women, and shackled to a system of enslavement masquerading as justice. As he is pushed deeper into the darkness of imprisonment, his resolve to escape burns only more brightly, until in a last spasm of flight, in a white heat of terror, he is called to choose his fate.

In language both intimate and lyrical, novelist and poet Charlie Smith conjures a fresh and complex portrait of the South of the 1920s and ’30s in all its brutal humanity—and the astonishing endurance of one battered young man, his consciousness “an accumulation of breached and disordered living . . . hopes packed hard into sprung joints,” who lives past and through it all.

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins. 

Revealing the haunting racism and violence of the South in the Jim Crow era, this novel follows the life of Delvin Walker. When Delvin is a young child, his mother flees, fearful of being accused of murdering a white man. Young Delvin is taken in by the owner of the local Negro funeral home and learns to care for those suffering from grief and discovers the power of the written word. Yet the racist world he lives in continues to haunt him. After a series of tragedies including a lynching and a church burning, Delvin flees town, fearful of being accused of murdering a white man just as his mother was years before. No matter where Delvin goes or how he tries to reinvent himself, he can never escape the racial culture of the country or the economic downslide into the Great Depression. 

I was not surprised to learn that author Charlie Smith is also a poet, as this book reads in a very lyrical and poetical manner.  In many ways Delvin is a metaphor for the black man in America during the 1920s and 30s. Delvin's life serves to underscore the inevitable encounter with racial injustice and violence the black man faces in America. 

I enjoyed the meta-writing quality of this novel in that Delvin is preoccupied with both reading and writing as an escape from his world: "they were part, he knew, of the stories his mother had told him and read to him of kings and treasures and palaces in far lands" (15). For Delvin, books are "rideable transports into habitable territory" (22). Yet heartbreakingly, as a child he is turned away from the public library because of the color of his skin. 

Ultimately, this book is about Delvin's unexpected and tragic journey as he tries to avoid and allude the pervasive racism that surrounds him. His journey thus becomes a cyclical journey; he constantly returns to his point of origin, unable to move beyond his past either racially or geographically, restrained by the racial limitations of his time. Delvin represents the suffering of all African Americans: "We all been scared. We been scared to death over here for the last three hundred years. All day every day." The title also alludes to this world Delvin finds himself immersed in from the day of his birth: "Ginny Galled, you might say - a negro name, Ginny Gall, for the hell beyond hell, hell's hell" (388). 

This book was emotionally taxing to read. I found the erratic passage of time and the omission of some details - such as the fate of Delvin's siblings - frustrating. Additionally, I questioned the reliability of the narration, as Delvin admits alterations to the truth in his own writings: "This was not true but he wrote it anyway" (225). 

Stars: 3