The Avenue, Clayton City (1988) by C. Eric Lincoln

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Avenue, Clayton City (1988)

by C. Eric Lincoln

Clayton City, Alabama

Alabama: 4/18

  Alabama is something close to being America's official Heart of Darkness. If you want to know something about the history of Alabama that they don't teach you in class, look up the racial demographics in Alabama by county.  You will discover that there are many counties in Alabama with single digit African American populations.  How, one might reasonably ask, is that possible?  The answer, as the literature from this project makes clear, is that freed African American were essentially burned out of many areas by local white populations in the years following the Emancipation.  That terror enforced segregation persists to the present. 

   And yet, as The Avenue, Clayton City by noted Professor-Author C. Eric Lincoln makes clear, African Americans make the choice to live and work in these parts of the country.  Many leave, and many stay, and it is the interaction between these two populations that was the cause of much change in the south in the 20th century.  Specifically, the ability of northern migrants to return home via automobile- a phenomenon that Lincoln describes here, in a novel set in the 1930's.  One theme that resonates again and again is that resident African Americans need to make peace with the "way things are" or get out or suffer severe consequences.  

  Author C. Eric Lincoln is the sort of writer I relish discovering through project-based reading- he was a professor and theological scholar who taught at Duke University and wrote THE book on the Black Muslim movement, in addition to his fiction.  The Avenue, Clayton City is sure to be in my top five for this state.