1,001 Novels: A Library of America
The Last Hotel for Women (1996)
by Vicki Covington
Birmingham, Alabama
Alabama: 15/18
I think Alabama is probably the worst literary state thus far. They don't even have a good detective novel/police procedural down here. The Last Hotel for Women is interesting by the standards of its Alabama mapped compatriots, in that it features historical villain Bull Connor as not just a major character, but sometimes narrator of this story of the Freedom Riders. It's struck me reading books from this part of the country that there is no one epic novel of this period that goes day by day, month by month, year by year and that learning the nuts and bolts of how this all went down requires non-fiction titles. Covington, at least, brings some insight to the less sympathetic side, as embodied by Connor, who was a staunch segregationist.
Bull Connor distinguishes himself as a rare type of villain in the deep south- an urban villain, ruling over a mixed population in an industrialized city, of which I believe Birmingham is the only one- in the sense that we use that term in reference to locales like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Cleveland circa the mid 20th century. He is sophisticated enough that the n word is used less frequently in this novel than in almost any other from this state, and the contention here is not whether some people should enslave other people. As Connor himself says multiple times in this book, he loves his black brothers and sisters and just wants them to thrive separately from whites.
I hadn't heard of Convington before this book. Looking at her Amazon product listings, I would probably put her as "forgotten."
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