BOOKS & AUTHORS : Rape, Racism Divide Texas ‘Crown’

As a child growing up on Cape Cod, Lane von Herzen left the familiar and somewhat staid confines of Massachusetts each summer to visit her mother’s relatives in what seemed to be the more exotic locale of rural Texas.

At large family gatherings, von Herzen would be enthralled by the stories her great-grandmother and great-aunt told about growing up in early 20th-Century Texas--a time when, even in the oppressive heat of summer, women and girls wore long black “modesty stockings,” which they would wash in a tin tub each evening and hang on a line to dry.

Von Herzen soaked up those kinds of details of early Texas life. But there was also a darker, more horrifying tale that the 1990 graduate of the Program in Writing at UC Irvine has never forgotten.

At her mother’s coaxing, von Herzen’s great-aunt reluctantly told the story of the rape and murder of her friend the day of their high school graduation, a crime that led to the lynching of 17 black men. The lynchings, preceded by race riots and arson fires, devastated the small farm town.

Similar racially motivated lynchings figure prominently in von Herzen’s first novel, “Copper Crown” (Morrow; $19), the moving, lyrically written story about an enduring friendship between a young white woman and a young black woman who defy the prejudice and social conventions of the time.

The novel, set in the fictional Texas sharecropping community of Copper Crown, begins in 1913, when the narrator, Cass Sandstrom, and her black friend, Allie Farrell, are teen-agers.

Simmering racial tensions erupt when, in an act of retaliation and rage against the white men who raped his wife, Allie’s brother and another black man rape and murder a young white woman, Cass’ sister.

The two black men are captured. But, as von Herzen writes, “the town had got such a taste for hating” that a group of white men “pulled away from their homes every colored man in town between the ages of 15 and 35 years. . . . There were 17 of them altogether, and they all died on the Valley Road . . . straining at the end of as many ropes, their feet shuddering into stillness, their tongues thickening into swollen, dry bulbs that betrayed their amazement.”

At her mother’s urging, Cass flees the burning, hate-filled town, taking with her the newborn daughter of her cousin who died in childbirth and linking up with Allie on the road out of Copper Crown. The novel spans three decades as the two young women build a new life together.

“I think the real point of the novel is these two women are able to overcome the prejudices and limitations of their times through this phenomenally strong friendship among one another. That sense of hopefulness and redemption is really key in my mind to what is going on,” said von Herzen, 29, who moved to Redondo Beach last year to be closer to her research scientist husband’s work.

Inspired by the writing of such authors as Alice Walker, Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, von Herzen also was influenced by South American “magic realists” Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marques, whose novels depict spirits interacting with the living.

Indeed, despite its realistic portrayal of small-town Texas life and the pervasive racial prejudice of the time, “Copper Crown” is infused with the spirits of departed relatives.

“I’m not advocating the idea that as I sit here talking to you that there are spirits in my room,” von Herzen said with a laugh. “I think it’s the idea that those who have died remain meaningful presences in our lives.”

“Copper Crown,” which is excerpted in the September issue of Seventeen magazine, is a Literary Guild Selection. The German and movie rights to the novel have been sold and an auction for the paperback rights will be held in October after the author completes a six-week promotional tour.

While declining to discuss the size of her advance and other “confidential” matters, von Herzen will say that “fortunately, for me, it’s enough so I can continue writing full time.”

Three years ago, the idea of writing full time would have been unthinkable to von Herzen.

Von Herzen, a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College, where she earned a degree in English literature, was firmly ensconced in her job as director of career planning at Scripps College in Claremont.

Not only was she about to be promoted to an assistant dean position, she said, but Scripps was going to pay for her graduate education “so I could get onto a dean’s track and ultimately be a dean of college somewhere.”

But von Herzen was faced with a dilemma: Should she continue her career in academia or follow her repressed dream of becoming a writer?

“I really had a wonderful working environment in that I worked for a dean at Scripps who was tremendously supportive and had tremendous faith in my abilities and wanted to see me go as far as possible and as quickly as possible,” recalled von Herzen. “Her support in many ways forced me to take a step back and ask myself, ‘Is this really what I want?’ ”

Von Herzen said she had spent four years advising students to not accept anything less than a career they were passionate about, to not make compromises and to follow their dreams. And, she said, “I talked to many alumni who came back who had this really crushing sense of disappointment about their own lives, (about) not having done what they really had wanted to do.”

She chose to pursue her dream.