Throwing Off the Shackles : PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK, <i> By Melissa Fay Greene (Addison-Wesley: $21.95; 335 pp.) </i>

Let there be no suspense about my reaction to this book. I intend to try to make a joyful noise here. Melissa Fay Greene has written a superb account of life and struggle in a tiny place. Because of its themes and the brilliant way the author has handled them, this book could stand as a metaphor for the halting American effort to become something better than we have been.

Put simply, this is the tale of how McIntosh County, a rural wetlands enclave in the southeast corner of Georgia, was transformed by some leftover ‘60s idealism, the coming of modern times (in the form of Interstate 95) and most of all by the awakening of its black population. It is a happy story that is full of tragedy and a portrait of ordinary people some of whom have flashes of moral grandeur and others who are made of baser stuff.

Most of all, it is a story of simple black people enduring and rising very, very slowly and then a little faster on the broad back of a flawed leader who ultimately breaks because he is human and has aspirations and burdens that push him past his limits.

The blacks encountered in this book are the kind of people one almost never sees and whose lives cannot be imagined even when the people flash momentarily before our eyes. They are the kind of rural black people whom I see walking in the withering summer heat on the side of the highway as I hurtle in my air-conditioned car down U.S. 13 on the Eastern Shore of Virginia toward Norfolk. I say to myself:

“They’re not far out of slavery, those people; I wonder what they know and think and remember.”

Well, Melissa Faye Green tells us. And how she tells us! Here she presents Frances Palmer, “soft-gummed, bleary-eyed and spirited . . . “ and the recollections of slavery passed on to her by a grandmother who died at age 115.

“My grandma used to go with her dress tied up round her waist and a big foot tub on her head, going down the road. And the boss man behind her with a strap. In the bucket they had guano to throw on the fields. And that boss man follow behind. Plat! Got to work or he beat the devil out of them. That in slavery time. Yeah, they got to work. And she had her little chile tied ‘round her back.’ That were my mother, hugging her tight ‘round the neck,’ a string around her little legs, a band around her waist. . . . And the poor little child--that my mama--cries, but that’s all right, you better not stop.”

Fanny herself was reared as a worker in the cottonfields by that very same grandmother, a stern taskmaster who created a world tightly circumscribed by the bed, the field, the table, the field again and the church. And then Fanny grew up and had her own life of work--standing in ice in a fish factory--and 11 children with the boys “sleeping willy-nilly on blankets on the floor” and her husband sleeping in exhaustion in a chair before starting work in the pine forest at 3 a.m. For dinner they would have corn bread and “flour-thickened stew” and this to Fanny “seemed all there was to know of wealth, of happiness.”

Slavery came late to Georgia, but by the time Fannie Palmer was rearing her children, the blacks on the Georgia coast had known slavery, Jim Crow terrorism and economic and political repression for two centuries. The systems they had endured had been designed to disable them, rendering them fit to serve only as a source of cheap and dependent labor.

During Fannie Palmer’s maturity, everybody in McIntosh County was dependant on Sheriff Tom Poppel, a corrupt backwoods autocrat. Blacks steeped in the lore of the disappearances and lynchings of uppity niggers, took the sheriff’s handouts and voted as directed. Crooked whites prospered by serving up prostitutes and fixed gambling games to tourists and truckers driving on U.S. 17 to Florida and back. Others took the honest spillover of the tourist business and enjoyed an ordered and racially stratified society. Sheriff Poppel took kickbacks, dispensed favors and kept order. Mussolini couldn’t have done it better.

The dramatic tension in “Praying for Sheetrock” is provided by the overthrow of Poppel’s power by the local blacks, led by Thurnell Alston, a man of uncommon capacity, who had the strength and dogged persistence to throw off two centuries of shackles to challenge Poppel and break the old system by getting himself elected to the County Commission.

The first crack came on a hot spring afternoon when Mary Harmon and Ed Finch were courting and flirting outside Mary’s shack and the system pushed the black people too hard once too often. The system that day was Guy Hutchinson, a white policeman, who got annoyed with the noise the two were making and tried to quiet them down. Somehow, in the process, Hutchinson managed to shoot the black man in the mouth at close range. He then threw him in a jail cell and locked him up without providing any medical care whatsoever.

Word spread through the black community and the people looked to Thurnell Alston for leadership. After mulling things over, he led a crowd of 200 or so armed blacks to City Hall. Such a thing had never happened in McIntosh County. The whites saw the rising of the beast they had always feared and the blacks found strength in themselves that they had never dreamed they had. They got Ed Finch out of jail and to a doctor and got Guy Hutchinson suspended. The blacks were ecstatic and Thurnell Alston’s political career had taken wing. In telling this part of the story Greene deploys her players and her facts in a gathering momentum that sweeps the reader along in the exciting quest for American civic justice.

One prays for the story to end on the highest note, with noble blacks aided by idealistic young legal Services lawyers (who made Alston’s victory possible by forcing the Constitution of the United States on McIntosh County) raising the community to new levels of morality. But that’s not real life in America. The new I 95 bypasses the old road and causes the withering away of the old corruption. A new and somewhat healthier political order is established, but Thurnell Alston isn’t part of it.

Alston can’t entirely rise above the poverty, ignorance and meanness of his own circumstances and Greene tells of his fall brilliantly, detail by searing detail at a dirge-like pace. In doing so, she gives this rough country man--who after winning, arrives at his first Commission meeting in a “white satin, velvet-trimmed nightclub outfit”--the tragic qualities of a Lear. In fact, she gives everybody their due, even Sheriff Poppel, and that is one of the strengths of this book.

This story illuminates many of the historic forces at play in the making of the American future. Corruption and racism in McIntosh County were part of a seamless whole. The racketeering, murder and prostitution that undergirded life in the county could not have occurred without the wholesale mutilation of the lives and the capacities of the black citizens. The general depression of moral life in that place is not unlike the coarsening of the quality of life in most of our urban centers--or in the quality of our domestic political life, for that matter--which also rests on the mutilation of poor black, Native American and Hispanic people.

There was more banality than bigotry in McIntosh County; more greed than hatred. The heroes were human and had failings. The idealistic young lawyers went away and settled into middle age. Indignation flared for a moment into reformist politics and then drifted back down to biracial lethargy. Progress had been made, yet racism still marbled the culture. Many more blacks would be born and then quickly become stunted by the awful momentum of a brutal culture, their talents forever lost to themselves and to their society. The county would stumble toward the future, still bleeding and wounding itself each day with its racism, but a little less so than in the days of Tom Poppel and Fannie Palmer, before Thurnell Alston. Life would go on.

And, as in the rest of America, it would be a little better than before, but far less good than people had once dreamed. The past would still have a far firmer grip on the future than most people would be brave enough to admit. Dreaming would be more difficult.

Melissa Fay Greene is a wonderful writer and a wise observer. She has written a splendid book.

* BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “Praying for Sheetrock,”see the Opinion section, Page 3.