No Better Blues : YOUR BLUES AIN’T LIKE MINE, <i> By Bebe Moore Campbell (Putnam: $22.95; 332 pp.)</i>

August 28, 1955. It’s a day in history that few African-Americans will ever forget. When a teen-age boy, Emmett Till, was beaten and murdered in Money, Miss., for allegedly flirting with a white woman, the crime made national headlines. This country could no longer claim ignorance about the centuries-old Southern practice of lynching. Till’s death, however, also foreshadowed the powder keg of black urban life, and he was the first of many city black boys who would never live to be men. When Jet magazine ran Till’s picture--his head and body bloated from drowning, racial hatred depicted in blood and torn skin on the dead boy’s face--it was a face that would never leave us.

It is from the mold of this face that Bebe Moore Campbell has cast “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine,” her first novel. Campbell’s hero is Armstrong Todd, a 15-year-old Chicago native who’s sent to spend the summer with his grandmother in rural Mississippi. Northern-born and irreverent of the strict Southern segregation policies, Todd shows off in a broken-down shack of a pool hall, speaking a few words of French to the pool-hall-owner’s wife.

These words, learned by his father in France in World War II, will cost young Todd his life.

Though we’ve heard the story before, Campbell’s prose powerfully constructs the scene as if it were the first lynching, as if it were our own son, brother or neighbor. Despite both the historical and contemporary references of violence against black men, the horror strikes us as fresh and new. What makes this book so strong is that the lynching is not belabored or drawn out for dramatic effect. It is the storm that brews up from it that is truly engaging.

Although this is her first novel, many of Campbell’s readers mistook her memoirs, “Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad,” for fiction. Campbell has a storyteller’s ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place that made “Sweet Summer” sing. Those skills are even more developed and more polished in this novel, especially when she examines relationships between parents and children. Campbell has the grown-up maturity to point out right from wrong, yet at the same time she never forgets how a child might see things--whether the child be the black boy who knows he’s going to die or the white boy who kills because it is what his father wants him to do.

In “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine,” Campbell, a journalist by trade, paints a picture of a judicious press. Years before the tabloid headlines of Woody Allen’s affairs or Dan Quayle’s spelling ability, it is journalists who come to Campbell’s Mississippi and ask the difficult questions, who force the people themselves to question. Take this scene in the novel:

The white men of Hopewell, Miss., have assembled to discuss the nationwide attention the local lynching has drawn. At the head of the group is former plantation owner and millionaire Stonewall Pinochet; his son, Clayton, is a journalist and liberal. Although he lacks the strength to stand up to his father in person, it is Clayton who has tipped off the Northern reporters to the heinous crime. Stonewall waves an out-of-town news report at his audience:

“ ‘Those of y’all with enough sense to be wearing your glasses will recognize this newspaper article depicting our fair town as a place where barbarians are bred who murder colored children,’ Stonewall said. ‘And this ain’t the only article, neither.’ He bent down and picked up newspapers from Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit. ‘Now, gentlemen, I don’t have to tell you that this is a new day. And as our esteemed governor has told us privately, as well as publicly, Mississippi can’t stand as an island. We can’t be perceived as a group of savages. Wealthy northern industrialists don’t invest in areas that are populated by savages. It’s men like us who have shaped this region, and by God, we’ve got to take the bull by the horns on this whole affair. Gentleman, we got us some rednecks that need to go to jail.’ For a moment there was absolute silence, a stillness so complete that Clayton could hear himself thinking: Thank God, Thank God .”

To Campbell’s credit, she never simplifies the issues. She distinguishes poor whites from the plantation Establishment, Northern blacks from Southern blacks. As a woman writer, she gives a unique voice to friendships between black and white women--and the ways in which sometimes one is a color first and a female second, sometimes vice versa. In the novel, Lily Cox, a poor white woman, and Ida Long, a young black woman, have become clandestine friends. When Lily’s husband kills Armstrong Todd, in Lily’s so-called defense, the women’s friendship is shattered, but neither woman finds it easy to let go. Campbell makes it clear that there was rarely intra-racial unity among blacks or whites; and she is not afraid to say that there were some blacks who, for any number of reasons good and bad, who sold their own people out. Campbell presents us with a medley of individuals as complicated as our country’s racial history.

It is in this difficult task that one finds the book’s weaknesses: Some of the lines are too tightly drawn, and the story suffers when Campbell works too hard to make a point. In trying to bring to the page so many voices, some of the characters are not as fully realized as others. Some phrases feel written rather than felt; there are times when Campbell seems more like a journalist than a novelist, reporting more than writing. For the most part, however, the novelist succeeds; there’s a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis.