Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke
Darren Mathews has a duty to the law. His wife thought that duty to the law was to finish law school and become a lawyer, as did one of his lawyer uncles who mentored him. For Darren Matthews it meant not finishing law school in Chicago, but coming home to his beloved Texas and joining the storied Texas Rangers “the ones who rolled in when local agencies couldn’t or wouldn’t solve a crime.”
Mathews is the chief protagonist of author Attica Locke’s fourth novel, Bluebird, Bluebird. And while Mathews is the protagonist, rural east Texas is the star. Once again, with her bold writing, her ability to structure plot and provide tension, plus, her remarkable insights on race, Locke has provided us with a crime novel that is about a small town double murder yes, but also about the complicated history of race that this nation is still grappling with. The confluence of race, history, land provide rich fodder for this most talented writer.
Mathews is currently on leave from the Rangers, following an investigation into a case where his role is being questioned – did he act as a law enforcement officer or as a friend to someone who needed help. It is the continuous tension in his life as a ranger and as a student of the law “he got it confused sometimes, on which side of the law he belonged, couldn’t always remember when it was safe for a black man to follow the rules.”
While on leave he gets drawn into a double homicide case in a small town, Lark, in rural Shelby County. It’s a place he’s never heard of but the death, first of a black man, a lawyer from Chicago, followed by the death of a local white woman, and the presence of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT) is something he can’t turn a blind eye to when friend and FBI agent persuades him to sniff around, even while on leave.
Locke takes us into a world that has uneasily co-existed for generations, a place where whites and blacks live in proximity to, not with each other. She is a remarkable creator of place. “U.S. Highway 59 is a line that runs through the heart of East Texas, a thread on the map that ties together small towns like knots on a string, from Laredo to Texarkana on the northern border. For black folks born and bred in the rural communities along the highway’s north-south route, Highway 59 has always represented an arc of possibility, hope paved and pointing north.”
The action takes place in and around the town of Lark, population 178 with just a few landmarks but a cast of characters with deep ties to the area, going back generations. Locke has studded her novel with memorable characters who paint a vivid and rich portrait of a part of the country most of us never think about. Geneva Sweet, owner of Geneva’s café, and widow of Joe Sweet, and mother of the late Lil’ Joe, a black grandmother who is determined to stay put; William Jefferson III, white, the local rich guy in town, living in a house the replica of Jefferson’s Monticello, and a dog house a replica of the White House, anxious for Geneva to sell up her café that lies within eyeshot of his home. Keith Dale, husband of the murder victim and “former resident of the Huntsville Unit of the Texas State Penitentiary, as hot a bed for the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas as they come.” There’s also a local white sheriff to whom the local blacks show deference, and a slew of other minor characters that add up to deep portrait of a place.
Locke has an eye for the detail of what life is like for folks in this neighborhood, and her observations of how black men have to conduct themselves, particularly in relation to law enforcement is astute, and especially relevant today. Geneva’s cook watches the local sheriff in action “a line of irritation set in his tightly closed lips as he watched the sheriff and his me taking notes, glancing every so often toward Geneva’s and jotting something else down. Darren had seen that look on black men’s faces before, a weary impatience to get it over with: the frisking, the talking-to, the interrogation, the inevitable moment in the spotlight. What you always knew was coming.”
As he delves deeper into the case, first unofficially and then officially, Locke introduces us to a complex hero in Darren Mathews. He’s estranged from his wife and he likes the company of Jim Beam. His loyalty to Texas is second to none, tested as a law student in Chicago “he [also] felt a hot rage at the students and professors around him, most of them white northerners, clucking their tongues and whispering Texas in a way that suggested both pity and disdain for a land that Darren loved, a state that had made him a gentleman and fighter in equal measure.”
At the same time, he is fully aware of the lingering effects of racism, felt so keenly by the black northern widow of the deceased man, Michael Wright. “He wanted to make her wrong about Texas, wanted her to know it as a place that did not fell black men and get away with it.” In some sense Michael is a proxy for Darren Mathews himself, a path not taken, a black lawyer living his dream in Chicago, the urgency to solve the crime becomes more intense, particularly as it followed no logical script of southern fables, where the murder of a white woman was usually followed by the swift death of black man, not the other way round as in this case.
Locke has written a gripping mystery thriller that is much more than that. As Mathews continues to investigate the murders, he unravels the long and deep racial divisions of the town that seem to be sown into its very fabric. The small town relationships are anything but simple and the legacy of race relations going back generations are never far behind. Mathews is a fully realized, flawed hero, in search of peace in the place that draws him, the place he calls home. With a cliff hanger ending, we, lucky readers, know that we are going to get to know Darren Mathews and rural east Texas even better.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 305 pages
Genre: Mystery, thriller
Themes: race, land, crime, history
Commitment: Time well spent with the first in what promises to be a rich series from the wonderful Attica Locke
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