Crossing Blood (Deep South Books) - Softcover

Kincaid, Ms. Nanci

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817310096 ISBN 13: 9780817310097

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 1999

Synopsis

Kincaid's fictional meditation on race relations in the Jim Crow South takes voice through its protagonist, a white teenage girl growing up in segregated Tallahassee.

Lucy Conyers lives with her brothers, mother, and stepfather in Tallahassee, in the last house in the white part of town, just before the pavement ends and the road turns to dirt. On the other side of a patch of woods are Melvina Williams, the Conyers' maid, her drunken husband Old Alfonso, and a yard full of kids, mostly boys--including Lucy's obsession, the wild and handsome Skippy.

This is the early 1960s and the battle over integration is brewing even in Lucy's own home. Her stepfather clings to segregationist ways, while her independent-minded mother believes in the cause of civil rights. Lucy  understands that there are unspoken lines she is not to cross, but her curiosity leads her to trespass on the forbidden world next door. There, she learns the hard realities of love, race, and hatred.

The story, told convincingly and compellingly in the voice of its young narrator, examines the complex relationships between family members, men and women, blacks and whites. Crossing Blood is a novel of making promises and struggling to keep them, of unlikely bonds and forbidden ones, of love gone wrong and love everlasting.

About this title

About the Author

Nanci Kincaid is the author of two novels, Crossing Blood and Balls, and a short story collection, Pretending the Bed Is a Raft. Her short fiction has appeared in the New Stories from the South anthology, as well as such journals as Story, Ontario Review, Missouri Review, and Carolina Quarterly. A native of Tallahassee, Florida, Nanci Kincaid has lived in Virginia, Wyoming, Alabama, North Carolina, and Arizona.

From Kirkus Reviews

Despite a slew of artful and engaging stories to her credit, Kincaid debuts with a dull, if skillfully written, coming-of-age novel, set in the civil-rights-era South. Kincaid's candid discussion of racial issues doesn't make up for this predictable fiction, a tale of two families that smacks of retrospective self-righteousness. The narrator, young Lucy Conyers, lives in Tallahassee, Florida, at the end of the street where the ``colored section'' of town begins. Along with her brothers, Lucy must measure her mother's pro-integrationist views against her stepfather's casual racism. All of their preconceived racial notions play against the drama of everyday events. While Lucy's mother fears for her family becoming ``white trash,'' her gruff stepfather worries that Lucy's becoming a ``nigger lover.'' The black Williams family, who lives next door, is shrouded in mystery. Though the mother, Melvina, keeps house for Lucy's family, her husband, Old Alfonso, is a no-count wife-beater and drunk. Yet hard-working Melvina cannot turn out the father of her rambunctious brood, which includes 16-year-old Skippy, with whom Lucy swaps blood in a vow of secrecy. The novel bogs down in explanation as we learn all about ``the brick-wall look'' and other ``colored-people secrets.'' While Lucy loves Elvis, Skippy prefers Little Richard, and so on. One set-piece, a visit by Lucy's stepfather's Bible- addled mother, is a poignant interlude; another, in which the girl's real father shows up, is more confusing than anything else. Good intentions can't propel an otherwise belabored fiction, complete with a highly melodramatic, ironic ending. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0817310096
• ISBN 13: 9780817310097
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288