Blood on the Roses edition by Robert Hays Literature Fiction eBooks
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In 1955, at the height of alarm over the Emmett Till murder in Mississippi and after the Supreme Court ruling against school segregation, Associated Press reporter Rachel Feigen travels from Baltimore to Tennessee to report on a missing person case.
Guy Saillot’s last contact with his family was a postcard from the Tennessee Bend Motel, a seedy establishment situated on beautiful Cherokee Lake. But they have no record he was ever a guest.
As the investigation deepens, Feigen has problems of her own when three local extremists decide to teach a lesson to the “uppity jewgirl” from the North who’s poking around in things that are none of her concern.
But events in the Tennessee Bend Motel’s room number 10 don’t turn out exactly as they’d planned.
This frank and honest story does justice to its superb Southern setting, capturing both the engaging qualities of the Southern people, and the terrible acts of discrimination and racism carried out by a few.
Blood on the Roses edition by Robert Hays Literature Fiction eBooks
Hays is an excellent story teller. The characters are well developed with human frailties. You are able to see yourself in the situations. I especially appreciated the introduction of similarities of the attitudes about Jews and homosexuality. I thnk he reminds us of how misguided ignorant hate is justified in the mind of the hater.I enjoyed the book and could not put it down. You had suspense, murder, FBI, voyeurism, love and good writing.
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Blood on the Roses edition by Robert Hays Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
I thought this was a very good portrayal of the South in the mid 1950's. I could be mistaken because I'm a "northerner," but from all I've read and seen in historical movies, books, etc., I think this book tells it like it was. I thought the character Rachel was very believable and I am sure that someone of her age with her upbringing would have been naive and thought that nothing would happen to her. I could definitely see how the two black me would have reacted the way they did based on their upbringing and experiences of the time. The three men in the book (Bishop, Harlan and Barney) seemed to be accurate examples of some of the southern racist men at this time. If anything, they were probably behaved milder than many of the other men around. I thought that Effie should have known more of what Barney was up to, but she probably just wanted to live her life and not cause any waves. I think that the author Robert Hays was very good and I look forward to reading more of his works.
I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book, through Reading Deals, so I could give an honest review.
Perhaps because Robert Hays is a journalism professor, Blood on the Roses seems like an in-depth feature covering important human rights changes initiated during the Fifties. The American South then was roiling with fervent opposition to the crucial social changes creeping past its boundaries, and the novel zeros in on several emotionally-laden storylines.
SCOTUS had just rendered its 1955 Brown v the Board of Education decision. In Mississippi, two white men were being tried for the murder of black Chicago teen Emmett Till. With American societal standards on trial, the nation, and especially the South, was seething with unrest.
Hays sets his story in the midst of this socially specific context. A homosexual is missing from a lakeside Appalachian motel in east Tennessee. To lead an investigative search for the Associated Press, the editor sends a young female Jewish reporter whose father is a retired NY judge. Arriving alone, in her brand new car, Rachel checks in at the motel, which is run by a classic Southern good old boy. As she asks questions around the town, she encounters only one other redneck, a deputy on desk duty, but there are several helpful women who immediately cooperate. The set up is as colorful as it is improbable.
I’m as good as the next reader at suspending disbelief to reframe historic reality into a transformative exploration of social mores and societal values. But Blood on the Roses doesn’t need that stretch. If Hays had set his story in the 70s (or, even more realistically, today), he’d have lost none of the Southern "heritage" or the underlying motivations for his characters. He could have referred back to the 1955 trials and billboards as evidence of how little some underlying attitudes had changed despite society’s "post-racial" claims. The many characters accepting homosexuality, racial equality, and women’s rights would have seemed more likely. And the point of the story would have lost none of its fundamental truth.
I wanted to give this 4 stars for its effort at focusing on socially important issues, but the context tries too hard and obscures the point. Perhaps if I’d felt more emotional connection, the anachronisms wouldn’t have grated so harshly. As an early draft, this has potential, but I’d like to see it developed into a more realistically suspenseful drama.
very good
Au clair de la lune / Mon ami Pierrot / Prete-moi ta plume / Pour ecrire un mot...
Driving from California to West Virginia in 2001, only a few dozen miles past Forest, Mississippi on Interstate 20, I saw a sign for the turnoff to Philadelphia, north on Highway 15. I shuddered, thinking of the events of 1964 in Neshoba County, when a young black man from Meridian, MS, James Chaney, 21, and two Jewish men from the north, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were lynched by racists in one of the most racist of states at the time.
The murder of the three men occurred shortly after midnight on June 21, 1964, when they went to investigate the burning of a church that supported civil rights activity. James Chaney was a local Freedom Movement activist in Meridian, Michael Schwerner was a CORE organizer from New York, and Andrew Goodman, also from New York, was a Freedom Summer volunteer.
The murders highlighted the civil rights activities of American Jews, later spurned by far too many in the Civil Rights movement because of the anti-Semitism of people like Louis "Hymietown" Farrakhan. There weren't many people named Ali or Mohammed in the civil rights "freedom summer" of '64 -- but there were plenty who shared the heritage of Goodman and Schwerner. Why blacks should embrace Islam, a religion that has enslaved them repeatedly in both the past and present (see Sudan) is beyond my comprehension, but there's no explaining Jew hatred.
The events of the novel "Blood on the Roses" (Vanilla Heart Publishing, 398 kb eBook from , Kobo from Kobo Bookstore, $4.99, about 76,000 words) by Robert Hays occur almost a decade before, in the autumn of 1955, but they resonate strongly since they take place in the aftermath of the lynching of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta region in August 1955.
In the autumn of 1955, at the height of America's concern over the murder of Chicagoan Till, 14, by white racists and in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation, Bill Skyles, Rachel Feigen's editor at the Associated Press in Baltimore, sends her to eastern Tennessee to investigate a missing person case. Feigen, the daughter of a distinguished New York judge, had already reported about the snail-like pace of desegregation in the wake of the previous year's Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Guy Saillot's last contact with his family was a postcard from the Tennessee Bend Motel, a place catering to hunters and fishermen near scenic Cherokee Lake. She has counted innumerable "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards driving in her brand new cream-colored Chevrolet hardtop to the motel from Baltimore in those pre-Interstate days. But she finds no record that he ever stayed there. She's at the motel because the young French-American man, who is gay, apparently stayed there on his way to Knoxville to meet a friend.
Feigen learns that the motel caretaker, a deaf-mute black man named George, may know something about the missing man. George's consuming interest is the Tennessee Bend's arresting rose garden--its only truly positive quality--and she gains his favor by showing her appreciation for his beautiful roses.
Feigen quickly finds herself caught up in the bigotry she expected to observe as an outsider when three local extremists, led by the motel's manager Barney Vidone, decide to teach a lesson to this "uppity jewgirl" from the North who's poking around in things that are none of her business.
Their plan? Kidnap two black men and lock them and Feigen in Room 10 of the Tennessee Bend, complete with its two-way mirror voyeur's window, and let nature take its course. They're confident the men's "jungle instincts" will take over and she'll get her comeuppance, after which they'll give the "boys" a good whipping for messing with a white woman. But the two men taken at gunpoint, an Army sergeant just back from Korea and an Urban League attorney from Philadelphia, don't play the game the way their captors expect.
Charlie Monroe, the venerable FBI man from Knoxville whose Southern roots run deep, provides probably the best summation of the pervading evil of this time and place "It's easy to condemn. But prejudice is an unpastured dragon . . . Let it loose, nurture it with a little ignorance and fear, and pretty soon it's in all the dark places and if we're not careful we'll all be devoured in its ugly flame." Monroe provides the novel with a great deal of humor with his rhyming stories...Look for them!
Robert Hays, 76, now retired from teaching at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, writes his fourth novel (he's written nonfiction, too) with an experienced journalist's careful attention to detail, drawn from his own half-century love affair with the American South. In an email to me, he described how his military training at Fort Leonard Wood, MO. (where I also spent some delightful weeks in the summer of '57) and Fort Jackson, SC, helped in describing the experiences of the kidnapped sergeant in the novel. He met his wife of more than 50 years while serving his country in Columbia, SC
"Blood on the Roses" is a frank and honest story that does justice to its splendid east Tennessee setting. The ugliness of so many people in the novel is in sharp contrast to the region's scenic beauty, but Rachel encounters many people who are good at heart; they're overwhelmed by decades of institutionalized racism and turn away in denial from the acts of violent racism carried out by a few. As I've found from living in two states with strong Southern influences --West Virginia and now Texas -- Southerners are a complicated people.
Hays is an excellent story teller. The characters are well developed with human frailties. You are able to see yourself in the situations. I especially appreciated the introduction of similarities of the attitudes about Jews and homosexuality. I thnk he reminds us of how misguided ignorant hate is justified in the mind of the hater.
I enjoyed the book and could not put it down. You had suspense, murder, FBI, voyeurism, love and good writing.
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