Books

Scottsboro
By Ellen Feldman, Norton, 2008, 363 pp.

Surely one of the most unspeakable miscarriages of American justice occurred in the last century. In 1931 at Paint Rock, a white posse pulled nine young black men, none older than 20, from a freight train. Within minutes, two young white women, also on that train and both dressed in overalls, cried rape. The 40-year odyssey of the Scottsboro boys had begun.

The case has been chronicled a number of times. So, then, why a new book? That Ellen Feldman's novel answers unequivocally, by recounting the events through the eyes of two women — one fictional, the other fictionalized.

Scottsboro is told by Alice Whittier, an educated reporter from a privileged background and by Ruby Bates, an illiterate mill worker and one of the actual accusing women.

It is a fascinating journey these two take us on, for as they comment, change their points of view, need each other, there remains evidence that each has her own agenda. The forces of racism and anti-Semitism, poverty and politics, sexism and success remain in stark contrast to the promise of the American Dream.

What is absolutely hypnotizing about the book is its fearless examination of the moral ambiguities inherent in every aspect of the case, especially among those who want a piece of the action.

It is shatteringly appropriate that Feldman turns the Scottsboro Boys into secondary characters, for even the best of those around the accused are more interested in serving themselves than in seeing justice served.

Ruby Bates and her co-accuser Victoria Price will do almost anything to escape from their slavery as mill workers. Alice Whittier will do almost anything to achieve recognition equal to the kind her male colleagues receive.

Alabama Attorney General Thomas E. Knight Jr. wants to take up residence in the governor's mansion. Defense attorney Sam Leibowitz has his eye on the Supreme Court. The International Labor Defense and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wage "a bitter battle for the right to represent the defendants in their appeal" in order to recruit new members.

And the Scottsboro boys languish in prison, even as the people of Scottsboro make up "their collective mind" that "the boys had to die for the good of the community."

Late in the book, Ruby Bates speaks with unsettling clarity: "All I got to do was tell the truth. But it turns out the truth ain't no easier to tell than a made-up story." That conviction is at the center of Feldman's book, itself a shattering examination of all the kinds of ambition intrinsic in any public outcry for any kind of justice.

Scottsboro is a crushing indictment of our corrupt American Dream and, by extension perhaps, our current political climate.

Steven Whitton is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.