THE MERCY SEAT
ELIZABETH H. WINTHROP
Grove Press
$16.00 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: “One of the finest writers of her generation” (Brad Watson), and author of three previously acclaimed novels, Elizabeth H. Winthrop delivers a brave new book that will launch her distinguished career anew. An incisive, meticulously crafted portrait of race, racism, and injustice in the Jim Crow era South that is as intimate and tense as a stage drama,
The Mercy Seat is a stunning account of one town’s foundering over a trauma in their midst.
On the eve of his execution, eighteen year old Willie Jones sits in his cell in New Iberia awaiting his end. Across the state, a truck driven by a convict and his keeper carries the executioner’s chair closer. On a nearby highway, Willie’s father Frank lugs a gravestone on the back of his fading, old mule. In his office the DA who prosecuted Willie reckons with his sentencing, while at their gas station at the crossroads outside of town, married couple Ora and Dale grapple with their grief and their secrets.
As various members of the township consider and reflect on what Willie’s execution means, an intricately layered and complex portrait of a Jim Crow era Southern community emerges. Moving from voice to voice, Winthrop elegantly brings to stark light the story of a town, its people, and its injustices.
The Mercy Seat is a brutally incisive and tender novel from one of our most acute literary observers.
THIS WAS A LIBRARY EBOOK CHECKOUT. THANK GOODNESS FOR LIBRARIES!
My Review: The beautiful writing! The moving story! The unbearable whiteness of the novel's voices, however, don't lead to celebration.
There are many third-person cinematic, or subjective, points of view. That gives us a kaleidoscope view of a day in the life of a bog-standard racist Louisiana burg in the waning days of Jim Crow. The entire story, the trial for rape of a Black young man, his conviction and sentencing to death, and remand into local custody the night before his judicial murder, takes place before we join the proceedings.
I read the story with great reluctance after a bookish-social-media friend damn near blew her brains out warbling its virtues. I can honestly say, Kickass Katie, you've never steered me less wrong than with this wonderful, tight, dense tale of a day in the life of a dead man and those who killed him. The factual inspirations for the work, detailed in the Afterword, are so grim as to make me want to bury myself in something soft so as to absorb the blows the mere idea of them give my already-battered psyche.
But in fiction's no-less-brutal embrace, the violation doesn't stop: As I read this book, I was bashed and struck and shoved into realizing this is a similar, though not identical, set-up to the also nonfictonally inspired 1981 novella
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by
Gabriel García Márquez. I'll assume that most people who read my blog are familiar with, at the least, the story of the incredibly wonderfully named Santiago (patron saint of Spain, country eternally "reconquering" itself from the Muslims) Nasar (as in Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt)'s murder at the hands of his ex-girlfriend and lover, Angela Vicario's, twin brothers. Both are stories of sex "crimes" that are, in fact, the crimes of women who love too freely for the comfort of the men around them. Who exactly asked them, I don't know; but they certainly receive a lot of cultural support for their rage and hate of the men who "defiled" the women in question. WHo were, let us note, both in love with the defilers....
Well, such was and is the lot of Woman in a world defined by and run by and for men. It revolts and disgusts me. It twists
every act into something pointed and edged with noxious bigotry and unforgiving judgment. It demands lies to sustain itself, and the lies are to self and others in equally toxic and ruinous measure. Willie remembers his time with Grace as love; Grace, whose death was ruled a suicide, isn't there to tell us what she felt and no one, evidently, thought to ask. It is Grace's father who brings this nightmare into being. He, like the Vicario twins in García Márquez's story, decides that his daughter's sexual indiscretion must be punished, and raises the hue and cry against the "perpetrator" Willie. She must've been raped! No good white woman would open her legs to a Black man voluntarily!
Hogwash.
And Grace, poor lamb, pays the ultimate price for her "crime" as she dies of a gunshot wound to the head. We're given no information about that, it is announced as a fait accompli, and no investigation or even questioning of it occurs. I question it. I suspect Grace's father, faced with a daughter who would defile herself by offering her body to a Black man (yes, yes, the N-Word is used throughout the book, but I am not so constituted as to be able to use it myself), couldn't live with her and couldn't allow her to live. He is the epitome of the man I loathe and despise the most: The zealot. He resorts to the foulest, most evil-souled means to enforce his will for the world onto all others. Never mind what they think, feel, want. He Knows Best and you, scum, exist to obey him.
So here is Willie, doomed by the State to die. We spend some time with Willie on this, his last day of life. But he's not a memorable character. He's a kid, a boy in love for the first time (never stated but feels so implicit that I assume it's true), and barely aware of life before and after his flare-up of primal passion. Memories come to him, simple things like frost and a brother's love; but in the end, they are nothing compared to the fact that Grace, the reason he existed so hard if so briefly, is dead. He ponders what a normal boy does:
...the stuff in the Bible he doesn’t believe, though he’s tried—he’s read the Bible, he’s prayed, he’s gone through all the Christian motions, hoping to believe. Wanting to believe. He figures it would make this whole thing easier if he did, but he can find no comfort in religion, in the book his mother lives by.
–and–
...{Willie} stays where he is, watching his white breath curl away and slowly mingle with the world’s cold air, watching himself breathe for the first time.
Try as he might, this guff makes no headway against the rushing river of regret that Grace is dead, Grace is dead, he killed her, Grace is dead. And so he, the victim of appalling and malevolent men's rage, does nothing to fight the horror of his impending judicial murder:
And when these visions come, it is all Willie can do not to beat his head against the concrete walls of his cell, his soul aching with regret; he ran away. He’d have never let it happen if he’d stayed.
Willie is not the first man to be killed by his regrets.
And the state whose judgment will kill him at midnight, served by the local District Attorney? What does the state have to say for itself? Nothing, really; the DA's participation in the judicial murder of a boy whose only crime was falling in love was not easy or uncomplicated.
If he’s read it once, he’s read it a thousand times, the warrant he chased after, sentencing Willie Jones to a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, and the application and continuance of such current through the body of the said Willie Jones until said Willie Jones is dead.
He and his Massachusetts Yankee wife were set at odds by this execution's run-up, and on this day, they both are doing their best to be fully present with each other. They are not succeeding:
...he wonders which is worse, to be lynched or to be shocked to death in an electric chair. There was a time when he was sure there was difference, but now that he’s had a hand in it, he wonders if it really matters in the end what kind of justice it is—mob or legal—when the end result is death.
–and–
“I suppose I care for many things, but what I live for is my boy.” (spoken by the wife)
Each in their own way made a hell of this moment by living it again and again and each has left the other behind in search of meaning outside their pair bond. A wife and mother, a woman, thinks of her son as the center of her existence; her son's father demanded this boy be murdered by the state. The husband and father can't force himself to contemplate the reason he did this thing that so troubles himself and his wife. And they each remain unaware of the other's cause of turmoil, assigning it to things that make sense to them but, in all honesty, wouldn't to the other.
The ending is so wrenching, so extreme, so deeply fitting, that I can't bear to take away your unmediated reaction to it. Suffice to say that it, too, is based on fact. The parts invented to make the story work as fiction are pitch-perfect enhancements of the facts.
There are other stories told here, not at all lower in emotional resonance than the main one; but they are, of necessity, less urgent: A wife's long-brewing loathing of a once-loved husband; a man's reckoning with the universality of fatherhood; a father's wretchedness and loss and dignity; a religious man's struggles against demons his god has no way to defeat but whose reality is tragically evident; a gormless man-boy without his own place in the world whose effort to carve one has dire consequences. All weave a beautiful basket to carry the main story in; others could easily see them as the main story in and of themselves. I won't say they're wrong. I will say that, in light of the polyphonic choices made by the author, the many stories are well-chosen and work together to make a syncretic whole.
There has to be a bruise, or it's not an apple: What the hell is the DA's dying mother doing here? Nothing at all. She's used as somewhat mawkish window-dressing for a sentimental moment or two. The story's momentum and depth would not change were she to be cut entirely.
At long last, I'll get to the point: Go get this book, and I swear it won't be wasted time to read it.
