My library has a long waiting list for The Cutting Season, which a few of y’all have recommended. So I downloaded Attica Locke’s other two novels, Black Water Rising and its sequel, Pleasantville, on audiobook while I wait. I’ve finished Black Water Rising, which was excellent, and I’m halfway through the equally well-written Pleasantville. So now I’m even more impatient to read The Cutting Season!
Black Water Rising, set in Houston in the early 1980s, stars Jay Porter — a African American attorney struggling to keep his criminal defense practice alive. He has a history, about a decade prior, of criminal charges resulting in a protest rally gone bad, but he’s turned over a new leaf and fighting for a good life now. One night, while celebrating his pregnant wife’s birthday out on the Bayou, he hears gunshots off the water. He, his wife and the captain of the boat end up rescuing a white woman — way overdressed for the area and refusing to say a word — drowning in the water. They drop her off at the police station and Jay thinks he’ll never hear from or about her again. Of course, he turns out to be really, really wrong about that. The case turns into a vortex that threatens to pull Jay, his practice and his life down with it.
The writing is good — Locke has a wonderful way with words. The city of Houston practically breathes as its own character. There’s also an intense subplot about a union strike, plus Locke delves in Jay’s background deeply, to give us a real picture of him as a man. There’s a lot packed in here, plot-wise and character-wise. What really blew me away was how Jay, as a black man in the 1980s (in Texas) — a responsible citizen with a degree, a career and a wife — gets treated by the white people (particularly law enforcement) in the story. You know a lot of times, when you read a book or watch a movie about some sort of conspiracy, you want to just shake the main character and tell him to go get help? Go tell the police what’s going on, tell the papers, tell someone. Jay lives in a world where he would be risking his life to do that. The constant shifts that this book forced on my perspective (as a white woman in 2016, also in Texas) amazed me.
