Grooms vividly evokes these stirring events, as well as Walter’s cruel experiences at the receiving end of police brutality the boy’s cathartic transformation during a particularly brutal assault is especially persuasive. Meanwhile, civil rights marches, boycotts, and protests gather force. Her frustrated husband Carl finds solace in area bars. It seems Clara has adopted a fatalist’s stance toward her cancer-driven, Walter suspects, by her memory of her own father’s senseless death years ago on trumped-up charges of raping a white woman. As children, Walter and his sister Josie share as their most pressing concern the declining health of their mother Clara, who refuses to seek medical assistance. Flashing back, Grooms, an award-winning short-story writer, poet, and essayist, does a lovely job of sketching such timeless aspects of Walter’s and his friend Lamar’s boyhood as their search for specimens to examine under Lamar’s microscope, even as he nails the details of institutionalized racism in the 1960s. Composing a letter to their families turns his thoughts to his turbulent youth in Birmingham, Alabama. Walter Burke trudges toward a village in Vietnam and watches a pair of friends die in a firefight. An engaging though loosely woven debut about an African-American boy who experiences the death of his mother-and the words of Martin Luther King-in the same year.
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