One of the treats of "Furious Hours" is that its author is curious about everything. Not just one murder trial, not just Harper Lee. So you get digressions about (and these are just a few examples):
-The Scottsboro Boys. African-American boys wrongly accused of a horrific crime. These kids were forced through trial after trial, and repeatedly called guilty by all-white juries. The story dragged on for years.
-The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Another case that went on for many years, whereby black people were injected with syphilis and allowed to suffer--and were watched by heartless doctors.
-Marie Laveau. In a creepy digression about voodoo and "the Seven Sisters," Casey Cep mentions Marie Laveau, the woman who worked as a "conjurer" in Louisiana. Commenting on the weirdness of American myth-making, Cep wryly notes that "Laveau seems to have been born before the American Revolution, and to have lived into the twentieth century."
-Philip Roth's father. Oh, yes. White insurance "salesmen" would market burial insurance to black families. The families would pay week after week--sometimes in nickels--so that no one would be inconvenienced by coffin charges upon news of a family member's death. The white salesmen understood that some clients--perhaps intimidated by authority--would simply keep paying, and paying, months and years after the person in question had died and had been buried. (So the payments were actually just helping to line the pockets of white people.) This comes up in Roth's memoir "Patrimony."
It's clear Cep chose a good story, but, also, you may want to take the ride just to be in the company of a smart and curious American citizen. Cep is here to talk about many things; her range isn't limited to the trials of Ms. Harper Lee.
-The Scottsboro Boys. African-American boys wrongly accused of a horrific crime. These kids were forced through trial after trial, and repeatedly called guilty by all-white juries. The story dragged on for years.
-The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. Another case that went on for many years, whereby black people were injected with syphilis and allowed to suffer--and were watched by heartless doctors.
-Marie Laveau. In a creepy digression about voodoo and "the Seven Sisters," Casey Cep mentions Marie Laveau, the woman who worked as a "conjurer" in Louisiana. Commenting on the weirdness of American myth-making, Cep wryly notes that "Laveau seems to have been born before the American Revolution, and to have lived into the twentieth century."
-Philip Roth's father. Oh, yes. White insurance "salesmen" would market burial insurance to black families. The families would pay week after week--sometimes in nickels--so that no one would be inconvenienced by coffin charges upon news of a family member's death. The white salesmen understood that some clients--perhaps intimidated by authority--would simply keep paying, and paying, months and years after the person in question had died and had been buried. (So the payments were actually just helping to line the pockets of white people.) This comes up in Roth's memoir "Patrimony."
It's clear Cep chose a good story, but, also, you may want to take the ride just to be in the company of a smart and curious American citizen. Cep is here to talk about many things; her range isn't limited to the trials of Ms. Harper Lee.
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