Volume 13, Issue 3
Spring 2002
Senior Lawyer News
BOOK
REVIEW:
Lay That Trumpet In Our Hands
by Susan Carol McCarthy
275 pp
Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
February 2002
On a March morning in 1951, 19-year old Marvin Cully, a local citrus picker, was found on a lonely road in Ku Klux Klan territory outside Opalakee in central Florida, shot, brutally beaten and near death. He died shortly thereafter. About this time NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall, who had won a new trial in the United States Supreme Court for Walter Lee Irvin and Samuel Shepherd, two young African-Americans accused of raping a white woman the previous year, was in Florida preparing for the new trial. That summer, Klan members attempted to abduct Marshall in a high speed chase to the Orlando Airport, and the Miami Klan blew up the Carver Village Housing Project for Negroes. On July 4th, the Miami Jewish Center was bombed, and within days, the doors of St. Stevens Catholic Church were dynamited.
In November, Marshall's clients, Irvin and Shepherd, were shot, Shepherd fatally, allegedly trying to escape. Although Irvin testified that the shootings were premeditated, a county coroner's jury found that the officers acted in "self-defense." In December, in Miami, two more Carver Village apartment buildings were blown up, there was a blast at the Miami Hebrew School and Congregation and a Jewish community center was blown up.
Finally, another horrifying and deeply disturbing act of violence occurred on Christmas Day in Brevard County, Florida: The home of Harry T. Moore, the Florida NAACP leader active in registering black voters, was dynamited, and both he and his wife died from the blast.
In this first novel, Susan Carol McCarthy, born and raised in central Florida, deftly weaves childhood experiences, community attitudes, townspeople peculiarities and family relationships around these compelling real-life events. The narrator is "Reese" McMahon, 13-year old daughter of Warren McMahon, a transplanted Yankee, who owns a 27 acre citrus farm. Reese, her brother Ren, eight, and their little brother, Mitchell, three, along with their parents, make up the family around which the book's events and activities take place.
Outraged over the murder of Marvin, who was Resse's best friend, Warren writes to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, and provides Marshall and Moore with information about local Klan members and activities, including a transcript of a conversation his mother and the children overheard at a local restaurant in which a deputy sheriff and two other men recite a chilling description of the murder.
Klan activities in and around Mayberry are regularly provided to the McMahon family by Marvin's father, Luther Cully, director of his church choir, who explains that his information comes from the choir members who work in the homes of Klan members and overhear their discussions of local KKK activities. Warren, in one of the many touches of humor in the book, dubs this intelligence network, the CIA (Choir Intelligence Agency).
Finally, in December, in response to the series of bombings that month in Miami, Hoover orders the Florida FBI to investigate violations of federally guaranteed civil rights.
As the story of the investigation moves along, the author intersperses throughout humorous memoir-like descriptions of church lawn picnics, beauty parlor conversations, snake races and Bible quoting contests.
As the novel approaches its climax, the McMahon family, in a suspenseful and dramatic episode, become dangerously and directly involved in obtaining information on Klan activities and member names which ultimately contributes to grand jury indictments of seven Mayberry area men for perjury and the disbanding of the Opalakee KKK.
A review of Lay that Trumpet In Our Hands in the March 31, 2002 Washington Post says it well: ". . . McCarthy blends fact, memory, imagination and truth with admirable grace."
One cannot come away from reading this book without recalling To Kill A Mockingbird, the 1960 novel by Harper Lee that won a Pulitzer Prize. They are both excellent books and this reviewer recommends that you read them both (even if it means reading Mockingbird again). And then, rent the Mockingbird movie (Gregory Peck won an Academy Award for best actor.) while we hope and wait for the Trumpet movie.
William B. Smith
Fine, Fine, Legum & Fine
Virginia Beach, VA