February 2015: Review of MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE

CLOSING THE DIVIDE

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King’s 86^th birthday.  Our country has experienced a year of exposure to the great divide still existing between Black and White.  Mississippi born, Minneapolis author Jonathan Odell has written a soon to be released novel that will inspire us toward continued efforts to close that divide. Jonathan asked me to be an early reader/reviewer of this book.  I’ve decided to offer my review of Jonathan Odell’s soon to be released novel, MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE, now available online at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.  On January 28, Majors & Quinn Booksellers will host Jonathan’s 1st Minnesota reading.

Lee Smith, who praises Jonathan Odell’s MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE as a “…no holds barred Southern novel as tragic and complicated as the Jim Crow era it depicts…” has long been one of my favorite authors. Jonathan Odell’s rhythmic cadence in language and dialect create an atmosphere that sets me smack dab in a place I haven’t experienced since Smith’s ALL THE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES.

Jonathan’s Miss Hazel lives her girlhood in the Tombighee Hills of Appalachian Mississippi. Smith’s stories depict a life in Eastern Appalachia. Much like Smith’s Ivy Rowe in ALL THE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES, Miss Hazel hails from an Appalachian culture that leaves her ill equipped for the world beyond her impoverished childhood. The story of Appalachia, then as now, is one of chronic poverty. The racial divide that exists in Mississippi is a crucial element in Odell’s story of oppression, violence, poverty and lack of personal power. In  1950’s Mississippi, more so than in the Northern and Eastern Appalachian communities, Black families lived in servitude to the White as if slavery was never abolished.  

Miss Hazel, a mere girl when we first meet her, carries some big dreams as she takes the arm of smooth talking Floyd into matrimony. Floyd, the eternal optimist who preaches an ongoing “religion of success” holds her near and shows Hazel the Whites-only kingdom on the hill overlooking Black shantytown. Here she will learn the life lessons that first smite then ultimately heal her.

MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE is a story told through the wary and witty eye of a Southern White boy, Hazel’s surviving son, Johnny, as he grapples with his own sense of basic human decency and his own claim to the man he will ultimately become.  The boy Johnny is precocious, sassy and sensitive.  He takes people and situations at face value, not divining the invisible lines that divide Black from White, poor from prosperous, book-learned from ignorant and Godly from irreverent.

While much will be made, and not inappropriately, of Odell’s novel as a story of the Civil Rights Movement, it is, in fact, the story of a young, White Mississippian boyhood.  As we see the world through the eyes of a child we are granted a pure, passionate and childlike view of the relationship between Blacks and Whites.  The child, Johnny, experiences human beings as human beings and exposes the artificial construct of racial supremacy as indecent and inhumane.   Through Johnny’s experience we are shown a fresh view, unobstructed by an imbedded bias of White against Black.

In Johnny, Odell gives us a boy who grows up fast in an environment that demands just that.  Johnny struggles to understand all he sees and hears around him of poverty, deprivation, power, resiliency and broken spirits.   Johnny seems to carry a deep- down understanding of the distinctions between generosity of spirit and the flawed and impoverished soul that eats its victims alive.

MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE is a story compassionately told.  Jonathan Odell brings humor to the telling of this important story of human longing for love and acceptance and a stable ground of dignity and equality for all. Jonathan Odell’s novel MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE is high achievement in storytelling comparable to the work of great southern writers like Smith.  MISS HAZEL AND THE ROSA PARKS LEAGUE is a story told with charm, humor and grace and offers a richness of hope that we will one day live in a world undivided by the color of our skin.

Deborah Padgett is a visual artist and writer.  Her novels, A STORY LIKE TRUTH, THE SEA IN WINTER & SOLVING LONELY can be found online and at local retail outlets as well as the St. Paul Public Library.