Where School Was Out

...Lainie interpreting the world for her little brother and making her own moves toward liberation...

...What better way to lay bare the cruelties and indignities of pre-civil rights Virginia than to show them to us through the eyes of a young boy who must struggle to understand what he is seeing, and, as best he can, rise above its tormenting inequities...

...a poor white classmate, cursed with a beautiful voice that brings him nothing but grief in school, ravishing a crowd at a party with his voice and then going home with the father who despises him for it...

...At the same time, in my heart, I didn't believe I would live that long...

...The otherplayers in Ben's small world include his "colored" friend Burghardt, named by his seamstress grandmother "after a great thinker whose book had lately come into my possession...

...I hadn't yet discovered that what you believed true and fair, what you stood for, might serve as much to isolate you as to include you...

...He isn't quite sure what she is doing, but as the book opens he reports having dragged an old chair into the woods that his mother was throwing out so the old woman could complain to God sitting down...

...But the compelling dramas are the boy's encounters with others: Grandfather Cary enacting his volatile sexuality and cruelty...

...He is the youngest member of a family whose three children are as decent as their good sense can guarantee...

...This kind of insight into the pain it can cost children to form their moral habits takes Prince Edward far beyond its particulars, however specific they may be...

...Ben is a sensitive boy, offended by much ofwhathe witnesses, althoughMcFarland is careful not to make him a hero: He goes dumb at times when speech would be a blessing, he flees or helplessly stands and watches—in other words, he is a sane and average kid of ordinary decency forced to make sense of an insane set of community mores...

...Ben and Burghardt saying goodbye after a friendship both tender and awkward...

...and when you became a man, you would expect others to know what you expected of them without your having to tell them...

...a kind of oligarchy fully recognizable today—formed of economic, political and public-opinion constituents...

...By way of explanation, but not of expiation, he speculates now about his silence: "Granted, I was a coward, ruled by fear as much as any pullet in the henhouse, but I was only a boy, about to start fifth grade—I'd had no experience with bearing witness against my own blood, and none consoling outraged old colored women...

...Similarly, in an Epilogue Robert F. Kennedy is quoted to the effect that "outside of Africa south of the Sahara, the only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, British Honduras, and Prince Edward County...

...He also informs us that he has not only used real names in some cases but has worked the actual recorded words of those characters into the text...

...Burghardt's father, Julius, is a sweetnatured worker on the farm who has been cowed into an all too familiar stoop of acquiescence...

...I thought all this masculine silence created a lot of unnecessary confusion and terror in my own life as a boy, but I very much looked forward to the day when I would be on the other end of things: a man, confident, silent, confounding...

...The parents are not courageous...

...By locating it in the pain of one particular boy, McFarland's meditative, retrospective voice speaks to the part of us that can still be shocked by the sordid history of racial politics...

...Someone anonymously contributed boxes full of Granny's books, but when she comes to claim them the volunteers refuse to believe this old black woman could have owned so many volumes...

...The rationale was stunningly simple: All schools had to integrate, but if there were no schools—voila...

...In the novel's most wrenching scene, he watches as old Nezzie, who has stockpiled exactly 41 used books to help Burghardt study, is stripped of her books and her dignity by a patronizing coven of women volunteers (including his mother) collecting a library for the new white school...

...McFarland has always been a psychologically astute writer, adept at the intimate gesture, the anatomy of family tensions, the investigation of small mysteries that bespeak large secrets...

...Though Ben saw and understood how cruelly Nezzie was being humiliated, when he had an opportunity to try to make amends he could not do so...

...It is a kind gesture, yet he has already been firmly stamped by some of the implicit social disparities between black and white...

...That, of course, is something to celebrate, but there are losses whenever such stories fade, whether they recount the horrors, the heroism or the ordinary behavior falling between...

...Alabama-born Dermis McFarland, in a departure from his previous apolitical novels (The Music Room, School for the Blind, A Face at the Window, Singing Boy), similarly recreates with great effectiveness a shocking period in Virginia history: Five years after Brown v. Board of Education, Prince Edward County closed its public schools, rather than allow them to be integrated...

...I knew charitable acts were permitted between the races, as long as they flowed from white to black and not the other way...

...In an Author's Note at the end, McFarland elaborates on the monstrous actions of the Prince Edward school officials and the likes of Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., who manipulated the Internal Revenue Service so that contributions to the segregated school would be tax deductible...

...She is miserable and clear-eyed, disgusted by the degraded standards of behavior she sees everywhere around her, and she is eager to instruct her little brother to share her refusals...

...To grow up in his thrall, and at the side of Ben's own father—who presumably learned his casual cruelty from Daddy— was never to know what was expected of you: "This business of knowing what was expected of you when no one had told you seemed an important element of what it was to be a man...

...Prince Edward, shored up by such documentation, is a sober and earnest book, but never a dull one...

...A few of these (for example, a real newspaper editor named X Barrye Wall Sr., who is portrayed as a friend of Daddy Cary) "enjoyed...

...His real moral compass, who has already figured out what needs to be resisted, is his 18year-old sister Lainie, whose new husband is shipped off to war, but not before she becomes pregnant...

...For Ben, resistance to what he calls "humanmischief " is still latent...

...Ben is 10...

...She rebels by standing alone in the woods crying out her fury and pleading for heavenly intercession...

...Or that it was an act of profound daring to advocate any change of the racial status quo because one could lose his job, if not his life...

...they accept, and sometimes abet, the routine nastiness of their town without apparent discomfort...

...Time and again I find myself recommending James Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society, about the integration of Ole Miss, to students who have trouble believing that it was once dangerous for white folks to entertain black friends without drawing the living room shades...

...One was as good as the other, and I mistakenly imagined that a storehouse of opinions could steer a person in times of uncertainty...

...No integration necessary...

...In a story dense with scenes of eavesdropping and unsanctioned witness, Ben often watches her from hiding...

...Again, Miss O'Connor of Georgia begs to be quoted: "The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet...

...author, "Haif a Heart," "Civil Wars" Just as the Vietnam years seem nearly as distant as the Civil War to many young people, the days when Jim Crow mutilated the lives of black Southerners are virtually unimaginable to them...

...It took until 1964 for the Supreme Court to correct that disgrace...

...Among many breathtaking affronts, black parents were for years compelled to pay taxes that supported a network of "Foundation"—read white, private— schools while their children did without any schools, good, bad or indifferent...

...The grown Ben is a candid and sympathetic reporter of what it feels like for the child Ben to puzzle out the defective moral climate he lives in...

...Grandfather Cary T. Rome (Daddy Cary), who runs the egg farm the family lives on, is sadistic, sexually predatory, violent, and not wholly rational...

...Thanks to Dennis McFarland's steady gaze, we have a very good view of Ben Rome standing, bewildered, at his own significant fork in the road...

...DuBois' middle names (and if they did they certainly wouldn't consider him great), so he is Bogart to them—calling to mind another great man of a very different sort...

...He is the kind of man who lays traps for the innocent and enjoys watching them being hurt...

...Taken together, these ordinary moments convey the oppressiveness of the time and the place as precisely as anything Flannery ?'Connor, another tormented Southerner, might have intended when she cautioned that general truths always begin in the specific...

...I didn't distinguish between opinions and beliefs," he says...

...But the boy's grandmother, Nezzie Mays, will not swallow her anger...

...Their chillingly polite condescension as she insists they have been stolen from her is one of the finest evocations I have read of the self-serving certainty of people who maintain face by invoking manners...

...Our current history—substitute Muslim for black, to cite just one example—only adds to the force of such inquiries into how and when we divide up into categories the innocent, the complacent and the complicit...

...The whites around him, in an amusing irony, do not recognize one of W.E.B...