Mommy Brain

River Rising by Athol Dickson is one of those books that defies description. It is sold under the heading “Christian fiction,” but could just as easily be considered “literary thriller” or “magical realism.”

Hale Poser comes to Pilotville, Louisiana to look for his roots. He doesn’t know who his people are; he was found floating in a pirogue in the swamp and was raised in an orphanage. After growing up and becoming chaplain at the same boys’ home, he finds a clue that leads him to Pilotville.

Pilotville is unique for the south in 1927. Blacks and whites work together and do business with each other without much animosity. The only thing they don’t do is worship together.

Hale is a mystery to the townspeople. He’s a minister, yet willing to work as a janitor at the Negro infirmary. He says things that upset people, implying that maybe they’re not doing enough to foster community between the races. He also appears to perform miracles.

When a newborn baby disappears, Hale is determined to return her to her parents. His digging brings up something he didn’t expect – a pattern of child disappearances dating back decades. He keeps searching, and what he finds is shocking and heartbreaking.

Athol Dickson has accomplished quite a feat with this book – not only is it a page-turner with a well-developed plot, but the characters are fully flesh and blood and the writing is brilliant and descriptive.

At first he glanced up from time to time, quickly, so as not to let the riders see. Observing the lay of the land, he saw fields of cotton spreading out half a mile or more in every direction and bounded all around by the long levees. But he lost interest in reconnaissance soon enough. He had forgotten how difficult it was to pick cotton, or maybe he had blocked the memory from his mind. He had forgotten the sharp pricks of the burrs as they fought you for the cotton bolls, the burning of the bull nettles lurking down among the lower branches, and the stinging green spiders that left hard little knots below the surface of your skin. He had forgotten the deep indentation that the tow sack strap carved in your shoulder by midmorning, an aching furrow that soon would become a callus, and the way the inside of your wrist would bleed from brushing across the side of your trousers when passing the cotton back a thousand times a day, as well as the merciless weight of the sack you dragged behind. Also the bitter irony that the more you picked the heavier it got, and yet the way to get your pay – or in this case the way to just survive – was to weigh down that sack as fast as possible.

In spite of all this misery, he fought the impulse to escape. Just as some were fishers of men, so some were pickers of them, and Hale Poser knew in his aching bones there was holy work to do here. Fire spread through his muscles but he resolved to ignore it, to concentrate instead on the way one person started singing softly over there a ways, and another nearby picker took up the song, and one by one new voices joined in as the richness of it slowly spread across the field until all the slaves were singing near and far. Although some were not so good, they all did their best; and the others, oh my goodness, some voices were just so masterful – blending sweet like honey and molasses and rising up like thunder and falling down like rain and flowing as a cooling breeze across the cotton field.

When I reached the last few chapters of River Rising, I couldn’t stop reading and I couldn’t stop crying.

5 out of five stars