The Voice At The Back Door (1956) By Elizabeth Spencer

 

Judges for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1956 unanimously selected The Voice at the Back Door by Elizabeth Spencer for the award. The Pulitzer Board of Directors however chose to ignore the vote and announced they would not be making an award that year. They believed Spencer’s book was too explosively controversial, it deals with racial injustice in small town Mississippi.

Anyone who does not understand how racial injustice could be considered too “controversial” a subject matter in 1956, need only tune in to any news source today. America has yet to successfully drive a stake through the remnants of confederacy, or its proud child Jim Crow.

The time period when the book was written and published was indeed tumultuous. Near the end of WWII, President Truman ordered an end to segregation in the military; and would be politically vilified for doing so. In 1954, the Supreme Court would issue a unanimous ruling in the Brown v. the Board of Education proclaiming that the mantra of “separate but equal” was a fallacy, declaring “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In 1955, a 14-year-old African American boy, Emmett Till, was accused of “flirting” with a white woman in a grocery store. He was kidnapped from his aunt & uncle’s home at night, physically mutilated and murdered with his body dumped in a nearby river.

These real-life events, and countless others like them, set the background for Spencer’s book about the post-civil war Jim Crow era, when white southerners had to relinquish ownership of African American slaves, but replaced it with a system of state and local laws enshrining white supremacy, as their God-given "southern way of life.”  Spencer’s book is a textbook on how that “way of life” operated. Her vantage point as author is that of a Southerner, she was born and raised in Carrolton, Mississippi.

Like Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird (which did win a Pulitzer Price five years later), the book begins with a Black man being accused of a crime. It flashes back to the cold-blooded execution of “12 Negroes” that took place in the courthouse before a trial had even convened.

While one should read The Voice at the Back Door as a civil rights history, let me tell you it also reads like a page-turning murder mystery played out alongside a complex love “quadrangle,” with a thriller primary election campaign for County Sheriff setting the timeline – and a Prohibition subplot for a little added spice.

The novel has three main characters. One is Duncan Hunter, a "townee," whose family has owned the grocery store for generations.  Dubbed “Happy Hunter” he was a college football star and is now a reluctant candidate for Sheriff. The second main character is Jimmy Tallant. He is a country boy, grown up to be bootlegger. Tallant and Hunter went to grade school and high school together. Their personal rifts over girlfriends and perceived rights and wrongs, and family histories, are the fodder of generations of small-town gossip.  The third main character is Beck Dozier, an educated Black man, his father was one of the 12 Negroes gunned down in the courtroom, his nephew is a kid called W.B. who works as a delivery boy for Hunter's grocery store.  

Recommendation: Absolutely. The Pulitzer judges were right, the Pulitzer Board was cowardly.