Standing at the Scratch Line
A Novel
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Raised in the steamy bayous of New Orleans in the early 1900s, LeRoi "King" Tremain, caught up in his family's ongoing feud with the rival DuMont family, learns to fight. But when the teenage King mistakenly kills two white deputies during a botched raid on the DuMonts, the Tremains' fear of reprisal forces King to flee Louisiana.
King thus embarks on an adventure that first takes him to France, where he fights in World War I as a member of the segregated 369th Battalion—in the bigoted army he finds himself locked in combat with American soldiers as well as with Germans. When he returns to America, he battles the Mob in Jazz Age Harlem, the KKK in Louisiana, and crooked politicians trying to destroy a black township in Oklahoma.
King Tremain is driven by two principal forces: He wants to be treated with respect, and he wants to create a family dynasty much like the one he left behind in Louisiana. This is a stunning debut by novelist Guy Johnson that provides a true depiction of the lives of African-Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the 30 years this lengthy debut novel spans (1916-1946), much blood is spilt and few lessons learned. The macho misadventures of its larger-than-life protagonist LeRoi Boudreaux Tremain---aka King--drag the reader from the trenches of WWI to 1940s San Francisco, by way of Harlem and New Orleans. King, who whets his appetite for violence when he takes part in a family feud at the tender age of 14, makes a career as a killing machine and underground entrepreneur. Discovering a taste for shedding blood and a hatred for "American Whites" during combat with the all-black 369th Regiment in the fields of Alsace-Lorraine, King returns home to do battle with the mob, the KKK and law enforcement agents everywhere. Sometimes an avenging angel, sometimes merely an implacable force, King kills as briskly as the hero of a John Woo flick, only without the balletic grace. The glamour of his exploits--in killing, gambling, bootlegging and real estate--dissipates, however, when King's family starts to fall apart. His wife, Serena, undoes him through two illegitimate sons. One, LaValle, is conceived when she sleeps with a white racist sheriff to enable King's escape from captivity; the other, Leroy, is King's child by a New York woman, whose whereabouts Serena discovers but conceals from King. Leroy, left to grow up in an orphanage, causes a "curse" to descend on the family. The book unravels with tragedies of the domestic sort (deaths of relatives, miscarriages, car accidents), which, though cheapened by their frequency and a rather hokey voodoo cast, are somewhat appealing, if only as a break from incessant mayhem. Although Johnson succeeds in dramatizing the forces of prejudice and poverty, is perhaps an impossible task to sustain King's righteous rage, virtually a one-note performance, over so many pages. FYI: Johnson is the son of Maya Angelou.
