Cotton

by Christopher Wilson and Christopher Wilson

Book Overview

Lee Cotton is a black boy born white-skinned in segre­gated Eureka, Mississippi, in 1950. Over the course of Lee's first twenty years, he will fall in love with the daughter of a local Klansman, get kicked senseless and left for dead on a freight train headed north, end up in St. Louis as a white man, and be drafted into the psych-ops corps in Nevada. There, a drunken accident will separate Lee from another part of his identity and change his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0156030454
• ISBN13: 9780156030458
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Beautifully Written Meditation on Prejudice

A lovely, lyrical, well-written and sexy fantasy about life in modern America. Lee Cotton starts out as a white-skinned African-American in poor Mississippi and experiences racism at its most overt and problematic. Reborn as a white "half-wit" after a near-fatal beating, he's inducted into the Army's psychic research training. Lee continues his journey through becoming a woman after a car accident, a lesbian, and back to an African-American woman as he returns to the heritage that his Voudou grandmother gave to him. Wilson manages to portray every important issue - relations between races and sexes, the problems of love, feminism, and spirituality - in the middle of a captivating and often hilarious story. Watch for Cotton's final transformation at the end of the book and prepare to be surprised.

Fascinating & Heart-Warming Insights from a Multitude of Perspectives

This is a very entertaining read. From the outset you think this will be a story that's been told before - incredibly its not. The author has actually created a very unique (in more ways than one) character with an authentic & charismatic personality. You really care about Lee. Lee's attitude to life & how he / she deals with it all are very inspirational. A very enjoyable & original book that rings true on so many levels - read it for a different perspective on life & hope in the face of adversity!

Intriguing main character and plot.

This was a very interesting read. The main character, Lee, undergoes several transformations throughout the course of the book. Indeed, it's rather difficult to describe the plot without giving too much of it away. Suffice it to say that this book turned into an unlikely page turner. I highly recommend it in lieu of popular NYT bestseller-type dribble.

Who is the real McCoy?

The title character of Christopher Wilson's second novel begins life as a blonde, white, blue-eyed boy born of a black mother. Lee Cotton's problems are compounded by another oddity, his ability to hear the thoughts of both the living and the dead. If that were not enough, Lee discovers that his life holds surprising, even shocking, turns that ensure he will never fit in anywhere. First he survives a brutal, racially motivated assault that leaves him a John Doe, assumed to be white, in a neurological ward, and then, through a series of events, he undergoes major transformations that always leave him different on the outside than on the inside. No matter what guise he assumes, he remains an honest, homespun, good-humored, observant individual--a cross between Forest Gump and Cal from Eugenides's Middlesex. As one character says, "'You're inchoate, Lee. You're plastic; you're protean. What happens next?'" Lee Cotton, rechristened along the way as Lee McCoy, is a misfit with a down-home attitude who has no idea who or what he is, although he doesn't seem to care much. Some of the other characters are as outrageous as Lee himself: self-destructive Angel who undergoes her own transformations, always one step beyond Lee's; time-traveler Ethan who claims "you can live as many lives as you like, all at once, in parallel"; shrewd reporter and lesbian Fay who wants more than anything to be loved, just once; Angel's father Byron who remains a steadfast bigot despite all the lessons he should have learned; Doc, a mechanic and once famous surgeon who now performs illegal surgery in the back room of a local bar; and grandmother Celeste, a wealthy woman from "N'awlins" who practices voodoo and who later talks to Lee from beyond the grave. The characters, with all their exaggerated qualities, fit well with the tone of the novel, for Wilson is not interested in realism but in theme: no one really belongs in his own world. At times Wilson stretches the reader's patience with his outlandish plot twists; the sections where the reader must adjust along with Lee to a new reality often cause the narrative to founder. Fortunately for the reader, each time Wilson manages to find his way back to the right balance between character and content through Lee's first person narration and sensibilities which provide an anchor for the reader. Lee's voice ensures continuity even if the narrative details do not. By the novel's end, the reader learns why Lee has undergone these trials, although the somewhat hokey explanation, not entirely unexpected, falls flat because of the shift from the delightful bizarre to a pat inspirational message. Despite the flaws, Cotton remains an inventive and memorable novel precisely because it is so over-the-top. -- Debbie Lee Wesselmann

"I'm bent to N'awlins, which is twisted my way."

In Eureka, Mississippi, the people are hardy, tough, used to heat, dust and drought, where "needles fare better than leaves". His "genes knitted from rainbow yarns", the light-skinned, mixed-race Leifur Nils Kristjansson Saint Marie du Cotton is born in 1950, Lee Cotton for short. Recessive genes render this southern child a confusing mix, "with buttermilk skin, azure blue eyes and straw-blonde hair". If his color, or lack of, doesn't get him into sufficient trouble, the voices he hears finish confuse him even more. Like his maternal grandmother, Lee is conversant with the spirits, living and dead, their cacophony joined with others in the all-black classroom he attends, making it all but impossible to attend to his lessons. Even in his youth, Lee intuits that his life will never be easy, part black, part white, and nowhere at home. The future holds some hard knocks for Lee, as he is drawn to dangerous places, his skin color purchasing easy but dangerous passage. The spirit voices encourage his innocent curiosity, but the world is unforgiving, opportunistic and wasteful. Falling in love with the beautiful daughter of a rabid racist, Lee comes close to meeting his Maker, later to pass for white and gain employment in St. Louis, later still to assume yet another identity in San Francisco. Lee's road takes him far beyond the borders of normalcy, even to Nevada as a member of a secret psy-ops team, damaged but determined. This gender-bending tale of one man's changing identity would be grotesque if not for Wilson's humorous and brutally honest prose. From civil rights to Vietnam to feminism, Lee spins from one drama to another, that light-skinned, blonde-haired boy far from home when he pays a final visit home, adding another twist to an already addled past. This is the South with all its pettiness and prejudices, brutality hiding behind a friendly smile, a man's hand as ready to stab as to shake, general meanness as common as a charm to ward off evil spirits. But these are Lee's people, the good, the bad and the ugly. Born into a world that does not easily accommodate him, Lee confronts every situation with a willingness to survive. Life is not a box of chocolates, nor is his existence simple, but this character has an unquenchable spirit, gripping a gris-gris in his fist as he marches into obstacles that would throw a lesser spirit. Adventure, romp, expose and debacle, the author's imagination conjures up a transcendental man with angelic pretensions, straddling the best and the worst of humanity. On the surface, this skin-color-sexual-orientation-morphing protagonist is patently absurd, but the story is written with such open-mindedness and good humor that it is hard to ignore the very real issues of racism, sexism and life from an ever-changing perspective. Luan Gaines/ 2005.