In The Dark Of The Moon

by Suzanne Hudson

Book Overview

In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till is murdered in Mississippi, an event that sends young Elizabeth Lacey deep into madness. Consumed by guilt as the unwitting architect of another cruel lynching,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931561907
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
• Length: 485 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 2.0" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A Brilliant Novel Of The Deep South - Beautifully Written!

Set in southwest Georgia during the 1940's, 50's, and 60's, "In The Dark Of The Moon" is the story of a woman's grace and her madness, a child's quest, and a family's secrets. It is also a tale of revenge. Underlying all, however, is the brutal racism endemic to the Deep South during that period, and the hope of change brought by the burgeoning civil rights movement. Emmitt Till, a fourteen year-old black boy from Chicago was visiting relatives in Mississippi during the summer of 1955. He was shot in the head, after being brutally beaten, for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Elizabeth Lacey killed herself that same summer, unable to bear the pain caused by the myriad of cruel images which flooded her mind. She left behind her precocious five year-old daughter, Kansas. Elizabeth, bold and honest, as she had vowed to be when just a young girl, had long been the "family emergency" no one wanted to confront head-on. The "broth of the family's bloodlines," tinged with insanity, had threatened to boil over since her adolescence, when her gaiety became fevered and her sadness profound. Her mind, camera-like, would take snapshots, moments frozen in time, and file them away for later viewing. Elizabeth was unable to protect herself from the "bad images of the world:" the death of FDR, who once waved and smiled at the three year-old little girl from a passing car; photographs of concentration camp victims; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a devastating betrayal which occurred on the night of her first high school dance; the violent lynching of an innocent black man she had unwittingly caused; the heinous murder of Emmitt Till which brought back all the pain. Kansas Lacey, now twelve, has been raised by her extended family: her grandparents, the emotionally fragile and very distant, Miss Pearl, and Daddy Jack, the Sheriff of Sumner; Miss Lucille, called Grandemona, her great-grandmother; Aunt Francis, always Elizabeth's confidant, who now wants to take on that same role for Kansas; the beloved Pinky, a black woman who had cared for Elizabeth when she was too ill to function, and then became a mother figure to the child, after her mother's suicide. The Lacey's, a dysfunctional bunch of folks, were unable to honestly answer the precocious child's endless questions about her parents and the past. They thrived on half-truths, euphemisms and omissions. As Kansas grew older, she was left to learn by the impressions she garnered and her own sleuth work, the results of which she kept locked away in her diary. She is not the only one working to bring the facts surrounding Elizabeth Lacey's death into the open. By Kansas' thirteenth year, all the evil and violence which had been hidden and repressed about the prominent Lacey family of Sumner Georgia, will come to light, and the daughter will finally learn that her mother "was solid and brave, in spite of the unwinding spiral of her mind and the poise of a pistol barrel at her temple." Suzanne Hudson has created u

(4.5) "Now look what you've done"

Hudson's latest foray into the gothic South is masterful, a riveting tale of family secrets and lost daughters, what may well be a classic novel. The Lacey family has long enjoyed the privacy of money and privilege. Old Campbell Lacey is the family patriarch, often at odds with his wife, Lucille. Camp Lacey, the sheriff of Sumner, Georgia, voices the typical sentiment of the Southern male, superior and capricious in dealing with the blacks who tend to the family's needs. Jack Lacey, Camp's son and heir, lives without the distortions of prejudice that have so warped old man Lacey's thinking. A deputy sheriff, Jack has his hands full with a chronically depressed wife, Pearl, an unhappy woman who indulges daily in an excess of peach brandy, ignoring her daughter, Elizabeth. The conscientious Elizabeth carries the world on her shoulders, turning to her Bible for solace in a house of shadows, where propriety is paramount and affection is incidental. Given to the emotional extremes of her mother, Elizabeth is unstrung by violence of any kind, blaming herself for every injustice. A teen when World War II breaks out, Elizabeth is precocious and flirtatious. She loves to dance, unaware of the consequences of her provocative sexuality, devoting herself to entertaining the troops in service clubs. Invariably, Elizabeth falls in love with a con man more than willing to fulfill her romantic fantasies. On one fateful night, Elizabeth has an assignation with this man, an encounter that will leave her pregnant and lead to an unspeakable act that taints the town for years to come. Kansas Lacey enjoys her mother's love for only a few years, as Elizabeth barely clings to sanity, finally unable to continue with the anguish of her daily life. It is Kansas who is the beneficiary of the household servants, the women who so carefully tended the fragile and unraveling Elizabeth. Kansas reaches out to Pinky, Eula Lura's mother, now dying of cancer. Eula Lura, the Lacey family cook, bears the weight of Ned's death, her devoted husband who was lynched, his body found mutilated one foul morning after a midnight fishing trip. Eula Lura knows the identity of the murderer, holding that information close to her heart, waiting for the time to set things right. It is Pinky who reaches out to Kansas, recognizing the same despair as in her mother's eyes. On the cusp of the desegregation movement, the swaggering white men of Sumner brag of their exploits, the Ku Klux Klan blooming in the threat-laden atmosphere. It is in the midst of radical change that Kansas pieces together the fragments of her mother's life, the teasing, girlish insouciance that serves as a catalyst for so much violence, the Lacey family's murky past and the promise of a different future: "Kansas would think back on Southern Georgia's gathering swell of violence, when Schwerner, Goodman and Cheney ended up dead in the morally desolate Mississippi of Emmit Till's final summer." In beautiful, studied prose, H