The Twelve-Mile Straight

By Eleanor Henderson, Ecco, 2017, 561 pages
Reviewed by Julie Bookman, June 16, 2020

My husband, Jay, and I each read and deeply admire this hefty novel (540 pages that clip right along) from the author who hit the fiction radar in 2011 with “Ten Thousand Saints.” Like “Saints” (involving young people in tough circumstances and set in New England and New York City in the 1980s), Henderson’s latest soars due to in-depth research, unflinching storytelling, vivid detail. (You can downright smell that red-clay dirt.)

“Straight” opens in rural Georgia of the 1930s, with two interwoven events: the lynching of a farmhand accused of raping Elma, 18-year-old daughter of a white sharecropper, and the birth of Elma’s curious twins. (One twin is light-skinned, the other dark. In Greek mythology, “Gemini twins” could have the same mother but different fathers.)

There are many twists and turns and secrets to be revealed, it is a story filled with breadth and scope, emotional power, dark history that painfully resonates today. Terrific characters abound, with names like Juke Jesup, Drink Simmons, Mud Turner, Wolfie Brunswick . . .

Some readers might have trouble digesting the unsavory aspects of this story. Henderson does not try to ease the woe. This story is full of woe. And heart. And truth.