Freshwater Road

Freshwater Road is a compelling coming of age story set during a defining moment in America's civil rights struggle. In the summer of 1964, nineteen year old Celeste Tyree travels from Michigan to Mississippi to participate in the Summer Project. Northern activists like Celeste have come to register Negro voters and draw national attention to the state's brutal oppression of its black-skinned citizens.Most of the Summer Project volunteers are upper-middle-class whites attending elite universities. Celeste is a middle-class black student at the University of Michigan whose father owns a nightclub in Detroit. Part of Celeste's agenda in Mississippi is to validate her own racial identity - something her father embraces and her light-skinned mother seems to have abandoned.Assigned to run a freedom school for children and a voter registration project for adults in the small town of Pineyville, Celeste must first adjust to dilapidated plumbing, debilitating humidity, and the torpid pace of the rural south. Then she has to deal with the hostile white response to her project. The beatings, church burnings and arbitrary lawlessness of Pineyville's sheriff are true to the historical acts of white racial violence that occurred in Mississippi that summer.Once Celeste settles in, the novel follows three main story strands. Celeste and a local minister attempt to breach the resistance of the white Registrar and register at least a few black voters before Celeste heads back North. She starts up a romance with Ed, a swashbuckling Summer Project staffer. Will they feel the same way about each other once they're out of the Mississippi pressure cooker? Finally, a letter from her mother shakes Celeste's sense of self to the foundations, and she has to figure out how to respond.Nicholas writes a competent prose, but she gives us too much fine-grained detail about Celeste's physical reactions, which slows the narrative flow. This is particularly problematic given how much action the author is trying to move forward. For example, there's a subplot about Celeste's friendship with a young local girl that promises to reveal something interesting about poor blacks killing the dreams of their aspiring children. But it peters out, lost among Celeste's whining about dirt, bugs and the dearth of indoor toilets. Toward the end of the summer, and the end of the book, the momentum does pick up again.On the plus side, it's interesting and instructive to see the Summer Project story through the eyes of a black volunteer. (Most of the volunteer accounts were written by whites.) Though she's a stranger to the south, Celeste has less far to travel to meet her black hosts where they live. As a result, Nicholas's story has a depth and intimacy that's missing from many other accounts, which treat the locals like residents of a partially decoded foreign country.The Summer Project volunteers operated in conditions that resembled a war zone. Like any solder in combat, Celeste is whipsawed by fatigue, fear and exhilaration. Her belief in the power of non-violent direct action wavers under the pressure of numerous provocations. But she comes through her time of testing with hard-won insights about race, identity and human connection. Through Celeste, Nicholas ably shows us how much courage it took to be in that place at that time, and what was gained by those who took the risk.

I remembered seeing Denise Nicholas as an actress when I was a kid so I was interested when I saw her name on a novel. I tried it first as a sample and before I was done with it, knew I wanted to read the whole book.This is a first novel and I was impressed with how she drew the reader in. It started off a little slow but soon I was involved. It's primarily written from the point of view of a young black woman from Detroit, a 19 year old college student who goes down to Mississippi to join the cause of getting black people registered to vote in the early 60's. She's idealistic but nervous about the things she's heard about how things are down there.Some of the novel is told from the viewpoint of her father, a former numbers runner who owns a bar in Detroit and only finds out what his daughter has done after she's gone. There's less focus on him but she does a good job of conveying his fear for his daughter mixed with pride in her courage and a desire to go down and rescue her from a situation he understands far better than she does.When her training is over and she's sent out on her own to a small town to run a freedom school and to try to recruit adults to register to vote, she soon starts to realize just what she's gotten herself into. There are times that she is deeply afraid and times when she wants to give up and go home. She deals not only with some very real fear for her life and safety but also is dealing with culture shock. Her life up to this point has been fairly priviledged and now she's living among strangers in a small house without running water or indoor plumbing.The people in this small town are well drawn, even though we don't learn many details about a lot of them. She meets good people, bad people, people who have been beaten down their entire lives, people who react with anger and doubt that the nonviolent methods of Dr King are the way to remedy the situation, people of both races who don't like what she's trying to do, and people who draw upon a quiet courage to try to bring about this change.This is a well written book about a turbulent time in our country. It's something of a shock to delve into this time and realize that it was really not so long ago that these conditions and attitudes were the norm. It's rather sad to realize how much courage it took to stand up against this and how much was risked to gain such basic human rights.While this is a story of courage at heart, these are not cardboard characters, all full of noble perfection. They're real people and people you come to care about and root for. I'm glad I read it and I hope she will continue to write more.

only I was compelled to read Freshwater Road, feeling it important to look hard at an era, a movement and a place that I glanced at while it actually happened. As an over-busy mom, worrying about imparting the right messages to my own brood, in the time of racial transition, I know I murmured "Hurrah" over many headlines, and "Oh no" over others, but I relied on headlines and first paragraphs for my information.Freshwater Road brings the struggle for voting rights back vividly and in a voice I can relate to. It was a well told account of a northern college student compelled to leave her comfortable northern home to do what she had to do. Meanwhile she found answers to some of her own questions about her place, her family, her values and life direction.The author might have served her reader better if she had been less wordy and descriptive in some instances. Balancing the mosquito bites, kitchen aromas and modern conveniences with moving the cause forward was often too much. I skipped some and then I needed to put the story down to rest, picking it up again when I felt my senses could take a little more assaulting.