Scottsboro

Ellen Feldman

Reviewed by Emily Maitlis

When a freight train stops near Scottsboro, Alabama, nine black boys find themselves hauled off it and facing death row. The year is 1931, the great depression is exacerbating divisions already entrenched in America’s deep south. The boys are accused of raping two white women on that train. It is a crime they did not commit but they will spend the rest of their lives protesting their innocence.

So yes, Scottsboro is the story of their excruciating struggle for justice at the nadir of America’s recent racial history. But this novel is also about Ruby, their accuser. Ruby Bates is raised to work in the raw, consumptive conditions of the cotton mills. One of many girls known locally and pejoratively as ‘lintheads’. Ruby knows what it is to be poor. And she knows what it is to be outcast. And she glimpses the power that can be found in turning on those even more vulnerable in the foodchain.  This is also her struggle - as she dives between conscience and baser instinct – to save her own fractured and fragile reputation.

And it’s about Alice, the horrified New York journalist who wants both to cover the trial and to influence it and believes she can talk Ruby out of her lies. Alice is as much detective as she is commentator on the trial of the Scottsboro boys. By today’s standards her actions would result in the whole case being thrown out – but here, there is no expectation of objectivity from journalists on either side.

Scottsboro is a story of poverty, prejudice and disenfranchisement, and about the harsh realities of trying to change all that. It is a story with plenty of victims and virtually no heroes. And in this, of all years, it is a sobering, visceral reminder of the enormity of the gulf that had to be crossed for a black man to become president of the United States.

Ellen Feldman’s narrative is quietly addictive. Her characters are stylish and poignantly drawn, her prose elegant and her research impeccable. As she weaves between the first person voices of Alice and Ruby, their rhythms and cadences are so instantly recognizable she can change voice within the space of a page.  
If the material sounds familiar – and certainly there are echoes of Harper Lee here, not least in the descriptions of the lynch mobs and the southern court drama - then perhaps Feldman’s USP is in the way she constantly shifts the reader away from obvious judgment.

Progressive, liberal views, she seems to say – be it free love or a clean conscience – are much easier to uphold when you’re not worrying about starvation or emphysema. Does telling the truth come at a price? Well yes, often, it does.

Feldman herself recognizes that setting ‘fictional characters lose amongst the ghosts of history’ can be playing with fire. The Scottsboro trial itself is no feat of the imagination- it’s all there in the text books. But from the emotional charge of her writing with its constant challenge to the reader she produces fiction at its very best from history at its very worst.