Beautiful prose, tough subjects, challenging perspectives. This Civil Rights movement and Bildungsroman collide in the figure of determined and independent Meridian.
Meridian is drawn to the Civil Rights movement; we trace her political awakening in the late 1960s as her political activities start to grow on her college campus, eventually taking her down South to participate in voter registration drives. The ways in which the campus space and the communities down South are sketched are very vivid. You feel totally immersed in the spatial and social realities of these places.
There are plenty of complex sexual and racial dynamics explored in the Truman-Lynne-Meridian triangle, and the book can be crude at times, in a way that reads as honest. The parts about Lynne and her complicity are powerful and challenging.
Written in 1976 you can feel the immediacy of its context and the ways in which people “did” politics back then, the ways in which the stakes were high and loyalties were fierce. At the same time, people were also bound by convention and kinship. The 1964 Freeedom summer and murders in Mississipi are referenced. It was a dangerous time to be doing this work and the pressure takes its toll. You can feel the “looking back” aspect of reflecting on what the movement had become by the 1970s, as well as a kind of reckoning of what that work in the 60s cost people.
There is also an interesting subplot about trauma and about the disillusionment of movements that dont necessarily go as planned. In some ways Meridian reads as the lone crusader, the final outpost, the weary cowboy.
Beautifully written, this feels like an important and challenging book about activism. Relatively compact, its scope feels epic.
One word: immersive.
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