Not much happens in small towns; the sun rises and sets, motorists zip past without a thought, and the locals gather at the lone gas station to try to be the first to guess the make and model of the cars flashing past. It’s an almost ritualistic monotony repeated in a thousand towns across the country, and which Clyde Edgerton chronicles in his new novel, The Night Train ($23.99, Little, Brown and Company). Starke, North Carolina, could be any of those towns, except it’s in the South as the Civil Rights Movement is gaining momentum, an element that promises a modern day tragedy.
The status quo reigns in Starke, with white on one side of town and black on the other and the ubiquitous railroad tracks separating the two. In Prestonville, “seven miles to the south . . . a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan meet monthly,” as good Klansmen will. It’s the way things are supposed to be. Starke is home to “Larry Lime Beacon of Time Reckoning Breathe on Me Nolan,” or Larry Lime for short. Larry recognizes that the “Devil was all in among colored and white, but . . . that the Devil might be afraid of some white people.”
Larry is careful not to cross the racial boundaries, but he befriends Dwayne, the white son of the owner of the furniture refinishing shop where he works. Larry takes him noodling, a crazy form of fishing where you stick your hand in an underwater hole and pull out whatever is in there. They shoot hoops together, although Larry knows they shouldn’t, and Dwayne’s father tells him to stop because it “just don’t look right.
This article appears in Aug 18-24, 2011.