Kelley instead delves into the minds of the Willson clan past and present, including David, now head of the family business but who once wrote against segregation for a radical newspaper, his wife, Camille, and two children – tracing their psychological trajectory from slave owners to benevolent masters, and then campaigners, of sorts, for racial equality. So when Tucker salts the fields he has bought (ie land on which his forefathers were oppressed), burns down the house and kills his livestock before leaving town, the reason for his actions have “yet to be determined”. Significantly Kelley’s black characters, including Tucker, are seen only through the eyes of the white majority, their motives never explicitly revealed. The sale sets off a chain reaction and leads to a mass exodus of the town’s black population. The story revolves around the Willsons, a former slave-owning family whose latest scion, David Willson, has sold a piece of their former plantation to his servant, Tucker Caliban, the descendant of a rebel slave. Kelley’s story is set in the deep south, in 1957, amid the racial hostility and resistance of the early civil rights era but he also draws our eye to the complicated nexus of oppression, bigotry, reparation and guilt inherited by white Americans after the abolition of slavery.
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