An Early Review
Where Southern Cross the Dog
Allen Whitley
2010 – Emerald Book Company-Austin
Set in Coahoma County Mississippi’s dusty and sweltering heat, is this summer’s great new novel, Where Southern Cross the Dog. Author Allen Whitley smoothly sets the mood for his story with an accompanying CD of field worker and prisoner “hollers” and blues artist and writers’ epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter. All serve as reminders of the social and cultural circumstance of the time, and the source of birthing pangs that will eventually be recognized as the Delta Blues.
Travis Montgomery arrives back in Clarksdale in August 1938 after graduating from Millsaps College in Jackson. Running errands for his father, the county coroner, proves a dull reprieve from school for young Montgomery until mystery, murder, international intrigue and even romance unfolds shortly after returning to his ordinarily quiet hometown.
Crossing racial lines, tensions and taboos of the time, young Montgomery quickly finds himself enamored of a young black woman, Hannah Morgan. Together, Travis and Hannah become “involved” not only with each other, but in the mystery surrounding the deaths of several black men and the white man who has confessed to the murders.
The atmosphere of the rural south in the early 20th century and its accepted mores are spotlighted in the book. Atticus Finch goes against Post-Reconstruction thinking by defending a black man in To Kill a Mockingbird. Where Southern Cross the Dog depicts this situation in reverse as local authorities of Coahoma County find themselves in the almost unheard of position of trying a white man for the killing of negroes.
In Where Southern Cross the Dog you will travel along highways 49 and 61, made well known by blues singer Robert Johnson, and the Yellow Dog railroad line turned into song by the “father of the blues”, W.C. Handy. As gandy dancers and sharecropper chants echo, Travis and Hannah discover that the human condition and the diversity of love can cause one to follow the footsteps of bluesman Johnson, and indeed, make a deal with the devil.
Olivia Wright King
Heart of Dixie Chapter
Pulpwood Queens Book Club
