Angel

When a black mother is lynched, a white social worker tries to save her daughter.

COTTON SONG

A Novel

By Tom Bailey

Shaye Areheart. 318 pp. $24

The smart writer looking for a novel idea could do worse than a good old-fashioned Black Angel tale. Whether in novels ( The Stand, The Secret Life of Bees) or films ( Ghost, The Legend of Bagger Vance), such stories are ever-popular: A white hero or heroine in physical, emotional and/or spiritual trouble is taught important lessons about life and love by a black character who exists solely to do so. Bonus points if the black savior possesses not just supernatural wisdom but actual magical powers ( The Green Mile). Double bonus points if the person saved is a child ( Bees, Clara's Heart).

Tom Bailey is to be commended for attempting, valiantly, to resist this trope. In Cotton Song, set in 1944 rural Mississippi, it is white social worker Baby Allen who sets out to rescue a 12-year-old black orphan, Sally Johnson. Sally's mother, a wet-nurse for one of the town's prominent white families, was accused of murdering her charge and then was brutally lynched.

Having tasted blood, the mob wants more and turns to Sally. But Baby risks her life to save the girl and root out the truth about the infant's death. Help comes in the unlikely form of Jake Lemaster, a faded former football hero and the layabout son of Boss Chief, the all-powerful superintendent of the infamous Mississippi state penitentiary, better known both in the novel and the real world (not to mention several blues songs) as Parchman Farm.

Bailey tells his story through a series of narrators, a technique that gives breadth to this Southern gothic tale of race and violence, class and sex. Though some of the voices serve merely to slow down or diffuse the narrative (Jake's 6-year-old son), and some (an actual fox) are plain ridiculous, others add a complexity that could not be achieved by relaying events strictly through Baby's eyes. Particularly good are the chapters from the distraught mother of the drowned baby and from the sheriff, who chafes at his placement in the dying-but-still-rigid Southern social order.

There's a lot going on in Cotton Song-- torture, maggots, and necrophilia, among other things -- and the action moves along at a brisk pace. Bailey's writing is graceful and fluid; he beautifully evokes the sweltering misery of a dusty Mississippi town in which all residents are condemned to play out their parts, like it or not.

But we hear far too little from Sally, around whom all the violence swirls; she seems to process her mother's brutal death with scarcely a pause. And many of the other characters nestle so close to stereotype that it's hard to take them seriously. Boss Chief is physically massive, locally omnipotent and relentlessly unconflicted about the brutality needed to raise a son, run a prison and maintain Jim Crow. Every time he opens his mouth, the narrative screeches to a halt while he speechifies, reminding us of Big Daddy from "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Jake is the alcoholic heir apparent whose vague ideas of prison reform are never explored or justified. His wife is an up-from-poverty, ice-queen beauty consumed by her social stature. The prison nurse is a tough cookie with a heart of gold. The local Klan grand wizard is a white-trash sociopath. Worst of all is Sally's stepfather, a gigantic, superhuman black man doing time at Parchman Farm. It takes a lot of nerve -- or perhaps the word is hubris -- to name your primary black male character Bigger. And then to render him essentially mute.

Cotton Song is an ambitious novel that attempts to say something meaningful about true heroism and the cost of racial hatred. But in the end, it succumbs to the same impulse that makes black-angel stories so culturally popular. Though Sally is saved in this novel, her saving seems almost incidental. She is saved mostly so that the white characters might be redeemed. ·

Kim McLarin is the author of "Jump at the Sun."