Southern Winds of Change

THE AIR BETWEEN US

By Deborah Johnson

Amistad. 321 pp. $23.95

Among the many myths that some whites cited to justify continuing racial segregation in the Deep South was one that seems especially absurd today: that the majority of African American Southerners, the "good blacks" who hadn't fled north during the Great Migration, would continue to accept the status quo were it not for the corrupting influence of "outside agitators."

In "The Air Between Us," the first novel published under her own name, Deborah Johnson performs a sly, entertaining dissection of that and other Jim Crow myths. (Johnson has previously written romance novels under the pseudonym Deborah Johns.) Set in the Mississippi hamlet of Revere in 1966, her tale illustrates why integration was inevitable: Despite the economic, legal and educational inequities, blacks and whites in this town had for decades commingled in the most intimate ways possible. This lengthy cohabitation, like an unhappy marriage, grew comfortable over the years, but that didn't eliminate the possibility that one side eventually would grow weary of the constant chafing. Johnson offers a colorful, well-drawn story in which the "agitators" seeking to break this unhealthy union are townies -- black and white citizens who finally decide to risk change.

"Nothing can stop the changes coming," says Cooper Connelly, a white physician and one of five characters at the center of the novel. "We couldn't even if we wanted to, and I'm not sure I want to."

At first look, Connelly seems an unlikely source of agitation. He is the son of a powerful state senator, Jack Rand Connelly, who rose from fertile cotton land near Money, Miss., to become a sheriff and then a politician. By the time the flames of the civil rights movement begin to lick at the edges of quiet little Revere, Sen. Connelly, a staunch segregationist, presides over a network of white state and local workers who are deeply loyal to him, and black residents who fear him. He bankrolled Cooper's medical school education and then pushed through funding to build a private hospital in Revere, where much of the novel takes place. Cooper is the top doctor at the hospital and also leads the town's school board, a perch that was arranged by his daddy, too. So a minefield of tension and recrimination is laid when Cooper decides to encourage integration in the schools.

Johnson's style is languid though purposeful, employing roundabout descriptions of the ways tensions between the Connelly men and other characters play out. Direct confrontations are few -- such as a quick, fierce slap-fight between two black women friends -- but when they happen, they pack a wallop.

A key surrogate for Sen. Connelly is Ned Hampton, the chief administrator at the hospital and a smooth fixer for the senator. He periodically tries to talk sense into Cooper, a task made even more urgent after a patient dies under questionable circumstances. With everyone riled up over Cooper's attempts to force school integration, Hampton says that Cooper will have no white public support should an investigation reveal he was guilty of medical negligence.

"The only thing is, you got to stop it with this school-integration thing. You got to stop that nonsense right now," Hampton tells Cooper, as pressure to get to the bottom of the dead patient's case begins to mount. "Too many folks who count are against it." But Hampton's arguments fail to sway Cooper, in no small part because Hampton is a hypocrite: For years he has been the only white member of a local black church, the one congregation where his unnervingly "black" singing voice is at home.

Once revealed, the true facts of who killed the patient -- a "poor white" from nearby Macon -- will undo the seemingly perfect life of Cooper Connelly and the system of segregation that has characterized life in Revere. This unraveling happens at a leisurely pace, through the stuffy parlors and fragrant gardens of some of Revere's intriguing citizens, such as Madame Melba Obrenski, the town's "Genuine Creole Card Reader," who lives on the "colored" side of town, right next door to Revere's beloved black physician, Reese Jackson, and his cultured wife.

Johnson's omniscient narrator gracefully glides through the tangle of associations that exist between the black residents and those who inhabit Revere's "white" side. Told in folksy language and down-home idioms that only occasionally veer into corn pone, this enjoyable story evokes a world once hidden in plain sight, and the inevitability of its end.