A child of the North and of the black middle class - her father, Shuck Tyree, owns a popular bar in Detroit, and she is attending the University of Michigan - Celeste volunteers for Freedom Summer for complicated reasons. Nicholas's appreciation of the untidy truths of human nature starts with her unsentimental portrait of Celeste. Rather than dividing her characters into dastardly whites and saintly blacks, she boldly explores the fault lines of class, pigment, geography and character within the African-American community. She has found the human complexity within the overarching passion play.

While she comes to the book with her memories of having performed with the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, she has delivered something infinitely richer and more artistically satisfying than a veiled memoir.

Beyond that, the movement represented a genuine example of Good versus Evil, which has a way of turning pedantic and inert when transmuted into fiction.Ī first-time novelist best known as a television actress from 'Room 222,' 'In the Heat of the Night' (for which she also wrote) and 'The Cosby Show,' Nicholas rises to these challenges better than most literary veterans. With an actual cast of characters as larger-than-life as Martin Luther King Jr., Bull Connor, George Wallace, Lyndon Johnson and Fred Shuttlesworth, any novelist would have good reason to despair over how invention could possibly outdo reality. Simply to note those episodes is to be reminded of why the civil rights movement has yielded far more history than fiction - the work of David Garrow, Taylor Branch, Diane McWhorter, Nick Kotz and David Halberstam, among others. The assassination of Medgar Evers and the development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party also hover in the wings of Nicholas's narrative. Nicholas manages to be intimate and epic simultaneously.įreshwater Road is a coming-of-age story that unfolds against the backdrop of epochal events, particularly the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.

Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas