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Book Review: PRISONERS
OF WAR review
by Hal Jacobs
Forget about nostalgic glimpses of Southern small towns and grand moral lessons about civic virtue or racial equality. Yarbrough, a native of the Mississippi Delta who lives in California, examines the grinding friction and hard jolts between black people and white people, men and women, mothers and sons, and soldiers facing the sacrifices of war. Set in 1943, the novel follows the lives of several individuals affected by the fighting thousands of miles away. Dan Timms, who is white, and L.C., who is black, are teenagers employed by Dan's uncle to drive rolling stores (old school buses stocked with goods) around the Delta. Dan can't wait to enlist. Soon he'll turn 18, and the Army offers him a sure ticket out of Loring, Miss. But his escape won't be that easy. His cynical, wheeling-dealing uncle, Alvin, can easily pull strings with the local draft office to keep him out of uniform --- and behind the wheel of his bus. His mother needs him to run the family farm, especially after his father's recent suicide. And even the suicide itself may have been a last attempt to get his attention. A friend of his father who'd served with him in WWI recalls a conversation that took place the day before Jimmy Del Timms killed himself:
L.C., on the other hand, wants to avoid the typical fate of black soldiers --- digging ditches and pulling latrine duty on the front lines. As he says, he doesn't want to die like a dog for a country that treats him like a mule. Instead, he dreams of escaping to Chicago, where he can play the same mean blues that he performs locally. Alvin, L.C.'s biggest music fan, protects him from the draft for a while. But then L.C. catches the baleful eye of a white farmer still mourning the death of his son overseas. In the end, L.C. must fight or flee. What brings the war even closer to home is the presence of a prisoner-of-war camp. Local cotton farmers line up in the morning to receive their allotment of German prisoners to work their fields. Among the guards is a high school friend of Dan's who has been sent home after being traumatized by his near-death experiences. As Marty Stark sinks deeper into alcoholism and despair, he begins to feel a connection with a mysterious prisoner who claims to be Polish. Whereas everyone else has a clearly defined identity, especially important in this racist culture, the enigmatic Pole doesn't fit in anywhere, becoming the most tragic figure of all. Alvin Timms, war profiteer and town scoundrel, provides the ironic detachment of the novel. Unlike his war hero brother who later grew disillusioned, Alvin never had any illusions to begin with. It's no secret that he'd been sleeping with Dan's mother long before his brother's suicide. Shirley and Alvin are prisoners just like the Germans and the teenagers, but their frustrated desires make them powerless to even consider escape. As Yarbrough shows, relationships between people are intertwined so deeply and mysteriously that sometimes they defy the power of words to express them. But in this powerful, understated novel, he finds a way to describe how fleeting moments between people slowly accrue and gather the heaviness of fate. An edited version of this review appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, February 7, 2004.
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