Caleb's Wars (review)

For Caleb, being a black teenager in 1940s Georgia means that he is in the midst of several wars: certainly, he is affected by the world war that his brother is off training to fight in, but more immediate to his experience are the wars between him and his overbearing father, who won't treat him like an adult, and between him and the white boys in his town, who expect him to act like slavery never ended. At his mother's urging and to his father's great disappointment, he gets baptized, and when he emerges from the water, he hears a voice that he figures must belong to God. During this eventful summer, he defies his father and gets a job in town, only to find himself working with an enemy—a German POW—and he discovers a spiritual gift for healing that he tries to keep secret. The basics of the story suggest similarities to Greene's classic Summer of My German Soldier, but, with its focus on spirituality and ironies of relative privilege, this is a very different book. It's also more an open-ended episode in a young man's life than a tightly plotted novel; many things happen, but few are resolved. Caleb's character is deftly and realistically drawn; with his turbulent teenage emotions and his inability to conceptualize consequences, he does some pretty stupid things that are, in the end, validated as necessary resistance to the tyranny of racism that grips his town and time. His status as an imperfect vessel for such a powerful spiritual gift gives hope for readers struggling with their own faith in circumstances where anger at injustice outweighs patience and charity.