Cedar Crossing by Mark Busby (review)

Mark Busby’s Cedar Crossing is a historically based novel about race, place, and Texas. In 1899 Jim Humphries and two of his sons were lynched in Henderson County, Texas. In 1964 eighteen- year- old Jefferson Bowie Adams II researches the lynching for a college oral history assignment. When Jeff’s Pampaw Scott and Aunt Mag tell him about the unjust murders of the three white men, the previously apolitical student spends the rest of his spring semester uncovering the role of the Ku Klux Klan and the community’s post–Civil War racism in the murders and the silence surrounding them. In order to write the novel, Busby carefully researched the once notorious but now forgotten Trans-Cedar lynching in East Texas. Although the novel often quotes directly from archival and primary historical sources, Busby responsibly subtitled Cedar Crossing “a novel,” as the novel deviates from the historical record only to speculate on the race-based motivations behind the lynching—a relationship between one of Jim Humphries’s sons and a young black woman named Reba Washington.

While researching the murders, Jeff develops a political consciousness, realizing that the lynching in 1899 and his own racial prejudice in 1964 are linked to “the long history of race relations in America” (94). Place also probably had something to do with the community’s prejudice in 1899 and in 1964, as East Texas was still haunted by the “often uncomfortable mixture of the South’s emphasis on its history, intertwined with the dark stains of slavery, manners, and social structure, in conflict with the Texan/West’s ideal of rugged individualism” (134). Reflecting on his previous sexual harassment (some would call it assault) of two black girls, he realizes, “I was completely clueless how I’d reenacted a kind of behavior that had been part of the stained history of race since the first slaves made the middle passage” (169). While this passage indicates Jeff’s growth, some readers might be put off by it or by the depiction of Reba Washington, who is first introduced “squatting down to make water” while she is watched by a white boy (her eventual lover) and who as an old woman is compared to a “black widow, at least in common law,” since she “had survived in a world where she was almost never seen as a person” (40, 188).

Because it is told from the perspective of a college student, this could be a classroom-friendly novel, especially for those of us teaching first-generation college students from rural areas—just like Jeff—to “read widely and . . . think critically” (161). In composition or creative writing classes instructors might replicate the oral history assignment Jeff receives from his professor; more advanced students might be led to engage in the type of archival and ethnographic research on local history Jeff independently conducts. This novel would also be well suited for courses on Texas literature, western literature, or the literature of place. Even the challenging depictions of black women could lead to productive class discussions on the very question about racial prejudice Jeff raises later in his life: “Who knows whether the old inherited beliefs still move people in their secret hearts?” (193).