Had journalist Paul Hemphill not spent a considerable amount of time living among the citizens in the "lost colony" that he describes so vividly in this book, "The Ballad of Little River" would not be the compelling tale that it is. And if I did not live here, a mere hour and a half away from Little River, I might think that he was stretching the truth a bit. But I know better.

I have been to Little River, played in the Tensaw River at its rather dilapidated state park, visited the site of Fort Mims and the grave of the famous Red Eagle. I have passed, on more than one occasion, the broken-down trailers sitting in cat-infested, junk-littered yards where dirty-faced children play and their parents stare at every passing car as though it were a curiosity. This is not a place that particularly welcomes outsiders - a place where no one is to be trusted other than "kinfolk", even if said kinfolk are crazy, lawless, or just plain mean. And most of all, a place where racial tensions still lie boiling beneath an innocuous surface. In this regard, Little River resembles many small rural Southern towns. Everyone is poor, almost everyone is ignorant, and people are either desperate to get out or have ceased to care at all. These feelings of desperation, loneliness, despair, and apathy indeed cross racial lines in Little River, where its some 200 residents all feel the blazing, almost unbearable heat of the Alabama summers and must swelter through them without the luxury of air conditioning.

Still, other than the infamous massacre at Fort Mims in the early 1800s, when five hundred settlers were slaughtered by renegade Creek Indians, not much bad had ever happened in Little River. People of both races seemed content to live as peacefully as possible, struggling along the best that they could just to survive. But in 1997, the Klan came to Little River, and, as fate would have it, there were two other incidents of racial violence that year. First, a young black man was shot to death while trying to break into a white family's trailer at night. Then, beloved store owner Peanut Ferguson was brutally bludgeoned by a black ex-convict. Though Ferguson survived, the stage was set, the time was ripe for the Klan to come in and stir up the young people - young people already dangerously bored, unloved, and unmotivated.

So it was that on a hot June night, a group of these young people got drunk following a Klan rally and torched the St. Joe Baptist Church and vandalized Tate Chapel. Both of these were black churches, yet the kids and their parents later denied that the crimes were racially motivated. And herein lies the tragic lie - these people genuinely believed that they were not racist, would deny it even as racial slurs came from their lips. Such attitudes are so ingrained on both sides that they are, in truth, accepted on some level.

Racism is not the only tragedy here. Equally disturbing are the sad, pathetic lives of these people, black and white, old and young. Family dysfunction, cruel poverty, blind ignorance, virtual isolation, and moral decay were all factors that contributed to the chilling suggestion,
"Hey, let's go burn down the n**** church!" That one statement, uttered by Brandy Boone, sums up the horror of Paul Hemphill's book.

It is all so vivid - the people, the places, even the decriptions of the food. Characters like Peanut Ferguson,
Doll Boone, Hoss Mack, and Murray January could not be more colorful if Hemphill had made them up. But he didn't. They are real. And, God help us, so is Little River. As Hemphill himself points out, "God's country is in deep trouble." When you read "The Ballad of Little River," you will come to understand why.

Recommended: Yes