Wolf Whistle Paperback – October 5, 2003

There is an extraordinary scene in this book: at a country store in rural Mississippi, owned by a white "hick" and patronized by poor blacks and whites alike, the young black boy from Chicago, Bobo, is double-dawg-dared by his friends to flirt with an upper-class white woman, Sally-Anne. The scene is loaded: the woman, described as "modern," has come in to buy Tampax. There is not another woman in sight, but the store is crowded with male regulars. Bobo has bragged that he has a white girlfriend and is egged on now to give a wolf-whistle. He does, and Sally-Anne, not fazed, finishes her purchase and is leaving the store when Bobo is confronted by a white man who insists that he apologize to "this white lady." Sally-Anne wisely guides Bobo out of the store, and unwisely gives him a ride home in her Cadillac. It is a perfect scene: silly, down-home, spine-chilling. And it is the central image of this remarkable book.This is not Southern Gothic, it is Southern grand-guignol, phantasmagoric, near picaresque, beautifully constructed and played, as one reviewer describes it, as a jazz symphony. The voices interweave and build their themes. All the actions seem inevitable, even the ones that play out in fantasy. It is orchestrated to a fare-thee-well.Despite its wild construction, Wolf Whistle is of course deeply disturbing. It is worth five stars and multiple re-readings. But it lacks one vital thing, for me: except in that scene described above, I really felt nothing. I never knew the characters. With few exceptions - and those neither the boy nor the woman - we never get inside them. Those two were key characters, and I wanted to know them most of all. But I was merely an audience at a play. From time to time, I was jolted by recognitions (I grew up in the South of that era), amused by satires, and at the end, I counted coup on the unconscious shifts in the culture that the murder of Bobo, like the murder of Emmett Till in reality, created in this community. But the people never came alive for me (this is certainly not the case with another of Nordan's novels, Music of the Swamp!). Part of me believes that this is because, while the murder of Bobo/Till changed things in the South, bringing force to a slow-building Civil Rights movement, it was not really felt there in real time, either. And the people in the town in Mississippi where Till died felt no more than the characters in Wolf Whistle. The community breaks up, the people move away from whatever group they were engaged in before the murder, or leave the town, because you cannot participate in this kind of horror without being marked by it. But marked is not enough. Some interaction between the blacks and whites is needed. That's what is wrong with the South even today. Until the people, one by one, feel keenly these very human moments, and come together, there will be no healing. Groups will break up, people will move away, but in their hearts, they will feel nothing more compelling than discomfort. And discomfort is not enough.

If I were to choose three words to describe Nordan's work, it would be haunting, hilarious, and tragic. Usually such elements are a recipe for disaster, or at the very least a digressive narrative train wreck , but Nordan seamlessly weaves together elements of humor and tragedy, the grotesque and absurd with verdant beauty. Wolf Whistle is a novel whose images will linger with you long after the reading has ended.Wolf Whistle is based on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, whose life was taken because he allegedly "wolf whistled" a white woman. This event would ultimately catalyze momentum for civil rights activism in the decade. Jordan sublimates this memory of the tragic event, which impacted his own childhood, into a collective meditation on the nature of Southern culture in the 1950s. Set in the fictional one horse town of Arrow Cather, Mississippi, no facet of society remains unexamined. Irony, satire and caricature are applied to all of his characters, except to Bobo, the murdered boy, who remains the pure and moral center of the novel. It is around Bobo's murder that the complex racial and cultural relations of this novel pivot. The murder reverberates through each character, no matter how major or minor. Each chapter oscillates from a different character's perspective/ reaction to the tragedy. In result, the reader is able to experience the true ethos of the era: the struggle of the white working class, intense racial segregation, the failings of the justice system, and of course, the cathartic power of the Blues.In an interview with the author, Nordan states that his novel is ultimately "a serious story about death and grief and broken hearts" but that it exists on "a plane, sometimes comic, even burlesque, just askew of the real historical universe." And it is in his sensuous, evocative prose that we are taken into the surreal setting of the Delta, where elements of magical realism are melded with historical fact. By mythologizing this event, I believe the reader experiences the tragedy all the more profoundly. Nordan will truly be remembered by this haunting and remarkable piece.

Words cannot describe the emotions this novel made me feel. It recounts a fictional version of the true events surrounding the lynching of a young black boy named Emmett Till. Reading the historical information about his gruesome murder simply cannot match the deep, heart-wrenching emotions this novel evokes. The characters in WOLF WHISTLE are all complex and well-written. The dark humor is surprisingly fitting, and the death of Emmett (Bobo) is tastefully and sympathetically portrayed from the point-of-view of a white man who was a boy at the time of the murder and who admits to feeling white-guilt over the circumstances surrounding the social structure of the times. However, he definitely does Emmett justice with this heart-breaking novel. I would absolutely recommend it.