Alice Randall's new novel details the (un)making of a black conservative

Author, novelist, professor, social critic and hit country music songwriter Alice Randall enjoys confronting, exposing and subverting the contradictions, ironies and delights of the Southern experience. Whether it's race, class, gender, or cuisine, the characters and plots in such past Randall novels as The Wind Done Gone or Pushkin and the Queen of Spades tweak, satirize and sometimes just straight-out blitz both conventional and unconventional ideas about authenticity, class and race, and their manifest forms in the 21st century.

Still, as good as those books are, they've just paved the way for Randall's latest, an innovative, captivating work that blends mystery, politics, philosophy, comedy and pointed observational barbs as it punctures any illusions about a post-racial America. Rebel Yell (Bloomsbury) just might be the best novelistic example yet of the mission statement Randall details on her website: "I am deeply intrigued by the problems and possibilities that began to arise when Southern rural blacks migrated to the industrial North. Including the particular difficulties encountered by black Americans when they seek to return home. My abiding interest in and appreciation of country music song lyric and Southern foodways inform my understanding of the South and are informed by my understanding of the South."

That dynamic is central in the creation of arguably her most fascinating character, Abel Jones Jr. He's what some would consider the embodiment of a 21st century race traitor (or what others would simply label an "Uncle Tom"). The son of a civil rights lawyer, Jones has become part of the black neoconservative wing, a group that recoils in horror at the clothes, music, attitudes and lexicon of contemporary black America. Jones' rejection of his background (his father's track record on the race battlefield was exemplary) factors into a host of other key decisions, including his pick of a second, less combative wife.

She's by his side when Jones comes to the end of the road in rather spectacular fashion early in the novel. He collapses at a dinner theater appropriately known as the "Rebel Yell," a place where actors in Confederate garb can function in a closed universe without fear of anyone pointing out they represent the regional version of the Flat Earth Society. In a taboo-twisting turn worthy of Dave Chappelle, Jones has even become a black Confederate, choosing this group to be among his closest associates and friends.

Shortly after his funeral, while sharing drinks and memories with her former husband's old friend Nicholas Gordon, his surviving first widow Hope Jones Blackshear soon flashes back to their time together. The bittersweet occasion becomes her chance to provide a personal account of their relationship and the things that shaped and influenced his evolution.

Randall's method is associative, not chronological. But she swiftly sketches the gradual warping of Jones' views and ideals, from his perilous childhood to meeting Blackshear at Harvard to their subsequent years as a youthful married couple working for the foreign service in the Philippines and Martinique. As tension creeps into their marriage and their politics diverge, it eventually becomes apparent they don't share ideas on childcare and domesticity. Nor can they live together as a couple.

Recounted through Blackshear's reminiscences, Rebel Yell contains much about her evolution and the erosion of her marriage, and its insider details of sorority functions, family dinners and class gossip among Nashville's stratified racial hierarchies sound as convincing as one would expect from a writer with Randall's own well-traveled, keenly observed life. The specificity Randall provides throughout the book gives a real face to not only black conservatives, but also to Fisk, TSU and Meharry professors, the members of Delta Sigma Theta, and numerous others organizations you seldom, if ever, see portrayed in films and television shows about black Americans. The author sees their nuances, and understands why they matter.

But it's her sympathetic but acid-etched portrait of Jones, and his morphing into a Thomas Sowell or Armstrong Williams, that elevates Rebel Yell above a polemic along the lines of Michael Eric Dyson's heavy-handed takedown of Bill Cosby. Why didn't the specter of racial turmoil and conflict shape Abel Jones Jr.'s life in the manner of so many second-generation post-civil-rights leaders, who were nudged toward activism? That's among the many thorny questions Randall raises at a time when the afterglow of President Barack Obama's election has sparked the wishful thinking that our national dialogue on race is over, case closed. Because Jones never really understood the commitment or anguish of his famous parents, Randall suggests, he takes for granted the achievements that their sacrifice helped obtain. He considers that a closed chapter in history and now deems any emphasis or even mention of that era specifically—and race in general—as unnecessary and divisive.

Yet Randall doesn't present Jones as a figure of pity. Instead, he's both a curious and tragic figure. Because he's so disconnected from his heritage and people, his rise and fall are unenviable. But he achieves a mental peace and social confidence from this stance that somewhat shields him from the usual barbs and charges. In a larger sense, Rebel Yell spotlights the alienation black conservatives feel toward their own people, and their willingness to isolate themselves and even embrace groups who either implicitly or directly demean them. Jones doesn't see this as anything but natural. But Randall's novel indicates just how deeply this represents self-loathing and hatred and both a misunderstanding and rejection of his family history—less a rebel yell than a rebel's hell.