Scottsboro - Ellen Feldman

A novel weaving facts and fictions about the real-life 1931 case of nine young black men accused of raping two white women, Scottsboro reawakens the intense racial tensions of America and the very different worlds inhabited by people of different races and classes at the time.

The novel starts in the build up to the accusation and the reader is given the facts of the case from the outset. Victoria Price and Ruby Bates are young prostitutes plying their trade travelling on a freight train. Nine young black men are also travelling on the train. When the train is invaded by a group of white men baying for blood, they ask Victoria and Ruby if they were attacked by the black men. Surrounded, Victoria tells them they had been raped. From there, the novel unfolds the devastating ripples of consequences of the girls' lie.

The main narrator in the novel is Alice Whittier, a fictional journalist who is reporting on the case. Alice is modern, rich and out to carve her career. But when she meets Ruby, she cannot help but get pulled into Ruby's world. A desperately poor mill worker and prostitute, Ruby is trapped by her lie and Alice is determined to tell Ruby's side of the story. From there, the women strike up an unlikely and, from Alice's perspective, unprofessional friendship as Ruby plucks up the courage to tell the truth.

Ruby is the other narrator in the novel, speaking in her colloquial, Southern style. Vain but endearing, sometimes worldly beyond her years, sometimes naive, Ruby's unprivileged and unhappy life is a world away from Alice's media parties and casual sexual relationships.

Based on a nutorious miscarriage of justice, Scottsboro could have been a book centring upon the most obvious and burning issue: race. Instead, it is a novel that goes way beyond, delving into the issues of class, gender, sexual attitudes and anti-Semitism as it covers the differing views on the case. From Victoria and Ruby, who don't want to tell the truth as it will stop the flow of dresses and make up they have received since the 'rape' to Alice who finds herself checking her belongings to see if Ruby has taken anything when she stays with her, Scottsboro unearths the most unsettling, deep-seated views of 1930s America.

No character is perfect - we discover even Alice's seemingly saintly father has an illegitimate child - and everyone has an agenda. Alice is always getting a new line for a story; Ruby is always craving material things to outshine Victoria; Abel speaks to the boys and Ruby and then twists their stories to suit the plot of his play. Feldmen's writing flows beautifully, perfectly capturing Ruby's plight and Alice's mixed motives as a journalist and a woman emotionally involved in the case.

Fascinating, intelligent and impeccably written and research, Scottsboro is an insightful read showing prejudices at their worst and capturing the climate of a case which put America's differing racial attitudes on trial.

My next read: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.