The Runaway: A Novel

The Runaway: A Novel Review

To really appreciate Terry Kay's "The Runaway" you need to have lived in that time and place -- Georgia, 1949. I did, and I know that Kay has painted it perfectly. I knew those people, remember them well. Before reading the book, I'd read a generally positive review in an Atlanta newspaper, but one that said the book was "overpopulated with stereotypes." What I found was a true portrait of people and place. Like all Southern towns of that period, conformity was enforced at least by social code, if not by law; it would be hard to write a truthful story and not have characters who seem stereotyped. It was a stereotypical period when change required daring, and the soldiers returning from war came home to fill the bill. They'd taken on a sense of purpose: defending human liberty and dignity. Terry Kay tells us that these are the forgotten heroes, the Southern ex-soldiers who stood up and said to their neighbors, straighten up and play right. They faced as much danger, if not more, than when they'd faced the German Nazis, just by saying, "Why don't you leave him alone? What did he do to you?" I said that to three white men one night, when they were picking on a young black man, and I barely escaped with my life. Of course, that was in 1963, and it was a far more dangerous thing to do in 1949, Kay's scenario in The Runaway. It was men like Sheriff Frank Rucker who led the way, who showed us how to speak up for another man's dignity, even when it wasn't safe. Kay's people may be fictional, but they had counterparts in real life. Stereotypes? Hardly.

Of course, Terry Kay's writing is moving, nearly ethereal in places, as usual. I was also impressed with how many phrases he was able to use from the dialect of the time: "naked as a jaybird," "a fart in a windstorm." He's a master. So we can forgive him the line on page 381: "Getting out of his car, Hugh walked over to Fuller." Even the greats are allowed one of those now and then.

The Runaway: A Novel Overview

Tom and Son Jesus spend their days dreaming, fishing , and trying to escape work.  But their fun comes to an abrupt halt when they discover a human bone, which later turns out to be part of the skeletal remains of Son Jesus' long missing father.  As sheriff Frank Rucker, a World War II hero, begins an investigation into remains, he unmasks the racially motivated killer known only as Pegleg.  The sheriff's findings divide the people of Overton County, forcing a surprising conclusion --or beginning of justice.

Set in the 1940's and using the relationships of two boys -- one black and the other white -- as a  springboard for the begining of desegregation in the South, The Runaway examines the joys, sorrows, conflicts, and racial disharmony of their historical biased environment.

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