'The Lyncher in Me'
BOOK REVIEW
NOTHING like parenthood to put us in mind of family history; or is it simply middle age -- intimations of our own mortality -- that sends us searching for ghosts? As the parent of three adopted sons, Warren Read goes digging into the past. Having survived neglect and abuse, it doesn't occur to him to worry about what he'll discover when he types his mother's maiden name into a search engine. "What stories could I possibly find in my lineage that would be more scandalous than those that existed in my own memories?" he writes. But the truth sends him reeling: Louis Dondino, beloved patriarch, the author's great-grandfather, served time in connection with three lynchings in Duluth, Minn., more than 80 years ago.
The author gets off to a compelling start with an account of that terrible night in June 1920. A white teenage couple, for reasons that are not entirely clear, invented the story that she'd been raped by a group of blacks working for a traveling circus. Before the facts of the case could be determined, several men, among them Dondino, rounded up a posse who broke into the Duluth jail to deliver their own justice. Amid shouts for vengeance, the whites hung three of those accused of the crime from a town streetlight, then triumphantly posed for the photo that would be sold as a souvenir of the event. Dondino was convicted, along with two other men, for inciting the riot that led to the murders.
Read's memoir is a patchwork -- history, biography, true crime and gardening tips (the digging metaphor is relentless) -- organized in three parts to reflect his circuitous emotional journey. In the first and second sections he alternates between a narrative of the crime and boyhood recollections; his father's abandonment of wife and children, and his consequent suffering at the hands of his stepfather. But by the end of Part 2, he's given the key- note address at a Duluth memorial to the lynching. After doing so, he acknowledges that he "rode a high like none other I'd ever felt." Having gotten a taste of "forgiveness and atonement," he cannot seem to get enough.
As for the memoir portion of the program, this is not a conventional coming-of-age story. While Read plays connect-the-dots with the family legacy of alcoholism and violence, that all takes a back seat to the more recent past. The author has become a fount of empathy; loving son, father, partner, teacher, (and gardener), he identifies with victims and perpetrators alike. Even so, the reader can't get over the feeling that this book's raison d'être has everything to do with reliving the moment when Read stepped before a crowd of 2,000 to shoulder the burden of guilt for a crime that happened long before he was born.
