'Black Water Rising' by Attica Locke

On more than one occasion, I have met a graying intellectual, attorney or businessperson only to later learn they were once members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society or the Weather Underground. Such encounters leave me wondering -- how does a person evolve from a young firebrand who marched, rioted (or worse) to relative domesticity, and what did they lose or gain along the way?

Attica Locke had to look no further than her parents for the question to arise, but the answer came from her imagination and is chronicled in her debut thriller, "Black Water Rising." Set in oil-obsessed Houston in 1981, the novel follows Jay Porter, a 30-year-old attorney whose small practice (personal injury, slip-and-falls) can't cover the bills or allow him to properly provide for his pregnant wife, Bernie. Even the birthday surprise he conspires with Bernie's sister to arrange -- a boat ride along Buffalo Bayou, helmed by a longshoreman who's a relative of a client -- is a downscale affair featuring some take-out barbecue, a few balloons and a store-bought chocolate cake.

It's clear that Bernie and her family are all Jay has. His other connections -- an estranged sister and mother, "comrades, cats from way, way back" -- have broken off in the aftermath of his college arrest, trial and by-a-hair's-breadth acquittal for conspiracy to murder a fellow "activist" who was actually an undercover federal informant. Jay's harrowing experience at 21 killed his spirit, the passion he once felt for "the cause" of black activism reduced to little more than picking sides. And the people on the side Jay has picked favor hard work over protest, business suits over dashikis, and making money playing by the new rules of the Reagan era. And while Jay notes wryly that money is the "new Jim Crow," he wants in on the game in the worst way.

Jay's middle-class rule book gets kicked to the curb when he and Bernie hear a cry for help and gunshots coming from somewhere across the bayou. At his wife's insistence, Jay dives into the water, and drags out someone who has jumped -- or was pushed. The victim turns out to be a white woman. She is unharmed but her mute presence is an implicit danger to Jay, who, knowing "firsthand the long, creative arm of Southern law enforcement," drops her like a bad habit at the nearest police station.