The novel
Unburdened by Midnight
A forthcoming novel by Samantha Bebb. One summer and the dark that follows it, on the Alabama Gulf.
- Title
- Unburdened by Midnight
- Author
- Samantha Bebb
- Form
- Novel
- Set
- Rural Gulf Coast Alabama, 1955
- Protagonist
- Reza, newly arrived from Iran
- Status
- Forthcoming
The year is not scenery. Through the summer and into the winter of 1955, the South was already arguing — in public and at kitchen tables — about who could sit, ride, study, and live beside whom.
The county had its own work. Sand roads. Longleaf pine. Pecan trees planted by people who would not live to harvest them. Screened porches, and the same law as the rest of Alabama.
Reza arrives into that. He is not a lesson walked through a postcard. The wars came with him, and they do not need a haint to keep their hours. Not everything that haunts the living is supernatural.
Some of it is. Haints in the moss. A winged thing older than the pines, which does not explain itself. A box the ground was supposed to keep shut. What was laid in it has noticed the county.
The sheriff is the law, and he wears a tattoo this county already knows how to read. He can see justice. He is kept from doing it. The badge does not get him through that door. What Reza is allowed to see, whom he is allowed to stand beside, and what the road will do after the courthouse has gone home: that is the book.
It is not yet in print. There is no excerpt here that pretends to be the manuscript. When the book is ready, the people on the list will hear it first.
The wars
An Iranian newcomer in a rural Gulf county in 1955 would have been rare, and watched. What the wars left in him does not wait for a ghost. The novel stays inside that watching — his, and theirs.
The line
Jim Crow is not atmosphere. Schools, buses, churches, and the courthouse steps were sorted by law. So was love. The book does not look away to make the county prettier.
The sheriff
He has the badge, and a tattoo the county reads whether he offers it or not. Being the law is not the same as being allowed to see justice done.
What walks
Haints, yes. Also a winged thing that is not of these trees, and something a lid was meant to finish. Midnight is when they notice the living.