Guardian by Julius Lester Page B

for that idea to gestate.
    I wrote a seventy-five page treatment of the movie I envisioned about the white boy at a lynching. The producer read it, but his mind was set on a movie about a lynching from the perspective of blacks. There was no creative challenge for me in writing that story. I felt like it had been done, and I wasn’t interested in writing something that would enable whites to shed crocodile tears for blacks.
    The producer and I parted company amiably. Oddly I did not sit down immediately and begin work on this novel. I put the treatment in a folder and forgot about it.
    I can’t recall what happened, but five years later the treatment I had done came to mind. I read it over, sat down, and began this book.
    It may seem odd for me to say that the book came very easily. But it did. It was as if the characters had been waiting for me, and characters I had not thoughtof presented themselves with their stories. Zeph Davis was a complete surprise, and the scene under the bridge in which he kills the frog came to me so easily that I was uncomfortable being in such proximity to my “inner sociopath.”
    While the subject matter is a lynching, on a deeper level, this is a novel about identity. Whom and what we identify ourselves with determines our characters, determines who we are, and what we do. Whose opinion matters to you the most? When you know that, when you know whom it is you most care about pleasing, you know who you are. We make choices every day that shape the content of our characters.
    Lynchings can take many forms. The one described here is only more dramatic.
    Unfortunately, the use of nooses as threats to blacks has become a cruel metaphor of our times. Over the past ten years, “about a dozen noose incidents a year came to the attention of civil rights groups,” according to an op-ed article in the New York Times (November 25, 2007). That number escalated after an incident in Jena, Louisiana, where nooses were hung from a tree at the high school.
    In 2007, there were between fifty and sixty nooseincidents—a black foreman at an ironworking plant in Pittsburgh found a hangman’s noose at his work area; a black professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College found a noose hanging from the doorknob of her office. Noose incidents were reported in Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Florida, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Connecticut.
    According to a 2005 Justice Department study, more than 190,000 hate crimes are reported every year. The Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of hate groups has risen by 40 percent, going from 602 groups in 2000 to 844 in 2006.
    As much as many would like to believe that racism in America is on the wane, the truth is that in the hearts of some, it is, but in the hearts of all too many others, racism is not only not declining, it is acquiring new life.
    Because of this country’s history, a hangman’s noose cannot be benign. It is a metaphor for a form of terrorism that touches every black life. Indeed, in 2008 an announcer on the Golf Channel was suspended for saying that young golfers who wanted to challenge Tiger Woods should “lynch him in a back alley.”Her comment was meant as a joke, but there is no humor to be found in lynching.
    On February 11, 2008, at a ceremony commemorating African-American History Month, President George Bush said, “The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice. Displaying one is not a harmless prank. And ‘lynching’ is not a word to be mentioned in jest. As a civil society, we should be able to agree that noose displays and lynching jokes are deeply offensive. They are wrong. And they have no place in America today.”
    It is my conviction that the racial divides in the United States will not be overcome until lynchings of all kinds are as painful to nonblacks as they are to