The Vain Conversation by Anthony Grooms

Abstract

CLA JOURNAL 129 Grooms,Anthony.The Vain Conversation. University of South Carolina Press,2018. 239 pp. ISBN: 978-1-61117-882-1. $27.99 Hardcover. The Vain Conversation is the second “race” novel of Anthony Grooms, an awardwinning Kennesaw State University literature professor. It chronicles thirty-seven years in the life of Lonnie Henson, a poor white southerner, from the time he witnesses at eight years of age the horrifying lynching of four black individuals—Bertrand Johnson and Luellen, his wife; and Jimmy and Jewel Mae, his pregnant wife—until his retributive killing three decades later of Noland Jacks, one of the murderers. As historical fiction, The Vain Conversation gains its impetus from the 1946 lynching of two black couples in Walton County, Georgia. In his intriguing novel, Grooms locates the lynching of his black characters in Talmaedge County (Grooms adds an “e” to his county’s name), a fictional region with an assumed etymology of Eugene Talmadge, a three-time segregationist governor of Georgia alleged to have sanctioned the reallife murders in Walton. The argument in The Vain Conversation is that the horrors of racism result from useless talk between people reciprocally dependent on each other. Reclaiming African Americans’ lynching history, Grooms brilliantly develops his argument of unprofitable intra-racial and interracial communication through the common thread of antithetical characters, contrary settings, and opposing themes. Grooms’ argument is not original, but it is sound as he develops a compromised, race-related communication between poor and better-off whites, between white men and black men, and between men and women. Lonnie Henson, the protagonist, effectively proves the point that Grooms makes. In the innocence and naiveté of childhoodandpoverty,Lonnieispittedagainstthemoreeconomicallythreateningwhite segregationists who misinterpret his information as an assault on white womanhood after he relates news of Bertrand’s kindly helping the destitute widow Mrs. Henson. As an adult during the 1960s black consciousness movement, Lonnie communicates with blacks and is misinterpreted. His relating to a black male cook his adoration for Bertrand is misunderstood as a need for homosexual love. Lonnie’s confiding in Aza X, his African American girlfriend, about Bertrand is viewed as an opportunistic means for her to seek slavery reparations from Lonnie. No progress exists in the conversations among this divisive mix of characters. However, Grooms has appropriately endowed Lonnie with courage and vulnerability, requisites for beginning genuine conversations about race. In Lonnie, Grooms has created a unique white male attempting to enter into amicable and serious dialogue about race, making him an unparalleled character in contemporary African American literature. The novel’s opposing settings affirm that racial misunderstanding is timeless and widespread. The expansive bucolic setting in 1940s Talmeadge County suggests a peaceful and protected existence, yet white segregationists utilize the land as a provision for human sustainability and as a site to carry out inhumane violence against their misunderstood black neighbors. Conversely, small, man-made places in the 1960s Pacific region to which economically oppressed blacks have been confined contribute to blacks’ insensitivity toward Lonnie’s race-related distress and to their Book Reviews 130 CLA JOURNAL desire for vengeance against the white man’s historic injustice. Whether depicting the black cook’s cramped quarters below deck on the USS Bennington (an evocation of the trans-Atlantic slave ship) or Lonnie’s unemployed black girl friend’s tiny onebedroom apartment in San Francisco (symbolic of blacks’ economic disadvantage, even outside the South), Grooms succeeds in revealing the hopelessness of America’s race relations resulting from unresolved social, political, economic, and educational differences. In so situating the conversation about race, the author astutely manifests that the ugliness of whites’ behavior in Talmeadge County shames the fertile beauty of the place and that the retaliatory behavior of blacks against whites in the Pacific region keeps America’s democracy in the throes of racism. More importantly, Grooms forces his readers to pause and think about their own accountability for poor race relations due to miscommunication in any setting. In presenting how miscommunication between the races is often negatively resolved, The Vain Conversation explores two opposing yet interrelated themes— murder fails to guarantee personal satisfaction, and revenge is no justification for murder. Blinded by arrogance and anger, murderers often...