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River Rising
By Athol Dickson
Bethany House, 2005. 304 pages.
Reviewed by Christy Risser-Milne
According to the author’s bio on the web, Athol Dickson’s novels “have yet to receive a bad review.” As far as this review goes, his record remains unblemished. This is a difficult story, and not one that I expected to come from the evangelical Christian publishing stronghold that is Bethany House. I commend them as a house for taking on this atypical (for them) novel.
In that neverland where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, Hale Poser arrives. The year is 1927. Poser comes to the town of Pilotville, Lousiana looking for work, looking for his past, looking for something he can’t quite name. An orphan who grew into a minister, Poser is a “Negro” who has discovered that his heritage is somehow linked to this town that is accessible only by boat.
Early in the book, we see Poser perform what seem to be miracles. He finds ripe persimmons where none are supposed to grow. Through his touch and prayer, an unborn baby who was coming out a very wrong way turns and is born as normally as can be. He stands equidistant to the Negro church and the White church and by praying and pulling on unseen forces, the two disparate congregations sing in unity for a breathless moment.
Others call him a miracle worker. He doesn’t see it that way. He just asks God, and things happen. Dickson weaves this story into a twist that comes when Poser goes off on his own into the endless Mississippi Delta region to find a kidnapped baby. Lost and dehydrated nearly to the point of death, Poser stumbles across a most unexpected place — a slave plantation. At least on this singular plantation, slavery is alive and well in 1927, and not a single slave knows that this is the only spot in the whole United States where the overseer’s whip still commands fear.
Himself now enslaved, Poser decides to perform more miracles, only to discover that they no longer work. He loses the one thing he still had that was his own: his faith. He tries to tell the slaves about freedom; about God. They don’t believe him. And they want no part of a world in which there is a multi-colored God.
To say more would ruin the story, but suffice it to say that this small novel held my attention from beginning to end. This is no earth-shattering work of fiction, but it is an excellent story told by one who loves words. Dickson provides all of the necessary words to create lush landscapes of cypress and water in the mind’s eye.
Everyone — black, white, or otherwise, ought to read this book, as it captures a unique snapshot of our history from a perspective not typically heard. The south in those days was the stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. Pilotville is presented as a strange oasis of apparent unity in the sea of racism that engulfs the region. But the apparent unity goes only so far. The townspeople may drink together, work together, laugh together, but they do not worship together. For Poser, this town is like a puzzle that is one piece short of completion. Dickson’s rendition of history is “true” in that sense in which good fiction doesn’t need to bother about “facts.”
All would-be prophets or miracle-workers should also read this book (as well as those who are skeptical of such things). For an “unabashed evangelical” (that bio again) to venture into the waters of doubting faith and the puffed-up sense of self had by most (if not all) TV preachers, is itself a kind of miracle.
I would surmise that Dickson could not have written this novel if he had not first written his non-fiction The Gospel According To Moses. Were it not for his lesson in questioning and learning not to fear the paradoxes of faith and God from his Jewish teachers, he would have been incapable of creating this story.
Managing waters just as treacherous as those of the Mississippi Delta, Dickson has given us a novel worth reading and pondering.
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