A mixed-race crusader takes on the lynch mobs

The Moon in Our Hands

By Thomas Dyja

CARROLL & GRAF; 354 Pages; $25

"The Moon in Our Hands" is based on the true story of civil rights crusader Walter White, an assistant field secretary of the nascent NAACP and the great-grandson of President William Henry Harrison. In 1918, White began a career investigating lynchings. Typically, he posed as a traveling salesman to befriend locals, sniff out details and bring perpetrators of racial crimes to justice.

Eight race riots and 41 lynchings later, White went on become a Harlem Renaissance novelist, win a Guggenheim, help negotiate publishing deals for Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and challenge Hollywood's simplistic images of blacks. But though he was a contemporary of W.E.B. Du Bois, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson, this early civil rights activist has been largely shoved aside by history. His story is virtually unknown.

White had blond hair, blue eyes and was 1/32 black. He passed for white among whites, but was often identified as black by fellow Negroes, according to Dyja. White's charm and quick wits allowed him to infiltrate small Southern towns like Sibley Springs. Dyja's story begins as White takes the train from New York City to the sleepy backwater, where, following a deadly shootout involving whites, a black man has been burned alive at the stake and his body parts ravaged for souvenirs by the crowd of onlookers.

To get to Sibley Springs, White must cross "The Line" just below Washington, D.C., where "another nation called The South began, and now three hundred years of its white voodoo fluttered curtains on the back porch of every passenger's mind. ... " Using Southern names like Nip, Ludey and Booney, Dyja's novel could be accused of stereotyping. Fortunately, the portraits of local whites and blacks don't fit any easy molds. Character flaws emerge from both sides of the racial divide. Even White, despite his admirable goals and the personal safety he risked, is not presented as the most likable character. Arrogant, judgmental, vainglorious, half the time White looks down his nose at the people he meets; the rest of the time he fantasizes about his own fame as a savior.

Dyja takes full advantage of his protagonist's name, "White," to explore the complexities and conundrums of this man haunted by both races coursing through his blood. He's equally disgusted with his black and white identities. Like a ghost, White can move between both worlds. From folk tales of Brer Rabbit/Fox/Bear switching skins to the simple act of White drinking his morning coffee, Dyja adeptly weaves the hauntings of skin tone into nearly every scene. "It was still coffee with milk in it, but if he kept going, at a certain point it would become milk with coffee in it. What would he call it then?"

Narrated in the third person, the novel sticks closely to White's eyes, the events and characters of Sibley Springs unfolding as he makes his investigation. Dyja's analysis of the town residents is cunning. Much of the novel is the protagonist's own ruminations: how to behave in the presence of rednecks or sharecroppers, or how to read who knows his true identity and purpose. Via White's perspective, we see behind the unspoken truces, petty rivalries and deep-seed rot of this desperate and glum little town. An early scene in which White first meets and sizes up the local rednecks at the country store is a literary tour-de-force of character insight and human motivation.

Structurally, "The Moon in Our Hands" has the heft and arc of a thriller and all the requisite end-of-chapter cliffhangers to keep the reader flipping pages. On the trail of events narrated almost as they happen, the entire book takes place in three days. Even the private-eye point of view -- "he'd find everyone and solve everything as if he were some Negro Sherlock Holmes" -- is reminiscent of potboiler crime fiction. Occasionally letting the temptations of genre get the better of him, Dyja errs in artificially heightening the drama where understatement would have served him better.

But overall, this ominous and richly layered novel rises far above the conventional historical whodunit. The trustworthy voice, painterly prose and meaty description pack a wallop. The book is ultimately a telling indictment of the dangers of first impressions. In "The Moon in Our Hands,'' there is always more than meets the eye -- a notion that White spent his whole life upholding.