Tuesday evening in downtown Eatonton (Oct. 11), the Georgia Writers Museum will host a “Meet the Author” session with John Pruitt, who will discuss his first book, Tell it True, A Novel.
If the author’s name seems familiar, it should be, at least to anyone who’s watched Atlanta television news in the last 50 years or so. First as a reporter and then as an anchor, mostly with WSB-TV, the state’s dominant local station, Pruitt gave us perceptive interviews on all manner of stories, though Georgia’s and Atlanta’s politics proved to be his bread-and-butter.
Some caveats are due here, as it relates to what follows. Which is to say, I may not be the typical reader.
One, as of this writing, I have not finished reading Tell It True, which came in the mail only a few days ago. However, I am impressed so far.
Two, I knew Pruitt, as they say, “back in the day.”
We went our separate ways, yet both wound up in the same general profession and lived through the same momentous changes in the South and the nation. I took a natural interest in John’s progress through the Atlanta TV ranks, and it was easy to follow, given the powerhouse role that television came to play in all our lives.
Three, as a print reporter mainly covering government and politics for an Athens newspaper, I shared some of the same duties and interests. More specifically, over time I became aware of small details involving what would become the central event in Pruitt’s book: the July 1964 pre-dawn assassination of Lemuel Penn (“Jarvis Pendry” in the book), because he was Black and had a Maryland license plate, as he and two other Army Reservists hurried home through the back roads of Madison County not 25 miles from Athens.
Back to Pruitt. This book is a novel, plainly stated as such on the cover. Yet it comes filled with characters and places and dialogue that may—or may not—pass as thinly-veiled versions of reality. If the reader is old enough to know the setting and real-life characters for the story, part of the challenge comes in trying to figure out how thin the veil may be.
Tell It True begins with a lightly fictional account of the murder of Pendry, followed by several short chapters introducing the cast of characters and their conflicting responses: journalists, national and local; lawmen, sheriffs and FBI; civil rights leaders, easy-as-she-goes elder statesmen and do-it-now youths; politicians, deal-cutting moderates and fire-breathing segregationists; New South boosters.
In one chapter, a black leader admonishes a young reporter to “tell it true.” In another, it is a white man at a segregationist gubernatorial rally who tells the reporter to “tell it true.”
Also, this book is not a memoir, despite the hero and heroine sprinkling the story with the mid-1960s challenges and procedures dealt with by a young television reporter and a largely anonymous AP print reporter.
Neither is it a history book, though it is firmly rooted in a specific north Georgia murder and the unfolding of the various conflicts outside–and inside–the broader civil rights movement that marked the spirit of the times. Zeitgeist, the Germans call it.
A couple of problems emerge that make a “novel” perhaps the most engaging way for new audiences to experience the events of the mid-1960s. For some of us who have more gray hair than we care to admit, those times are a part of our life experience. However, in 2022, two generations are pretty much gone from us, while Georgia’s population has doubled–a million new faces in the last census alone.
For newcomers and younger natives alike, Georgia in the ‘60s is getting to be ancient history and thus, almost by definition, irrelevant.
Yet, echoes of the same problems remain today.
As I see it, we learn in two ways, in our heads and in our gut. And our gut–our emotional life– typically rules the way we work through daily life. By creating characters and problems we can identify with, a skilled novelist may be able to help us figure out some different paths with our heads.