Both Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992), by Bebe Moore Campbell
and Wolf Whistle, by Lewis Norton (1993) take their inspiration
from the 1955 death of Emmett
Till, a black teenager from Chicago who was murdered for allegedly
making sexual advances to a white female while visiting relatives in
Money, Mississippi. After a jury acquitted two white men of the brutal
slaying, one of the accused bragged of his involvement to the national
media.
| Bebe Moore Campbell, an African American, won a NAACP Image Award for Your Blues Ain't Like Mine,
which examines the effects of her fictional version of the tragedy upon the lives of
the victim's family, the murderers, and other characters over the course of thirty years. Read an excerpt from an interview with Bebe Moore Campbell. |
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Lewis Nordan, a white male attending high school in Mississippi at the time of Emmett
Till's death, has placed that violent episode at the epicenter of a fantastical
fable of magical realism wherein animals speak and angels roam the Delta landscape.
Wolf Whistle was an American Library Association Notable Book and won the Mississippi Authors'
Award for Fiction and the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
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Read excerpts from Nordan's essay "Growing Up White in the South".