From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary
reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in
Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freshwater Road has
been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights
Movement. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years
for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice
Walker and Ernest J. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting
this era.
When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to
Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she's assigned
to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best
known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier.
As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of
the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and
the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner
strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable
lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her
adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. All the
while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and
her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in
Mississippi for the summer.
By summer's end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the
questions that preoccupy her--about violence and nonviolence, about
race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family
bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an
unforgettable story that--more than ten years after first appearing in
print--continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights
fiction.
