Book Review: Well Considered
by Richard Morris
Publication Date: Feb 15, 2010
List Price: $17.95
Format: Paperback, 292 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781450203883
Imprint: iUniverse
Publisher: Author Solutions
Parent Company: Najafi Companies
Read a Description of Well Considered
Book Reviewed by Robert Fleming
Some critics have often said white authors cannot capture the soul and
passion of African American characters, but that is not the case with
Richard Morris’s aptly titled novel of race, hate, eugenics, and violence.
Morris (Cologne No. 10 For Men) takes the tortured memory of a lynching of a Black man,
Thomas Phillips, killed by a white mob in 1907 in Maryland and places it
front and center in the mind of a contemporary man, Ron Watkins, his
great-grandson. After learning the sordid details of the race crime, Ron
seeks to unravel the facts of the murder of his elder.
His family, relocated from Oakland, California to the D.C. area, knows the
vicious, subterranean venom of prejudice running just below the veneer of
civility. Mr. Morris, a white man, has been looking and listening to all of
the nuances of modern life, especially the joys and disappointments of Black
culture and history. Through Ron, he examines the fear, insecurity, and
potency of the American Black man, which some of our authors dismiss as just
cheap machismo, gangsta posturing, and emotional shallowness. But Morris
also creates the customary white bigot, Jimmy Clay, a son of the Confederacy
and a Neo-Nazi with predictable gusto and demonic Gestapo rage. Peerless
narrative point and counterpoint.
Mr. Jimmy Clay, sometimes speaking like hate rabble-rousers Rush Limbaugh
and Glenn Beck, addresses the white fears of the post-Obama era in this
fictional Eastern state: "Goddamned uppity niggers, coming in here acting
like they own the country, wearing their white shirts and ties, and dressing
up in suits, and driving their big black SUVs…Buying them big, fancy houses,
moving in their little black monkeys, coming into the stores and bars and
restaurants and movies. They’re the problem. They don’t know how to act.
Don’t know what it’s like. They don’t know their place."
Yes, Ron explores some of the bitter, disgusting segments of the Black
history, but the lynchings completely underscore the vitality and strength
of our ancestors. The writer looks favorably on the spice and spunk of our
families, our husbands and wives, as they make their way bravely into the
white world. When he probes the race killing deeper, he finds that his
current situation mirrors the one endured by his great-grandfather decades
earlier. In fact, Jimmy Clay, with his horny kinfolk Annie, is living in the
house where Ron’s elder used to reside. Ron has a yen for the suggestive
Annie and changes his running routine to trot past her home. Jimmy and his
boys spy on the Black man, eventually assault and toss him in a deserted
well. The book asks some important questions: Is it possible to right a
historic wrong? Is prejudice a part of human nature? And what is the remedy
for hate?
With on-target commentary or race, sex, crime, family, social and gender
issues, and mob violence, Well Considered is a profoundly memorable and
affecting novel of an African American man trying to come to grips with the
hate-filled past and the poisonous divisive present.