Title: The Avenue, Clayton City
First published: 1988
Description: The lives, dreams, triumphs, and tragedies of a group of characters center around a mythical avenue in a mythical southern town, in a portrait of the South just prior to World War II. The Avenue in C. Eric Lincoln’s fictional town is the principal residential street of the black community in Clayton City, a prototypical southern town languishing between the two world wars. Unpaved and marked by ditches full of frogs, snakes, and empty whiskey bottles on one side of town, it is the same street, though with a different name, that originates downtown. Only when it reaches the black section of Clayton City do the paving stop and the trash-filled ditches begin. On one side, it provides a significant address for the white people who live there. On the other, despite its rundown air, it is still the best address available to the town’s black population. Some of them, in fact, are willing to go to any extreme, including murder, to get there.
Subjects: Fiction, Race relations, Working class, City and town life, Fiction, general, Southern states, fiction, Fiction, family life, general
Places: Southern States