“When I turned 18, the first thing my mother told me is to go register to vote,” says Wanda M. Morris, whose latest mystery “Anywhere You Run,” tells the story of two sisters who are caught up in the tumultuous 1960s when Civil Rights workers were trying to help Blacks in the deep south exercise a right they’d been given over a century ago—being able to vote.
Marigold, the serious sister who dreams of being an attorney, is working for the Mississippi Summer Project, a 1964 voter registration drive attempting to increase the number of registered Black voters in her hometown of Jackson, when she discovers she’s pregnant. The father? A New York lawyer working for the project who skedaddles back home as soon as she tells him of her condition.
Her younger sister, Violet—the traffic-stopping beauty with lots of beaus—has always done exactly what she wants. Her father taught her how to use a shotgun and so she does, killing the man who brutally raped her. Always resourceful, she gets Dewey Leonard, the son of a rich white man, to run off with her. But Violet never plans on marrying him and once they’re out of Jackson, she steals his wallet and buys a ticket to visit her cousin in Chillicothe, Georgia. There she takes a new name and gets a job while determining what to do next.
Dewey isn’t about to let Violet go, not only because he’s obsessed with her but also because in his wallet is a photo of he and his father and several other White men standing over the grave of the three Civil Rights workers they’ve just murdered. He hires Mercer, a man who worked for his father to find her. His father ups the ante and promises Mercer more money to murder her. And so, the hunt is on.
Morris takes us to the time of Jim Crow, where Blacks in southern states lived in fear and were denied the rights that most of us take for granted. This is the world Morris’s parents were raised in.
“They’re both from Alabama,” says Morris. “And so I heard stories. My parents told me about how they had to drink out of separate water fountains, go in the backdoor of restaurants, and how they couldn’t be caught in certain towns after dark. Those stories always rang in my head.”
Marigold, in her desperation, has married a long time admirer, hoping to pass off the baby she’s expecting as his. Together they move to Cleveland but the relationship turns sour quickly. Her new husband has big dreams of owning a nightclub and expects Marigold to support him while he wiles away his time. After he beats her, she decides to join Violet in Chillicothe. What she doesn’t realize is that she’s leading Mercer, the man Dewey hired, directly to her sister.
“I wanted to put the reader right there, jab smack in the middle of what it felt like to just try and live your life, to try and work, to try and raise a family and having to live with all this vulnerability and hatred,” says Morris.
To create the ambience of the time, Morris dove deep into the era, reading stacks of vintage magazines and newspapers, listening to music of that era, and spending lots of time in the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta, Georgia where she lives.
The book works on so many levels—as a mystery and thriller and also as an introduction to what it was like living in a world of racial injustice. Saying a book is page-turner is often a cliché. But in the case of “Anywhere You Run,” it’s totally true.
This article originally appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.
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