It is the Freedom Summer of 1964. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner have gone missing. Celeste Tyree, a black student at Michigan who grew up in Detroit has gone to be a voting rights volunteer in Mississippi at the urgings of her white boyfriend, J.D.The novel takes us inside the realities of Sixties racism in Mississippi. The town to which Celeste is assigned has had a lynching within the last five years. While training in Jackson, she is harassed while distributing leaflets and arrested for littering. En route to Pineyville, where she will work, her male driver, Matt, is stopped, searched and beaten by the Highway Patrol while she cringes in fear inside the car. Early on, the home she is staying in on Freshwater Road is fired into in the beginning of the night. She is clearly not welcome.This is also a kind of Freedom Summer for Celeste. She left for Mississippi without telling her father, Shuck, except by letter which arrived after she left. In the course of the summer she confronts the complicated relationship between her mother and father and has to decide how she will cope with a revealing letter from her mother Wilamena.Equally, she faces the choice between fear and leading a civil rights effort among the residents of Pineyville, working with the courageous children who attended Freedom Schools and the adults who attempted to register to vote. The tension of the novel increases as events move toward the group of six's attempt to register to vote.The book chronicles a journey into adulthood that not only faces the reality of racial prejudice but also the flawed human nature within her own community. Confronting domestic violence and marital infidelity and the limits of what people sometimes are able to do about these things faces her with choices about how she will deal with her own complicated family life.This novel worked at several levels for me. It opened my eyes further to the vitriolic racism that is a recent memory for many blacks, and still a present reality. It also gave an account of flawed and courageous people facing hard realities. While there are themes of sexuality and violence, these are handled with restraint. Indeed, the narrative "voice" of this novel had a quietness and steadiness that allowed the unfolding tensions of the novel to create their own drama. I understand this is the author's first novel. All that I read here suggests an author of great promise.
Celeste Tyree has led a somewhat privileged life. Having grown up in Detroit she is now a sophomore at the University of Michigan. The daughter of a prominent business owner, she has never experienced the hard life that some young black people have. Celeste thinks she knows what life is all about. But it is the summer of 1964 and the situation in Mississippi has begun to heat up. The Summer of Freedom draws Celeste to the small Mississippi town of Pineyville.With orientation in Jackson, Celeste quickly learns that she doesn’t know “what it’s like to be black” and that the white volunteers understand more about the rules that blacks must follow just to survive.Pineyville proves to be the biggest challenge of Celeste’s young life. Houses are little more than shacks with outdoor plumbing and outhouses. People don’t trust the northern intruder. Will the Freedom School that she is to run attract any students? Will any of the residents attend the voter registration classes? Will Celeste make it until August when she is scheduled to return to Detroit?I enjoyed this audio book. The writing was outstanding and I felt a connection with Celeste. I do not pretend to know what it was like for the black community in 1964 Mississippi as I’m a white woman born several years later in Ohio. The only situation that may compare is if I were to travel to a country where women are suppressed. Would I have the courage to travel to that country and help educate women to fight for their rights? Personally, I think I’m too strong willed and opinionated to control myself in situations that they find themselves in daily. But I felt myself there next to Celeste as she “Yes sir”-ed and “No sir”-ed her way through the summer.It’s a pretty good chance that this will end up in my reread pile. Freshwater Road has earned a 4 on my bookometer.
Do You like book Freshwater Road (2006)?
It was the summer of 1964- Freedom Summer. Nineteen-year-old Celeste Tyree traveled to Jackson, Mississippi to teach Negroes in Freedom School and to help with voter registration. She was assigned to work in Pineyville, Mississippi. As she rode with one of the other volunteers on her way to this small town, she began to think that the civil rights movement she chose to become a part of wasn’t what she had expected – young students, Negro and white, risking their lives for what was right - but she soon learned how serious it was. Meanwhile, Shuck, her father, was back home in Detroit dealing with the decision his daughter had made.At times there was too much detail in the description of settings. There were also parts that would have had a bigger impact if characters more clearly expressed their emotions. For instance, there was a funeral.There was one character who hurt more than anyone else who attended, but it wasn’t written in a way that helped me to really “feel” her pain. Minor flaws aside, Denise Nicholas does have a way with words. I found myself reading certain sentences more than once, I liked them so much. Freshwater Road takes the African-American reader back to a time a lot of us would rather not think about, but it’s such an important part of our history – the courageous people who came before us, putting their lives on the line in an attempt to achieve social equality- that it would serve us well to reflect on occasion so that we never forget to be thankful for how far we’ve come.
—Katrina Burchett
This book was such a mixed bag for me. There were parts that were wonderfully written, the descriptions of the racism during Freedom Summer, and the fear the volunteers felt seemed very true to me, and therefore was very moving. However there were parts of the book that I was just like blah, blah, blah there is no point. The whole situation with Celeste maybe not being her father's child, but rather the product of an affair her mother had... why even put that in this book. Same with the romance
—Jenee Rager
This was a powerful historical novel about working to register black voters in Mississippi in 1964- where I am happy to say I have never lived. What a deplorable place to have lived if you were black in the early 60s.Blacks had to cross the street when approaching a white on the sidewalk. If a child died, there was no ivestigation. The blacks had no doctors, dentists and were beaten, raped, killed without any punishment to a white.I can't imagine how they survived in Mississippi. Other southern states were bad, but no to the extent Mississippi was. I still marvel at how much they had to overcome to achieve equality. A well written, engrossing book that brings to life a dark time in our history.
—Linda Appelbaum
