Living Jackson Magazine

The Race Before Us
A review by Susan Howard

There are all sorts of reasons to read this impressive first novel. For starters, you could read it for the pleasures offered by the writing. Wonderfully evocative, the prose never calls attention to itself. Instead it places you right in the midst of the action so that you can see, feel, smell, and sometimes even taste what’s going on. Because of the author’s pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, you can hear everything as if you were standing there. Far from getting in the way of the story, this writing delivers it directly to your heart.

But let’s say you don’t care one way or the other about fine writing. You could read The Race Before Us for the story it tells. You’ll never find a tale more engaging or more gripping. Its momentum is part seduction, part suspense; and once you’ve been drawn into the action, the suspense whisks you forward toward an ending which you sense will answer all of your questions and then tell you something that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

If you are acquainted with author Richard Hoard, or familiar with his writing or even just his reputation, you are aware when you embark on this novel that you’re in the hands of a born storyteller—one who had amassed a lifetime of material by the time he was in his late teens. The son of Floyd Hoard, the Jackson County solicitor who was murdered by car-bombing in 1967, Richard Hoard survived his father’s death and wrote a memoir about it, Alone Among the Living, which has become a classic and is still being reviewed, discovered and purchased by succeeding generations.

This storyteller also puts his narrative gifts to work in the pulpit, as a Methodist minister and in the classroom as a high school teacher. In fact, he acknowledges his students as sources of “the greatest encouragement” and adds, “We learned together about the writing of literature.” I can say with certainty that those students were learning with a highly skilled practitioner.

Still, let’s assume that you not only don’t care about elegant, understated writing, but you also don’t pick up a book just because someone says it’s suspenseful. Perhaps you prefer romance. If so, you’re in luck. As the subtitle of The Race Before Us indicates, this is a love story, actually a very good love story, clear-eyed and insightful about young love and its lasting impact, which is not always what you think it’s going to be. In fact, this may not be the love story you expect.

At its center are two teens, Tamara Collins and Jeff Powers, who arrive simultaneously in an area of rural Middle Georgia, and who come there from opposite ends of the social and economic spectrum and from opposite sides of a racial divide which, in the mid-1960s, is very pronounced. Jeff is there for one last summer of servitude, working on the family farm and helping out in his uncle’s country store. Tamara is there because she’s being shuttled from relative to relative until she can get old enough for the authorities to quit worrying about her. They already don’t worry nearly enough.

Jeff, a track star back home in Athens, has never run into anything like the kinds of trouble Tamara is far too accustomed to—she has already been raped at gunpoint just trying to get from the bus station to her cousin’s house—but he does have one thing going for him: parents who are on the side of the angels. This background pulls him through a summer fraught with surprise and terror as he tries to protect and help Tamara and risks his own life doing so. It pulls him through, but just barely.

If, like so many of us, you have willfully forgotten an aspect of life in the South that only really began to change 40 years ago, you have yet another reason to read The Race Before Us: You can read it for the history, for a reminder of how far we’ve come, how much we’ve had to get past, and how much forgiveness has been and still is required.

That may not sound like your favorite reason, but this element is yet another of the book’s surprises. It generously rewards the reader with a heroic coming-of-age journey, with a love story that opens out and elevates everyone involved in it, with an adventure tale of white-knuckle suspense that you’re not likely to forget, and with writing that sings and hums like the road beneath your tires when you’re traveling somewhere you really want to go and loving the trip. And as we all know, there is nowhere better for travel than the South.

Susan Howard is the librarian at Commerce Public Library and occasionally writes a column for The Commerce News.