Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke review compelling Texas noir

A black Texas Ranger questions his loyalties when he probes the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son

Heaven, My Home is the second instalment in Attica Locke’s Highway 59 series, hard-boiled crime novels in which the crime doubles as the mechanism by which the state of race relations in the US is laid bare. Texas Ranger Darren Matthews, who was introduced in 2018’s Bluebird, Bluebird, is in many ways a classic noir protagonist. His own mother is blackmailing him; he’s in constant danger of “falling off the cliff of his own morality”; his marriage and sobriety are teetering on the same edge. But in Locke’s brand of noir, Matthews also happens to be a black cop for whom black lives matter, grappling with the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election and marvelling daily “with befuddled anger at what a handful of scared white people could do to a nation”. In a subplot carried over from Bluebird, Bluebird, he has landed himself in hot water after covering for an elderly black man suspected of murdering a racist petty criminal in the course of running him off his land because “his own read of history told him a black man should have the right to his own fear. Otherwise, he would forever be dying because of someone else’s.”

When Levi King, the nine-year-old son of an Aryan Brotherhood captain, vanishes on Caddo Lake in east Texas, the investigation brings Matthews to an enclave in Marion County named Hopetown, settled in the 19th century by a group of slaves who swam to freedom and still occupied by their descendants more than a century later: “part of a larger historical story of what black freedom looks like”. A band of squatters linked to the Brotherhood and led by Levi’s stepfather, Gil Adamson, have set up a ramshackle trailer park on its borders, and clashes between the rightful residents and these neo-Nazi interlopers with whom they are forced to live cheek by jowl have resulted in an uneasy standoff.

A seam of southern gothic runs through the novel: the swampy moss-wreathed lake that seems to have swallowed a boy whole, his mother’s febrile grief, the fading antebellum glory of the hotel where Matthews is put up by the local police force, allegedly haunted by a slave mistress who died by her own hands. But it’s men such as Adamson who are the real nightmare. When Matthews arrives at his home he refuses to allow him inside, unable to see past the black man to his badge: “I don’t give a shit ’bout the star on his chest.” He’s the kind of person whose toxic nostalgia has led him to flank his front door with racist figurines waving Confederate flags, and of whom Locke writes: “The country seemed to grow them in secret like a nasty fungal disease that spread in the dark places you don’t ever dare look.”

The action shifts between Hopetown and nearby Jefferson, where we encounter the quietly slapping water of the bayou as well as a thick, insidious bog of racism, and where the missing boy’s wealthy grandmother presides over the town behind a facade of gentility. Citing examples of black people she has welcomed into her home, she can get no further than her maid and her driver. The requisite plot thickener is supplied when it’s revealed that the last person to see Levi was a cantankerous black man named Leroy Page, Hopetown’s oldest resident, who periodically rustles up gun-toting horseback patrols as a kind of vigilante response to the encroaching threats. When the investigation inevitably narrows in on Page, the needle on Matthews’s wavering moral compass swings even more wildly, as he reckons with his own “blind spots when it came to black folks”, and his instinct to give Page the benefit of the doubt.

Heaven, My Home is a propulsive and compelling novel, worthy of comparisons to Walter Mosley. The story whips along towards a resolution so neat and tidy that it skates very close to cliche, but Locke’s exploration of Matthews’s predicament digs deep into the tension between “the impulse to police crimes against black life and to protect black life from police”. It is buttressed by passages of gorgeous lyricism, with loving, elegiac evocations of Texas set alongside extended meditations on displacement, reconciliation and forgiveness, and on what “home” means in a place where it’s an idea you can’t “exactly touch”. In some scenes there’s an old African American spiritual playing in the background, an anthem of resistance from which the novel takes its name: “I make heaven my home, I shall not be moved.” Locke suggests that being black in America has meant a constant, disorienting search for terra firma, fighting to claim some piece of the “fields and prairies that we once tilled until our backs broke and bled”, and that this feeling has returned with terrible urgency, or perhaps that it never left.

Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton is published by Penguin.Heaven, My Home is published by Serpent’s Tail (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaHJno5q9cH6PaJ%2Bemaaau2652GafqKWVYq%2B6ecCtq6KbkWK5sK%2FKnmSrnaaesrg%3D