'THE PERSIA CAFE' | A review Segregation and murder form core of southern novel

By ROB STOUT
SPECIAL TO THE VINDICATOR
& quot;The Persia Caf & eacute;, & quot; by Melany Neilson (St. Martin's Press, $23.95).
The American south, with Mississippi as its ideological and geographic center, has long been explored in some of the nation's most profound fiction. While certain aspects of the southern experience will remain forever infamous in our nation's history, the literature it spawned continues to possess a grip on the American psyche that shows little sign of letting go.
Writers such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Shelby Foote learned to master this dark allure in their work, and the & quot;tragic fable of southern history, & quot; as Faulkner himself so referred, has not been lost on its latest generation of fictioneers -- Charles Frazier, Josephine Humphreys and Jeffrey Lent -- to name a few.
Now comes Melany Neilson, who's 1989 "Even Mississippi," an account of two race-baiting congressional campaigns waged against Robert Clark, a black incumbent bidding to break Mississippi's congressional color barrier, garnered a number of literary awards, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination.
Race: Race and transformation are again the focal points of her first piece of fiction, & quot;The Persia Caf & eacute;. & quot;
It is the summer of 1962, and we find the quiet town of Persia, a wonderfully rendered piece of the Old South, about to be stripped of the Jim Crow laws that defined Mississippi's strict social order for over a century.
As told by Fannie Leary, who, along with her husband Will, runs the town's only restaurant, we are reminded that miscegenation (or any type of social discourse between males and females of the two races) was an offense met with rough, often capital, punishment. Such is the case in the opening pages when a black grocery store clerk named Earnie March becomes involved with the white Sheila Jones. Earnie soon mysteriously vanishes from the town.
Federal authorities: But two years later, when Earnie's body is seen floating in a nearby stream (coincidentally by Fannie), things have changed, and now federal authorities begin visiting Persia and asking questions.
Suddenly, Will disappears after being implicated with several of the caf & eacute;'s customers, then Sheila and her family disappear, leaving Fannie to run the restaurant and under the scrutiny of two FBI agents assigned to the case. Ultimately, it is Fannie who crosses an equally dangerous color line by deciding to cooperate with the agents, who are looked upon with hostility by the now polarized town.
For her, complacency recedes into doubt, then quickly turns to a willful determination to do the right thing even at the expense of her own personal safety.
Fannie's development from a simple figure whose life revolves around baking pies to & quot;a girl who saw the world one way then saw it another & quot; is not unlike that of the author's own youth in the staunchly segregated town of Ebenezer, Mississippi, where & quot;white was white and black was black. & quot;
Neilson's personal experiences have left her with both a lush descriptiveness of small town life and a mastery of dialogue that keeps the novel from falling into many of the morality lessons that are all too common in such stories.
From its first short sentence, & quot;Caf & eacute; & quot; is a disturbingly beautiful piece of writing that sustains an emotional power through to its epilogue.