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Landscape of Fear

Kate Betterton’s novel, Where the Lake Becomes the River, opens with a metaphorical snake in the grass. “Mama’s like a woman hosting a garden party and there’s a coiled copperhead about to strike her foot through her dye-matched slipper, but she either can’t see it, or she’d rather be bitten than make a scene.” It is an apt opening for a novel that is full of snakes, sometimes reptilian, sometimes human, always threatening. Only the snakes that drive the plot in this 2008 Novello Literary Award-winning debut novel are not hidden. There is no grass. In a novel that unfolds as the Civil Rights movement migrates through the Mississippi Delta, it is easy to understand why. The overtly threatening characters (several KKK members, their police officer lackeys, a murderer, an arsonist/thief/heartbreaker) make no attempt to hide their power or their identity. To depict them as snakes in the grass would be historically inaccurate. Still, they function in much the same way the real reptiles inhabit the story. Snakes and snapping turtles literally coil themselves around the characters and imbue the landscape with fear. As suddenly as the reptiles appear, and as inexplicably, they recoil and move on. These snakes are around to lend a threatening backdrop to the story, but when they intersect with the characters, getting rid of them is so simple that they lose their ability to frighten. When the narrator, Parrish McCullough, stands up to the police that follow her around or confronts the KKK grand dragon who she believes planted a bomb on a school bus, she simply speaks her mind and leaves without any complex consequences. Even the deep-seated racism, which seems inseparable from any depiction of the Delta during the years leading up to desegregation, makes only a handful of cameo appearances before it is dismissed. When the main character’s mother, a white woman, asks one of her children to wash the dishes used by a black character “extra well” because “he didn’t grow up the same and he might not be careful about things,” she is cross-examined and seven lines later, apologizes. “I was wrong to say that; it was unfair. I guess I got it from my grandparents.”