Naomi Dawn Musch

Overview:

     A young black student has been raped and beaten on a Midwestern campus. When Sally Stevens, a teacher at the college, offers to continue tutoring the shattered young woman, Sally's own childhood secrets rise like swamp mist to smother and strangle her marriage and career. Who is innocent, who is guilty, and who is dead, play out across time and social status in Patti Lacy's novel What the Bayou Saw, published by Kregel.

Looking Closer:

     Patti has a deft touch when it comes to tying the threads of past and present together in this story where long-time prejudices of the deep south cross the mason-Dixon line. I've read, watched, or studied the civil rights movement most of my life. Yet, having grown up about as far from a Louisiana bayou as one can live, I've never really felt the reality of it. But Patti's book struck an emotional core that is the very reason I read historical fiction. It made the time and place real to me. It gave me a more insightful view of what it might have been like to be part of that turbulent period than almost anything I've read before.

     Getting to know the characters in What the Bayou Saw is a lot like meeting real people. You get to know them gradually. That's because Patti Lacy's characters are skillfully layered, multi-dimensional people, not cut-outs like those in a “Lipton cup-a-story”. I found that I didn't always like the protagonist(s) in Patti's story, but that was okay. I still cared about them. Again, they were real. Writers who want to create a populace that seems real should study Patti's model, and let the characters grow and develop out of the situations that they find themselves in. In this way the reader comes to know them gently, making judgments, occasionally wrong ones, just as we do with actual people we meet every day.

     At any rate, a reader would have to be truly hard-hearted not to be touched by this genuinely moving story, and writers would have to be hard-headed not to be inspired by Patti Lacy's skill.