She had no tears left in her.Īnd Luther, who had never touched a white woman before, who had never so much as brushed against one in a crowd, who had avoided even that incidental contact with a kind of bone-deep terror accessible only to a Negro man in the Deep South who grew up knowing all too well what messing with a white woman could get you, could only stand there, stricken and dumbfounded, as this woman pressed his hand to her cheek. It took Luther a moment to realize that she was crying, because her eyes remained dry, no water glistened on her cheek. Her face contorted into an expression of raw, utter sorrow and she made groaning sounds that did not seem quite human. She held his skin to hers, which was papery and thin, almost translucent. A woman - at least he thought it was a woman - took Luther's hand and lifted it to her cheek. They shook clasped hands toward heaven, they smiled terrible, toothless smiles, they looked up at the Negro soldiers like penitents gazing upon the very throne of God. They were little more than skeletons wearing rags of flesh.Īnd their eyes gleamed with a madness of joy, an insanity of deliverance, at the sight of the colored tankers. You could look at them and see where tibia met patella, count their ribs by sight.
Their mouths were drawn tight against their bony jaws. Their eyes were like small, frightened animals, peering out from the caverns their sockets had become. It was difficult to believe they were even human. Set against a backdrop of violent racial conflict on both the front lines and the home front, The Last Thing You Surrender explores the powerful moral struggles of individuals from a divided nation.The creatures swarmed the colored tankers. A black man, who as a child saw his parents brutally lynched, is conscripted to fight Nazis for a country he despises and discovers a new kind of patriotism in the all-black 761st Tank Battalion. A young black woman, widowed by the same events at Pearl Harbor, finds unexpected opportunity and a dangerous friendship in a segregated Alabama shipyard feeding the war. Pulitzer-winning journalist and best-selling author (Freeman) Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s new historical novel is a great American tale of race and war, following three characters from the Jim Crow South as they face the enormous changes World War II triggers in the United States.Īn affluent white marine survives Pearl Harbor at the cost of a black messman's life only to be sent, wracked with guilt, to the Pacific and taken prisoner by the Japanese. Could you find the courage to do what's right in a world on fire?
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