A former lawyer and policy adviser in President Bill Clinton's administration, Paul Legler has turned to writing fiction. I hope his compelling second novel, "Half the Terrible Things," brings attention to him and to North Dakota State University Press.
An introductory note reads, "The large events involving the main character in this novel, Martin Tabert, are real." Legler bases the book on occurrences leading to Tabert's brutal death by whipping in 1922 at a convict labor camp, a tragedy that led to prison reform in Florida. At the camp halfway between Tallahassee and Tampa, "Palmetto trees grew on little hummocks rising above the stagnant brown water, the huge palmetto leaves interlacing overhead, darkening the scene, and endless water weeds tangling in confusion in the gloomy swamps."
Convicts fell cypress trees and build roads to haul out the lumber — dangerous, exhausting work. Before beating the men, often for no reason, T.W. Higginbotham, the sadistic whipping boss, pours syrup on a "long black strap … 'Black Aunty,' " then coats it with sand, making the lashes more painful.
In a letter to Tabert's father in Munich, N.D., a former prisoner wrote, "I could not tell you half of the terrible things that happened down there." For a time, Martin Tabert's death became a cause célèbre.
Legler includes in the book government and personal letters, affidavits, newspaper articles, folk songs, even Marjory Stoneman Douglas' protest poem "Martin Tabert of North Dakota," published in the New York World newspaper in 1923. Photographs appear throughout; one, for instance, identifies "Bailiff Daugherty during Whipping Boss trial, Cross City, Florida."
An engaging subplot concerns Martin's wooing of Edna Knutsen before he leaves the family farm to see the country. Now an elderly woman in a Devils Lake, N.D., nursing home, Edna asks her granddaughter to find Martin's grave. "Bring him back so he can rest in peace."
In another, perhaps less interesting subplot, the granddaughter, a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice, leaves her office with secret photos of an innocent Afghan tortured to death by the CIA after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Legler convincingly renders early-20th-century North Dakota farm life, a life not without beauty. The whooping cranes that Martin and Edna observe when they meet provide a lovely motif. After Martin's death and Edna's divorce from Torger Moen, she again finds succor in nature, in the "small pink prairie roses, yellow and orange coneflowers, wild sunflowers … the song of the meadowlark."
Dixie County, Fla., on the other hand, is dismal and stifling. Ironically, where T.W. Higginbotham whips Martin with Black Aunty, Torger beats Edna with a razor strop. In another irony, Legler explains that the Putnam Lumber Co. of St. Paul leased prisoners to work in the camp, work benefiting the company. Putnam's president and his daughter once lived in a Summit Avenue mansion, the daughter vacationing on Captiva Island, Fla.
As much as I admire Legler's evocation of time and place, its historical breadth alone is impressive, the novel has shortcomings. Legler often reports rather than dramatizes his material. The sudden change in the redneck sheriff, Jim Speckhauser, seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, this powerful book's strengths outweigh its weaknesses.
Anthony Bukoski lives in Superior, Wis. In April, the University of Wisconsin Press will publish his latest short-story collection, "The Blondes of Wisconsin."
Half the Terrible Things
By: Paul Legler.
Publisher: North Dakota State University Press, 267 pages, $19.95.
