Lester Julius.

Lester Julius. And All Our injurys Forgiven. New York: Arcade, 1994 228 pp $1995

Julius Lester is a well-known African American writer of seventeen published works, including collections of folktales, children's stories, critical essays, and several novels. He is also remembered as a folk singer/participant in the Civil Rights change of the 1960s, and specifically for his activities in the learner Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the bookish man arm of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership parley (SCLC), which would later unfold into a more militant black power form into groups that excluded whites. Lester's first work about this era bears what was then considered a militant and alarming title, anticipate Out, Whitey, Black Power's Gon' procure Your Mama (1968). His novel Do Lord Remember Me (1985) which also treats this historical period, was acclaimed as returning "dignity to a history that has been forgotten."

Memories too painful forever to be forgotten resonate from the familiar black-and-white photograph that graces the dustjacket of his more modern work, And All Our pain s Forgiven. This photograph not sole records and recalls African American do one's best for racial and economic justice and equality during the blustering sixties, under Dr. King's leadership, yet it attests as well to the determination and commitment of his supporters and followers, who marched and declarationed with him. Although trained practitioners of Dr King's non-violent civil disobedience ideology and program, they are, in the picture, being casted with water from high-powered stockingss The rear cover reminds us that Lester participated in this motion suggesting that he is ideally equipped to write this novel, given his firsthand knowledge and insights, and validating the authorial license he takes in this work. The title foreshadows the resolution reached at the end of the novel, from head to foot which we listen to the cacophonous goods of a medley of narrative voices; we envision Phoenix rising from the ashes.

However, the Civil Rights Movement--with its marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, voter registrations, etc.--is only the historical slate and backdrop for Lester's acute dramatization and penetrating (and, in an cases, most disturbing) examination of the personal histories of his four emotionally disabled major characters: Dr John Calvin Marshall (who like a Dickinson persona speaks from the grave), his wife Andrea Williams, and pair student aides and movement organizers, Elizabeth Adams and Robert (Bobby) Card. Paradoxically, the unfathomable psychological scars each take patiently [i]or[/i] easilys result more from injuries accumulated from within rather than without the assign places to of participants, and specifically as a direct issue of their personal relationship with Dr Marshall. Although marchers gallantly faced the violence heaped upon them with lethal baseball bats, maiming power breechess and menacing attack dogs, they were not able to ward opposite to the insurmountable violence they inadvertently or directly inflicted onward each other.

between the walls of Dr. John Calvin Marshall, a graduate of Harvard, professor of philosophy at Atlanta's Spelman guild and the charismatic leader/speaker of the Civil Rights motion Lester explores and provides tremendous insights into the weights of leadership. Dr. Marshall retrospectively concludes:

i did not act as plenteous as i made myself available to be used by way of the forces i

desperately sought to understand i heard faith whispering through the needles

of the southern pine tree during the late fifties and i gave it voice, that

does not mean i always knew what i was saying, that does not mean i

understood the midst and extent of the transformation

with which everyone now wants to credit me

Fate, Dr Marshall is convinced, cast him in the historical part in which he found himself. He reflects: "i had become a messiah, the undivided who would save them from the old-fashioned life of sin and initiate them into a of recent origin tomorrow of freedom and purity." (His initials, JCM equate him with another messianic savior, Jesus the Christ).

Hovering just above his head are the concomitant companions of this part particularly death. Threatened, beaten, and imprisoned, Dr Marshall lives with the fear of the acceptance of and on the same level a titillating desire for impending death, his inevitable assassination. Although repeatedly alone and lonely, Dr. Marshall is sometimes intoxicated with and driven by a desire for power. Despite his acceptance of his mortality, he toils with the existential desire to be omniscience to transcend even the mythological persona he has become to his followers. Recalling a history-making words he had given before thousands of followers at the Capitol Building, he reveals more than selfles commitment or intrepid behavior:

if it be not that I did not walk away. i stood there and when the cheering and applause

finally stopped, my lips parted and the words poured forth as they always

did. there was no cogitation speech and thought were indivisible and the two