Two violent attacks reveal the racist underbelly of a small Appalachian town in David Joy’s newest novel, “Those We Thought We Knew.”
Joy will be in Greenville for a “Books Over Drinks” event at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 7 at M.Judson Booksellers. Tickets are $35 and include admission, a cocktail and a copy of the book.
Like his previous books, the novel is set in Jackson County, North Carolina, where Joy has lived most of his life. It’s also the ancestral home of the book’s main character, Toya Gardner, a young Black artist from Atlanta who’s returned to her roots to trace her family history and finish her graduate thesis.
“She winds up discovering that the church her grandmother was a part of and her mother was part of was founded by 11 formerly enslaved people and that at a certain point in time, Western Carolina University had forced the church to move the church and to remove its cemetery,” Joy said in a recent interview.
That church — Mt. Zion A.M.E. — actually exists. It was founded in 1892 in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and is one of Jackson County’s oldest churches, according to Joy.
Photo provided“The novel starts with this girl doing an art installation to expose that history,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ernie Allison, a white sheriff’s deputy, finds a man with a swastika tattoo sleeping in the back of a car. Probably just a drifter, Ernie thinks, until a search of the vehicle yields Klan robes, a gun and a notebook filled with the names of local residents, including the chief of police, who soon goes missing.
Tensions build until two acts of violence directed at Toya and Ernie split the county apart.
“I wanted to force white characters into difficult conversations that I don’t think the majority of white America has had outside of incidents of Black death or Black trauma,” Joy said of his intentions for the book. “And I decided that the way I would do it was to set all of that against a traditional mystery, where the great illumination was less a matter of whodunnit and more about people coming to recognize things about themselves and about the community they thought they knew.”
Visit mjudsonbooks.com/events for more information.
