Scottsboro (Picador Classic) - Softcover

In her exhaustively researched novel Scottsboro, Ellen Feldman errs on the side of too much history. The book painstakingly recreates the infamous Scottsboro case, complete with all the twists and turns and society-exposing foibles. But, ironically, what it fails to do is make either the real or fictional characters come to life.

The Scottsboro Boys, as they were called, were nine black teens accused of gang-raping two white women on the Southern Railroad freight run to Memphis on March 25, 1931. Feldman tells their tale through Alice Whittier, a fictional, left-leaning white journalist for a socialist newspaper in New York.

Alice searches out one of the accusing women, a dirt-poor millworker named Ruby Bates. In real life, as in the book, Bates later recanted her accusations and traveled the country raising money for the teens' defense.

The heart of the novel should be the complex, evolving relationship between these women from very different worlds. But Ruby is just too simple -- or too simply depicted -- to carry the emotional weight of the book, while Alice is too busy dispensing facts about 1930s America to blossom as a character. Her motivations for pursuing Bates are touched upon only lightly, as are her feelings about events both political and personal, including whether or not to sleep with her boss.

Trying to pack so many stories into a relatively short novel means a few end up flattened. In one chapter, for instance, we hear from the mother of one of the accused teens. Hers is a tale of birthing babies and picking cotton, of submitting to rape by the white boss to keep him off her daughters and staying down on her knees in hopes of better times. It's not that these terrible things weren't realities for black women in 1930s Alabama, but piling them all onto Mrs. Norris makes her feel less like a real person than a racial representative.

Scottsboro rightfully seeks to remind Americans of a shameful moment in our history. Sometimes, though, history should be delivered straight.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.