De’Shawn Winslow had a great success with his debut novel, “In West Mills.”
That book won the Willie Morris Award for Southern fiction and, in a more specialized vein, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize and the Publishing Triangle awards. These latter two prizes are given to celebrate the very best in LGBTQ literature: fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
“In West Mills” was praised for its thoroughly convincing creation of a really small North Carolina town, located in the northeast section of the state, near the Virginia border, many commuting to work in Virginia Beach or Newport News.
There is little to do in West Mills, little obvious excitement, but, in “Decent People,” that changes when three siblings, African-Americans, are killed in their home one night.
Marian, Marva and Lazarus Harmon are discovered shot to death, Lazarus having been shot the most; perhaps he was the primary target.
At the crime scene, the local sheriff finds some marijuana and various pills.
Marian was in fact an MD, the town’s only black pediatrician.
Were they killed by someone seeking drugs? If so, why were there drugs left behind? Was Marian making extra cash writing scrip for addicts? Was this a drug deal, of some kind, gone bad?
In any case, the white sheriff doesn’t care very much.
But Josephine Wright cares intensely. Jo has retired from her job in NYC, returned to West Mills, and reunited with an old flame, Olympus, called “Lymp.” Lymp Seymore is a half-brother of the three murder victims and is suspected of their killing.
He is not arrested—the sheriff can’t be bothered—but Jo is furious that gossip focuses on Lymp, mainly because he had quarreled with his half-siblings.
The novel is, for a while, a whodunnit, when she sets out to find the killer and clear Lymp’s name. She learns soon that several people had recently quarreled with Marian, and the town is full of angry people.
There is no privacy and no secrets. Many disputes are conducted in public, in church and stores, with others listening. Gossip conveys the news to anyone absent.
Winslow himself, like the sheriff, seems to lose lost interest in the murders. What Josephine uncovers is truly widespread sexual activity in West Mills, premarital, extramarital, heterosexual, interracial and, most dangerously, homosexual.
In this black community, this last is especially taboo.
Effeminate boys are called sissies and faggots, ostracized and bullied. One young mother, Eunice, takes her son LaRoy to Dr. Marian for “treatment” which, we learn, is to have two bigger boys literally BEAT the gay out of him.
Josephine’s gay brother, Herschel, has remained in the relative safety of New York. He’s not coming back.
The murder is solved. Only Lymp and Jo care, really, and if West Mills is any kind of accurate description of a real town, don’t go there.
