“Anywhere You Run” opens with the killing of the three civil rights workers in June of 1964 in Neshoba County, Mississippi. That killing lurks in the background of the action for the entire novel, motivating some of the action but never really the center of the black characters’ concerns. The events that initiate the action of this novel happen in the first few pages. These are the “given,” what Henry James would call the done, that which we must accept if we are to go forward, but they are a lot to lift.
The protagonist, Violet Richards, 22, is a young black woman in Jackson, Mississippi. Her life is at a spectacularly low point. Her mother and father have both recently died and her sister Rose died only a few years earlier under circumstances we are not told about for a long time, although we are told that Violet blames herself. Violet and her sister, Marigold, carry on. Named after flowers, the three sisters were their mother’s “bouquet.” Marigold is, to all appearances, the sensible one. Violet is the wild one, a drinker and partier. As the novel opens, she has been raped by a local white boy, Huxley Broadus, and has exacted her own revenge. Taking the law into her own hands, she shoots him. Now she must leave town.
Violet is such an attractive woman that, despite the ferocious racism of that time and place, Dewey Leonard, the white son of the owner of a local feed and supply store, has fallen in love with her, wants to run away to the north and marry her. Seeing a way to escape, Violet agrees, but In Birmingham, Alabama, she steals Dewey’s wallet and takes off, landing in Chillicothe, Georgia, where she has a cousin. Meanwhile, back in Jackson, Marigold, the good sister, has fallen for James Scott, a handsome young black lawyer from New York, working with the Freedom Summer voter registration project. She is pregnant, tells James, and the justice lawyer flees at once. Marigold quickly accepts the marriage proposal of the dull and unsuspecting Roger Bonny and they run away to Cleveland.
Both sisters now running, the chasing begins, and as the subtitle tells us “Your Past Will Find You.” Dewey hires a local redneck, Mercer Buggs, to find Violet and get his wallet back. We will one day learn what’s in the wallet. Mercer, believing that Marigold will lead him to Violet, flies to Cleveland. These are not trained operatives to say the least.
The fleeing sisters leave behind clues so obvious even the fairly stupid Mercer can follow them. Communication is through pay phones, sometimes with charges reversed, which is oddly nostalgic and refreshing. In dialog, description, language, invention or characterization, this novel is neither ugly nor distinguished. The plot moves in much the same way as “The Last of the Mohicans”: escapes and chases, drama, passion; violence, revenge, secrets revealed. It is, in short, a story.
