Growing up in the Ozark mountain city of Springfield, Missouri, author Steve Yates never heard anything about the dark episode of racial strife that’s served as the inspiration for both of his novels.
But after a college professor at Missouri State University mentioned the gruesome events of 1906 — the Easter Vigil lynching of three black men; a roving, angry mob of 2,000 whites; fears of a brutal race riot and the burning of the town’s black neighborhoods that was averted only by a wild rumor — Yates said he was captivated.
“The rumor that Dr. (Katherine) Lederer told us was that a white limestone quarry manager gave his employees dynamite and told them to mine the streets,” Yates said. “That rumor was so powerful that blacks told Dr. Lederer that act saved the black quarter of Springfield. I wanted to understand how that was possible.
“That might have been the end of his job at the quarry, the end of his social life, the end of his life at church, possibly the end of his family life. Who would do that and why? Fiction was the right way to answer it.”
Yates, the assistant director of the University Press of Mississippi, will read from his latest novel, “The Teeth of Souls,” Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at Turnrow Books in Greenwood.
The novel follows up on Yates’ first novel, “Morkan’s Quarry,” published in 2010, which follows the owner of the limestone quarry and his son, set against the backdrop of the confusion of the Civil War in the border-state Ozarks.
Yates’ latest novel, published in March by Moon City Press, follows the quarry owner’s son, Leighton, as he attempts to scrape together the family’s legacy and finances after the end of the Civil War.
With his finances tottering, Leighton marries the 14-year-old daughter of a bankrupt German banker and contracts with freed slaves to work his quarry — setting Leighton on a collision course with many of the town’s white businessmen.
In a review published Monday in The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Turnrow proprietor Jamie Kornegay — himself a recently published novelist — wrote that “The Teeth of the Souls” is “built with a craftsman’s patience and exacting, its components forged from the finest material. A thing of integrity, built to last.”
Yates said he’d recently concluded a series of readings, signings and talks about the novel in Springfield, his hometown and the setting of both his novels. Although the novels depict a miserable episode in the city’s history, Yates said he was less worried about a tepid response to the book than about remaining true to the brutality of the historical record.
“I sure did have trepidations — but really they were more about how should fiction represent something so awful and so violent and how can I do that properly and give it justice while not letting the reader off the hook,” Yates said. “Just write good sentences and follow Barry Hannah’s advice: ‘Give us a beginning, middle, end and thrill us.’ The rest of it — you don’t know what’ll happen, so just do it.”
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
