The Study of Racialism

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2942 }

Freshwater Road

Denise Nicholas
Fiction/African American Studies, 6x9, 300 pp, TC $23.95, 1-932841-10-5 CUSA

August 26, 2005

Freshwater Road is the story of one young woman’s journey into adulthood via the political and social upheavals of the civil rights movement. A young black collegian, Celeste Tyree, leaves Ann Arbor to go to Pineyville, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964 to help found a Freedom School and a voter registration project as part of Freedom Summer. As the summer unfolds, she confronts not only the political realities of race and poverty in this tiny town, but also truths about herself and her own family.

As Celeste gets to know her fellow activists and the people of Pineyville, she grapples with her father’s disapproval of her decision to go to Mississippi. A numbers-running bar owner in Detroit, Shuck Tyree is proud of his daughter and proud of the opportunities he’s provided for her: Celeste risking what he’s offered by going to the violent South is not what he had planned. Long estranged from her mother, Celeste is rocked by revelations of wrenching details of her past. At the same time, she develops a deep relationship with the woman hosting her in Mississippi, Geneva Owens, who helps Celeste learn more about what it means to be an adult woman and a “person of substance” in the world.

Denise Nicholas is an actor who starred in the TV series Room 222 and In the Heat of the Night, among many other TV, film, and theatrical productions. Freshwater Road is her first novel. Before her career as a TV star, Denise Nicholas worked with the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi in 1964, and in Freshwater Road she reaches back to bring that summer alive in this unforgettable first novel. Freshwater Road will prove to be one of the best and most important novels ever written about the civil rights movement in America.

Biography
Born in Delaware, Denise Nicholas attended the University of Michigan and studied acting in New York. Her acting career began as an apprentice with the Free Southern Theater, touring rural Louisiana and Mississippi during the turbulent days of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1969, she came to television as “Liz McKintyre” on Room 222. The role of the fictional Walt Whitman High School’s guidance counselor earned Nicholas two Golden Globe Award nominations. In addition to appearing on the big screen in the comedies Let's Do It Again and A Piece of the Action, Nicholas played councilwoman “Harriet DeLong” on the TV series In the Heat of the Night. Her stint on the TV crime drama included not only acting, but also penning six episodes and a two-hour TV movie.