Book Around the Corner

All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (2023) French title: Le sang des innocents.

Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built. They were the foundation upon which Charon County stood.

All The Sinners Bleed is set up in Charon County, in a small town in Virginia, near Chesapeake Bay.

It’s a rural —and fictional—county of 20 000 inhabitants with twenty-one churches. This ratio of church per inhabitant is mind-blowing for a French who usually sees in a town, a Catholic church, a Protestant one and sometimes a mosque.

In this county, two murders were committed in the last fifteen years, and now, they had a shooting at the local high school. Mr Spearman, a well-known, respected and white history teacher was shot by a black student, Latrell McDonald. The deputies who arrived on the scene with Titus shot Latrell as he was going out of the school.

Charon County elected its first black sheriff, Titus Crown. And now, he has to solve the murder of the history teacher and make sure that his deputies shooting the murderer was actual self-defense.

An African American man had been shot by two white deputies. Didn’t matter who was sheriff, there were going to be serious questions asked. Titus knew this, and even though some people wouldn’t believe it, he agreed with them. The history of policing in America, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, made those questions necessary.

Titus struggles to find his place as the sheriff. The whites are weary of him and the king of their community and head of the most important job provider of the area, Scott Cunningham, didn’t support his candidacy. Jamal, the influential reverend of the New Wave church hoped he’d become a support for the black community. But Titus is aware of the position he’s in:

The moment he announced his candidacy he had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him because of his skin color, and people who believed he was a traitor to his race.

It’s a tough place to be and he walks on a narrow line. His attitude is clear: play by the book, only by the book and ignore the fact that he knows most of the people in this town since childhood.

A former FBI agent, Titus came back to his hometown to lick some wounds, be close to his ageing father and eventually became the sheriff. He detached himself from this town for years, and he makes a fair assessment of his hometown’s mentality when he gives this example:

A new pharmacist had tried to take over the Sommers building but Billy’s cousins, still stinging from his arrest and subsequent conviction, started a rumor she didn’t really have a degree, and within a month the rumor was an immutable fact, and by the fall the young woman who’d tried to help the good people of Charon with their medicinal needs soon lit out for greener pastures. Titus thought the fact that she’d been a Black woman hadn’t helped to endear her to the white citizens in the county. Normally the Black folks in Charon would have tried to rally around a sister taking on a new venture, but the young lady wasn’t a native of Charon. She was a come-here, and people in Charon were loath to cotton to new faces. In this the citizens, both Black and white, were united.

A small-town vipers’ nest at its finest.

Everyone knows everyone’s business since the beginning of times, people grew up together, families have reputations. And the money comes from two major sources: Cunningham’s factory and drug trafficking. Black and white communities don’t really mix and rampant racism personified by statues of confederate generals is an endemic disease.

And this murder and the subsequent shooting lifts the lid of the pot where the town’s secrets, sins and hatreds are stuffed. Titus knows right away that things will get ugly very quickly.

That was the thing about violence. It didn’t always wait for an invitation. Sometimes it saw a crack in the dam and then it flooded the whole valley.

All the Sinners Bleed is of course the investigation about the murder but it’s a so much more.

It’s the literary MRI of Charon County, a fictional county that looks a lot like Trickum County in The Devil Himself by Peter Farris. It’s the kind of place S.A. Cosby grew up in.

It’s also Titus’s personal journey. He still has open wounds from his mother’s death. He has scars from his career as an FBI agent. He has to reconcile with his family and his hometown. He wants to be a human, not a man defined by the color of his skin.

When they had discussed the possibility of Titus running, he’d gone to great pains to ensure that Jamal realized he was going to be a sheriff who was Black, not the Black community’s sheriff. He’d told Jamal he’d do everything he could to enact real change, but at the end of the day he couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore the law. Unfortunately, he’d failed in his attempt to make him understand that idea.

At the small scale of Charon County and according to the talks between Cosby and Lehane I attended at Quais du Polar, the election of a black sheriff unleashed the same fears and racism that the election of Obama did in the American society.

The unsolved issue of the consequences of the Civil War and slavery, its end and the Jim Crow laws are close to the surface and reappear.

All the Sinners Bleed is a masterpiece of crime fiction: excellent crime plot, state-of-the-nation exploration, and meaningful personal journey for Titus all wrapped in one book.

It questions the idea of identity on the level of a community and on a personal level with Titus’ inner struggles. And it’s summed up in two lines by Titus’ late mother:

You can stand in a pulpit and call yourself a minister. I can roll around in mud and call myself a pig too. Don’t mean you was called to preach, and it don’t mean I was meant to be pork chops,”

Rush for it if you haven’t read it already. I already bought another Cosby, Razorblade Tears.

PS : I should start a challenge: “Pick up trout and fishing references in American books”. They seem to be everywhere, even in the most unexpected pages: Roger’s face was pale as the belly of a trout. 🙂