The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America's Dilemma. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1998 by Jonathan Alter

Last year, as part of the coverage of President Clinton's race initiative, I traveled to Hot Springs, Ark, to tape a story for "NBC Nightly News" on race relations in the president's hometown. I ended up disappointed in the story that aired. The only strong moment came when I asked a white woman how she would feel if her daughter came home with a black man to marry She paused, sighed, and said evenly to the camera: "I'd pray." Beyond that, the story was far too superficial, even for television. The same has been true of various articles about race that I've written for Newsweek over the years. And I'm not alone. Journalists feel frustrated by the complexity of certain subjects, but especially this one. The deepest stories -- the ones in the marrow of the nation -- are always the hardest to convey.

But Alex Kotlowitz, author of the highly acclaimed There Are No Children Here, a wrenching account of the lives of two African-American boys in a Chicago housing project, is game to try again. This time his subject is the mysterious death of Eric McGinniss, a 16-year old black kid who was last seen alive in a white neighborhood and ended up drowning in a river between the towns of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, Michigan.

By the standards of modern-day non-fiction thrillers, the new book is a failure. It doesn't give away too much to say that the resolution, the "payoff," leaves more than a little to be desired. In recent years, a number of similar books have been written as powerful narratives. The author usually novelizes the story as best he can with vivid characters and a tidy, satisfying ending. If certain players won't be interviewed, he writes around them. If facts are inconvenient, as they were in John Berendt's In the Garden of Good and Evil, he sometimes simply changes them.

Kotlowitz takes the more honest tack. Every writerly doubt, every failed lead, every source who stiffs him is grist for his layered tale of racial myth and countermyth. Although the book is disjointed and padded in parts, Kotlowitz succeeds in making his frustration in finding the truth about Eric's death serve as a metaphor for our larger frustrations about race. It's a dark photo montage of the American dilemma, vintage 1990s. The serious student of racial problems won!t learn much, but The Other Side of the River is an evocative reminder of the essential messiness and emotional confusion of life in this country. Every crime, every conversation, ends up being just another game of blind-man-and-the-elephant.

The basic segregation facts are staggering. St. Joseph's, about two hours east of Chicago, is a prosperous town of 9,000, 95 percent white. The town went 25 years without a homicide. In "St. Johannesburg," as some blacks across the river call it, a police officer still talks about "coon hunting." Confederate flags are available. The progress in race relations is real, but stops short of profound. "There is in St. Joseph a tacit understanding that anything goes -- working with blacks, golfing with blacks, drinking with blacks, even occasionally voting for blacks -- but not bedding down with them," Kotlowitz writes. When an attractive county clerk dances with a black man at a party, she is teased and scorned as "Nicole," as in Nicole Brown Simpson. Most blacks simply steer clear of St. Joe's. "I pull up in parking lots and hear car door locks clicking. It gets to me," said one.

The feeling is mutual. The one place residents of St. Joe's avoid like the plague is the town directly across the river. Benton Harbor has a population of 12,000, 92 percent black. In 1994, it had the highest per capita murder rate in the U.S. with 21 homicides, triple the rate of Chicago and New York. Some whites call the place "Benton Harlem" "If you ain't bleeding," says one detective, "you ain't gonna make it on the fist" of those who get police help.

We know from his earlier book that Kotlowitz has a rare ability to get black kids to talk honestly, and he uses it here. But he also understands the subtleties of black politics, which is much less monolithic than many whites imagine. At the same time, what unifies many blacks in Benton Harbor is a willingness to assume the worst about St. Joe's and the whites who live there. It goes without saying in Benton Harbor that Eric McGinniss was murdered, whatever the facts. The white St. Joe's police detective handling the case, Jim Reeves, was doomed from day one in Benton Harbor because of the color of his skin. While Kotlowitz bends over backward to be sensitive to the suspicions of the black community, it's impossible to escape the psychological projection at play. Eric's death, allegedly at the hands of whites, resonated for years longer than the black-on-black homicides that happen with stunning regularity.

Kotlowitz's reporting ranges across many compelling sub-themes, from racially charged school-board politics to the details of an autopsy on a drowning victim. But he returns, often lyrically, to this case as a totem of two towns. "Truth becomes myth; myth becomes truth. And your perspective -- myth or truth, truth or myth -- is shaped by which side of the river you live on," he writes. And finally: "To those in Benton Harbor, it is proof that race blinds their neighbors to the obvious. To those in Benton Harbor, it is proof that because of race even the obvious is never what it seems'