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George Garrett's The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You is a Southern tour de force that explores the truth of two seemingly unconnected crimes in different locations in order to examine the nature of truth.
Investigative reporter Billy Tone returns to his childhood home in Paradise Springs with a book contract to write of the events occurring there on the 4th of April, 1968. In the central Florida town, April 4th is famous with natives as well as relative newcomers as the occasion of two murders, one suicide, a kidnapping, and the burning of a revival tent. To the rest of the country, the date is known for the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
In the confusion following the murder of Alpha Weatherby, a respectable yet certifiably mad bank teller, and Little David, a diminutive itinerant revivalist preacher, and the torching of the revival tent itself, Paradise Springs was reeling with shock even before Father Caxton, the Episcopal rector, was found dead by his own hand. The arrest and hasty conviction of Billy "Goathead" Papp, Little David's advance man, and the revivalist's companion, Geneva Lasoeur, a six-foot former stripper from Texas, obscured the engineered closure of events in Memphis.
Garrett weaves the local story with the national one, exploring an instant on the cusp of a period, and demonstrating once again that history is most assuredly subjective. He slides back and forth along the ribbon of time, between straightforward narrative and the present-day recollections of people who had been there, as well as the thoughts of newcomers to the region.
The tales are overlaid like broken fragments of glass, each containing a streak of the truth like a blaze of startling color, each both highlighting and distorting the pieces beneath it, suggesting other, equally probable scenarios, until finding the truth becomes a matter of determining what is or what one wants to be so.
Anna Garris Goiser is a writer in Washington, D.C. She can be reached at anna_goiser@bookpage.com
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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