'Praying for Sheetrock'
by Melissa Fay Greene Addison-Wesley, $21.95
"Praying for Sheetrock" is a beautifully written first book by an ambitious young lawyer who set out to change the world 15 years ago by working in a rural Legal Services office in an obscure Georgia backwater: McIntosh County. What Melissa Fay Greene found was an astonishing pocket of the world, seemingly untouched by the civil-rights movement and still controlled by a corrupt white sheriff and his courthouse gang.
Sheriff Poppell did not rule through force, but through patronage. When a truck crashed on the interstate, he would spread the word and stand by quietly while the poor harvested the shoes, candy bars, or whatever unfortunate cargo was lost. He was involved in drug smuggling, prostitution, and gambling, but most of all, he enforced the segregated status quo. Greene details the black community's awakening and overthrow of the sheriff, assisted in part by Legal Services lawyers.
She tells the story through the eyes and voices of the community, with poetic and striking portraits of the county, its people, and its politics. She could have stopped with a romanticized version, untouched by human weakness, but Greene opts to tell also of the downfall of the most prominent black activist. He succeeded in overthrowing the sheriff and was elected to the County Commission, only to succumb to temptation and be convicted of corruption. It's messy and inelegant, just like life. That, I suppose, is about the highest praise one can give to a portrait of a community in change.
