About Like Trees, Walking

When the phone rang at the home of Paul and Roy Deacon in the early morning hours, it often meant that someone had died.  The brothers’ family owned the Deacon Memorial Funeral Home and had buried the loved ones of Mobile’s black families for over 100 years.  On the morning of March 21, 1981, the call was different.  The body of nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was found hanging from a tree on Herndon Avenue.  The murder shook the citizens of Mobile, Alabama, especially the Deacon brothers.  They had called Michael Donald a friend.

 

As the brothers navigate their teen years, they face familiar rites of passage; prom night, graduation, college life, but the family business forces them to confront the rites death brings, passages from this world to the next.   As Roy and Paul Deacon search for solace, their journeys take them from church sanctuaries to cemeteries, protest marches to courtrooms, from the tree-lined streets of Mobile to the dark beach roads on the Eastern Shore. 

   

Added to the grief of a murdered friend, the brothers and their hometown face the first lynching in over sixty years.  Mobile had been as peaceful as its tree-lined streets were beautiful, but the murder gave the city its own sad chapter in the Alabama racial history.  Like Birmingham’s four little girls, Selma’s Bloody Sunday, and Tuskegee’s experiment, Mobile had the murder of Michael Donald.

 

In this riveting debut, Like Trees, Walking explores a fictional aftermath of a true story that will both haunt and illuminate. The novel examines death, faith, truth, and justice, elements that often intersect and at times collide.  An old tale set in modern times, Like Trees, Walking explores the complexities and the promises of America’s New South.