Justice league
Is forgiveness divine or foolish? That question scratches the mind of Texas Ranger Darren Matthews as he looks out the kitchen window of Leroy Page’s historic house. Matthews has visited Page, a fellow black Texan, looking for information about the missing nine-year-old son of an incarcerated leader of the Aryan Brotherhood.
Page is an old man descended from freed slaves who established Hopetown; now, white supremacists squat on his rural property. He may have been the last to see the missing boy.
“Black folks are the most forgiving people on Earth,” says Page to Matthews. To be truly free they had to let go of any rage over what white folks had done. Matthews recalls another Texas kitchen years earlier, where his father and uncle debated whether Christian forgiveness should be limitless, or whether it risked granting impunity to oppressors, cleansing them of responsibility.
A small moment in Attica Locke’s transcendent tale, , but the question raised is a key part of the novel’s DNA: does forgiveness make black
