Easter Lilly: A Novel of the South Today

by Tom Wicker

When a white man is found with a knife in his heart and his pants around his knees, all signs point to a black woman as the killer. Sure enough, Easter Lilly Odum doesn't deny doing the deed-but, she claims, it was either that or getting raped. In a place where white is white, black is black, and the dead man is the brother of the county prosecutor, folks find this story hard to believe. Yet the clear fact is, Easter Lilly is knock-out beautiful, the sort of woman that men lose their minds over-men such as Shep Riley, a New York civil rights lawyer. Riley aims to save Easter Lilly from Southern injustice, even when he is forced to admit that justice, like truth, is a pretty elusive thing. Ingenious, its Southernness palpable, Easter Lilly will beguile and entertain at the same time that it tests the limits of our prejudices.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 1998

About the author

Also wrote under the pseudonym Paul Connolly.

Thomas Grey Wicker’s respected talent as a journalist took him from his origins in Hamlet, North Carolina, to The New York Times. There he served as associate editor, former Washington bureau chief, as well as the author of the famous op-ed column “In the Nation” for thirty years. He was the author of a considerable number of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction books as well. Wicker earned his journalism degree from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 1948, and at first wrote for papers in Aberdeen and Lumberton. He wrote for the Winston-Salem Journal for eight years and The Nashville Tennessean for two years before heading up to the Times, where he eventually retired in 1991. Wicker’s famous report on the assassination of President Kennedy, written from the perspective of the motorcade following the president, has been praised as the most accurate firsthand account of the shooting.

Reviews

[Missyjohnson1 · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a waste of time. One cliché after another. Poor dumb southerners. no education, unable to do anything for themselves and racists beyond belief. Not just one or two folks but an entire town. The men only think with their little brains and are completely besotted by a beautiful black woman that goes against everything that "should be right" OMG. Then the white savior lawyer from "up North" swoops in to see that justice is done for the poor wrongly accused black woman. Luckily Shep Riley, the attorney, has a degree from Harvard and is so focused on justice that he walked away from all of that money in New York to practice law in the quiet of Vermont. He luckily saw the article in the NYTimes about a murder in the South and knew that he needed to go make things right. There was so much description of how people looked and how attractive the women were or not to the men (who only wanted sex with them) that I wanted to throw the book. The men that wanted the little woman to stay at home and have the dinner ready..............................aaaarrrrgh. Not sure why the parts with Meg are there. not believable. Trying to say that she could help with voir dire was one thing but it seemed illegal the way that they conducted it. seemed like jury tampering to me. The confession by Easter Lilly in the end was not surprising nor did it make much sense for the way the entire disjointed story was told. Again. total waste of good reading time.

[Salsadancer · Rating 1 out of 5]

A beautiful black woman in a Southern "hamlet" kills her jailer; a Northern lawyer comes to defend her. I kept wondering why Tom Wicker wrote this book in 1998 -- at least that's when it was published -- instead of 1968 when it would have been more relevant. The book was a trashy parade of cardboard stereotypes.

[Jill]

EASTER LILY: A NOVEL OF THE SOUTH TODAY by Tom Wicker (1998)