Hampton (mdayhampton.com) was intrigued by Custis and began crafting his back story, a prequel to “Behind Picketwire.” Now, 147,000 words later, his life and longings are on full display in a magnificent, eloquent, and heart-pounding story called “When Sounds Collide: A Novel” ($23.95 in paperback from River Grove Books; also for Amazon Kindle).
Stretching from the late 1800s to 1953, the novel begins in North Carolina. It is a perilous time for a brilliant young Black boy named Custis, who angers local punks when he accidentally reveals he can read. “His mind could have belonged to a poet, a teacher, an author, or a scientist, but his heart was only ten years old.”
Beaten and left for dead in the woods, his house—and his mother—destroyed in arson, he is saved by young white girl, Sarah Tennison, living at a nearby ranch. Sarah had not spoken since her mother died from cancer, blaming her father and Doc Lyman; but now she gives voice as she seeks help, and over years an unbreakable bond forms between Sarah and Custis, “a Black man forbidden to marry outside of his race.”
Though sheltered and encouraged at the ranch, Custis, desperate to develop his idea of using sound waves to look inside the human body, heads to New York. Through the machinations of three unlikely friends, he passes as a man from Greece to enter the physics lab at Centennial University, “which still would not allow a Black man to obtain a degree.”
The book is a complex story of love and regret, and deep loss, and yet what shines in these pages are truly good and kind people, even in the midst of devastation. This goodness is a kind of “silent sound” which “has been here all this time.”
The story will draw you in and will not let you go.
