Out of the Night That Covers Me
By Pat Cunningham Devoto
Warner Books, 2001, $23.95

A good subtitle for this 1950s chronicle of the Deep South would be “The Adventures of John Gallatin McMillan III.”

Pat Cunningham Devoto has picked a character from her earlier novel, “My Last Days as Roy Rogers,” for a spinoff sequel relating experiences from the standpoint of children. This is not a children’s book; it is a book about children written for adults.

John is 8 when his widowed mother dies in a small Alabama town. An only child, he travels with his mother’s sister to their home in Lower Peach Tree.

Readers of “My Last Days” will remember John as the sheltered boy whose mother kept him isolated in a basement room because she feared he would fall victim to the polio epidemic. Although friends took pity on the isolated boy and lured him outdoors, he actually enjoyed his isolation, surrounded by favorite toys and books.

He is in for a shock. First, Aunt Nelda is considerably more concerned about inheriting her sister’s furniture and other belongings than she is about John’s welfare. In her zeal for material possessions, she forgets John and leaves him in the depot at Montgomery.

Things get worse. In Lower Peach Tree he is introduced to Uncle Luther and two cousins, Little Luther and Shell (short for Michelle). They are everything that John is not. Their home is a crude “dogtrot” not even large enough for John to have a bed of his own, and he ends up sleeping on blankets on the porch. Uncle Luther is a coarse alcoholic without a whit of love or affection in his bones. They are only minimally literate and have no manners at all.

All Luther sees in John is another laborer for his cotton fields.

Of course, John is unaccustomed to labor in any form, and his first morning chopping cotton is almost disastrous. He becomes seriously ill from sun stroke.

Gone are his days of pampered, scholarly living.

Life improves when John becomes reacquainted with a local banker, known as The Judge, and his wife. Byron Vance is legally blind, and he and his wife are childless. Aware of John’s uncomfortable situation with the Spraigs, they take John under their wings and offer him odd jobs around their home and at the bank.

Through this work John meets a strange black man known as Tuway, The Judge’s personal assistant. Tuway was born with a skin affliction causing his face and body to be blotchy white and black. He is not of mixed blood, but some people regard his skin problem as an affliction brought on by the sin of his mother.

Tuway was abandoned by his mother and grew up in the care of Mama Tuway, a healer and seer who lives at The Bend, a community in the bend of the river inhabited by descendants of slaves.

John is too young for the treatment received at the hands of the Spraigs and too immature to understand adult doings in Lower Peach Tree. He plots ways to escape to Chicago, regarded at that time by local blacks as something of a “Promised Land.” This escapade leads to new adventures among new people, and the novel spins its way into fresh mishaps and even tragedy.

“Out of the Night” is rich with the colloquialisms of 1950s Alabama. Pat Cunningham Devoto writes with a clarity that is sympathetic but not patronizing, with a lilt that is natural and melodic.

Her title is the opening line from William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” the poem long memorized by school children and ending with “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

Prior to becoming a writer, the author raised two children, taught high school, earned a private pilot’s license, designed and helped to build her lakeside cabin in Alabama and was active in her community. She is a member of the USTA Tennis Olympic Committee and worked with the Atlanta Olympic Games. A native of Alabama, she now lives in Alabama and Georgia.