Trouble at Lacey

THE VOICE AT THE BACK DOOR (334 pp.) -- Elizabeth Spencer -- McGraw-Hill ($3.95).

The people of Lacey, Miss, had reason to be proud of themselves and of their town. After a history stained by lynching and violence, they had acquired a new sheriff who was outspokenly determined to apply justice equally to blacks and whites. The leading politician, Kerney Woolbright, backed the sheriff's policy. So did Jason Hunt, the town's rich man. Even Bootlegger Jimmy Tallant was willing to accept this manifestation of the "new South"--provided his business was left alone.

But Sheriff Duncan Harper is too highprincipled to let anything illegal alone. So Bootlegger Tallant fights him. His weapon: Beckwith Dozer, a Negro stubborn enough to demand his "rights" and supple enough to let the embattled white men think they are using him. Tallant intends only to discredit the sheriff by forcing him to defend an "uppity" Negro. But the design gets out of hand when Tallant is shot by a shady associate. Dozer is suspected, and Sheriff Harper, trying to drive Dozer to safety in the next county, is killed when a slashed front tire blows out.

Before he dies, Woolbright and Hunt have fled his side, the town has cried for his blood, and Lacey's Negroes have again heard the growls of the lynch mob. The brief reign of the "new South" in Lacey dies also, leaving the survivors with nothing more than bitter knowledge of failure. Author Spencer, who was born and raised in Carrollton, Miss. (pop. 475), has, like many Southern writers, a poet's sense of words. Unlike most, she brings a disciplined mind and an invigorating economy to her third novel. Time and again, an imaginative phrase pins a character to the reader's consciousness. Jimmy Tal-lant's lonely face "made you think of telephone poles leaning infinitely on along a highway that went forever toward the mountains." A sub-moronic deputy is "the third best shot at the pool hall"; ig-year-old Cissy was "poised that summer at a moment of femininity so intense that her virginity seemed scandalously out of order in the universe."

Trouble at Lacey builds up like a thundercloud as its people, white and black, find the knot of race too tangled for unraveling by words and seek relief in action --no matter how blind or brutal. The voice at the back door sounds insistently throughout the book; it is the plaintive, smoky voice of the Negro asking his eternal "Why?" and getting, as always, a dusty answer.

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