amusement, October 19, 1995, page 6

William Heath read from his new novel last Thursday in Bachelor Hall. The Children Bob Moses Led chronicles the events of Freedom Summer, 1964, when blacks and whites worked together to help register black voters in Mississippi. The novel features real people like Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, as well as a cast of fictional characters like Tom Morton, a white college student who shares narrative duties with Bob Moses.

National movements always have local roots, and Freedom Summer was no exception. One of Tom Morton's chapters takes place in Oxford at the Western College for Women. Tom Morton's orientation for the project is held in Kumler Chapel and Leonard Hall on Western Campus. Scenic Oxford provides a sharp contrast to the Mississippi locales of McComb and the fictional town of Tallahatchie, where the volunteers encounter severe resistance from angry whites and racist police.

Crafty legislation in the South prevented most blacks from registering to vote. Bob Moses envisioned an end to discriminatory laws and segregation if more blacks had voting power. He advocated nonviolent methods of achieving this goal, believing that "politics without morality is chaos, and morality without politics is irrelevant."

In recent years Jonathan Yardly of the Washington Post has drawn attention to the conspicuous absence of a book like Heath's: "Why is it that no fiction of lasting merit came out of the South as a result of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? It is an oddity that writers somehow failed to rise to the tumultuous and traumatic events of that memorable period." Heath's book fills this void nicely, recreating the triumphs and fears amidst an atmosphere of hatred and misunderstanding.

Research for the novel took Heath ten years, and he traveled to Mississippi to conduct personal interviews with participants of Freedom Summer. Heath also visited Oxford to examine the Freedom Summer Orientation files. Heath's novel presents not only the facts of Freedom Summer, but transports the reader into the social and political climate, touching on milestones like the March on Washington and President Kennedy's assassination.

Mississippi's backwards politics come to represent a larger indifference in a jaded America with the Vietnam War lurking around the corner. While working toward equality and mutual understanding, the Summer Project workers show some of the first signs of the counter-culture: communal living, interracial relationships, and drug experimentation.

Heath's unique perspective on Freedom Summer goes beyond historical accounts to vividly dramatize one of America's most crucial domestic episodes. William Heath is the author of The Walking Man (Icarus Books, 1994), a collection of poems, and the editor of Maryland's Monocacy Valley Review. This is his first novel. Heath, an associate professor at Mount Saint Mary's College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, teaches literature and American history. This week Heath will give readings at Borders Books and Music stores in Dayton, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati.