A Tinker’s Damn
by Darryl Wimberley
Published by The Toby Press
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Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart
Carter Buchanan and Spence McGrue are best friends. They spend their days running the Sands Ponds of Florida’s panhandle as content as any two young boys can be in 1929. Then Spence’s father is killed in a lumbering accident while working for Carter’s dad, Tink. The subtle differences between the white Carter (who narrates the story) and the African-American Spence, rears its ugly head. Tink forces Spence to go to work in the mill while continues his push for Carter’s education and the dream he holds for Carter to become a doctor. Away at school, Carter learns that botany, not medicine is his true passion. A riff grows in the boys’ friendship that can never heal.
At the center of A Tinker’s Damn is Tink Buchanan’s obsession with money and the need to regain the land his father lost to neighbor Dave Ogilvie. The Depression is sweeping across the country. Dave is on the verge is losing the land to the bank if his tobacco crop doesn’t make it this year, and he can’t make the interest payment at the bank. Tink, on the other hand, sees the looming war in Europe and begins to branch out (no pun intended) into other tree-related products like tung oil. As the Depression rages, he works harder and harder and makes more and more money.
Carter is brought home from school to work in the mills. Tink needs someone he can trust. Spence has become that man, but the Klan and the times dictate that Tink cannot let a black man be his second-in-command. Carter hates the mills and longs for the day when he can go back to school and his easy lifestyle. Then he falls in love with Dave’s daughter Julia, and he must decide what avenues he is willing to venture down to get what he wants.
A Tinker’s Damn is a coming-of-age story when the young Carter learns what it takes to be a man and what it takes to love a woman. Carter’s ultimate decision is, will he betray Tink so that Dave won’t lose his land, or will he defy Dave and run away with Julia?
A Tinker’s Damn is filled with surprises in every chapter that reveals the person who Carter becomes and is a powerful comment on race relations during the 1930s.
Armchair Interviews says: Well-told coming-of-age story.
Author’s Web site: http://www.DarrylWimberley.com