In just three novels, including Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, SA Cosby has brought down the curtain on Black Southern life that burns with authenticity amid diverse casts of characters having (sweet) tea about race, sexuality, and… spill paternity. Cosby’s most memorable protagonists – from car thieves to fathers avenging their sons’ murders – often acted outside the law after the law proved insufficient for the task.
Never one to search the same body of water twice, Cosby explores new depths in his latest work, All the Sinners Bleed, by focusing on the man of the law. Titus Crown, 36, is the first elected black sheriff in Charon County, Virginia, a “teardrop peninsula” in the Chesapeake Bay steeped in a dark history: In the early 1800s, white settlers burned down the region’s last Indigenous village and off en masse to impose their “obvious destiny.” Cosby makes it clear that the county – named after the mythological Greek who carried dead souls across the River Styx – has been marked by centuries of violence and chaos, perpetrated from harsh winters to family picnics and Founder’s Day celebrations is remembered on the district square. “These,” writes Cosby, “were the rocks on which the South was built.”
Some 200 years later, a year after our 45th President was elected, Titus is readjusting to small town life with his ailing father and a new love after a horrifying stint at the FBI’s Indiana field office exposed him to a kind of Christian die he has yet to fully process nationalist violence. But the city doesn’t let him rest any more than history lets him stay in the past.
Titus and his small team of local workers are called to a shooting at Jefferson Davis High School. The Charon County tragedy is quite different from the shooting at Virginia Tech, Columbine, Sandy Hook, or countless other schools on two fronts. First, the shooter is Black – Latrell Macdonald, the 20-year-old son of Titus’ high school friend. And Latrell has only one goal: a beloved teacher, Jeff Spearman, a white man who taught and mentored Titus and his friends and the current generation of Charon youth in the 1990s.
During a tense, detailed stand-off between the sheriff’s team and the armed young man, Latrell’s incoherent ramblings about Spearman and Malak al-Mawt (the Koranic angel of death) while holding a wolf mask suggest that something Stranger things are afoot than an escape. Shootout at the mill school. “Check his phone,” Latrell pleads with Titus. But before Titus Latrell can finish speaking, two police officers shoot the young man dead, thus preventing the possibility of learning his motive firsthand.
Before their bodies go cold, the deaths of Latrell and Spearman spark a whirlwind of public emotion in Charon County. Whites describe Latrell as a cold-blooded drug addict, while a dreadlocked cleric and his diverse, progressive congregation focus on a young black man murdered by racist cops.
Titus, a sheriff with experience in the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Division, must sort through tenuous leads at the crime scene while navigating a racially charged situation defined by neo-Confederates, who resent his independence, and blacks Residents who voted for him now suspect him of being an Oreo.
Add to the angry chorus Scott Cunningham, the chairman of the board, who likes to think he’s overseeing Titus even though the sheriff is an elected officer. Cunningham, from a venerable family who practically owns Charon County, put his considerable reputation and money behind Titus’ opponent, Cooter Benning, son of the former sheriff, whose campaign platform Titus sums up: “Harassment of the black and brown population and all who… voted democratically.” .”
When officers recover and unlock Spearman’s phone, Titus decides to privately view the videos and photos hidden on it. The damning evidence, dating back more than a decade, links students and teachers to a series of acts of violence against a number of black teenagers, some as young as 13, so horrific that Titus “burned the phone” would like. Scald his eyes with hot oil. Put Spearman and Latrell on a pyre and burn them both to ashes, then scatter those ashes to the four winds.”
The explosive find and the presence in the images of a third, masked perpetrator, unofficially dubbed the “Last Wolf”, prompt Titus to first search for the victims, which leads to an old pasture near a property where the remains of seven children entwined are found in the massive roots of the tree. The ensuing investigation to find the last wolf seduces Charon County residents, white and black, and uncovers abuse, corruption and more.
Cosby does an excellent job of outlining the county’s various actors and suspects, from wealthy city fathers and mothers to the neo-Confederates – Cosby’s term for the Civil War apologists marching to protect a statue of a beloved rebel hero. Everyone has something to say or something to hide – truck drivers, meth dealers, soul food restaurateurs, preachers of all faiths, and even members of Titus’ team. But Titus’ propelling perspective reveals the layers of complexity that a black cop patrolling a small southern town can divine, an educated man who ponders just as easily Flannery O’Connor’s observation of Christ’s visitation of the South, as does the earthier wisdom of his long-dead mother, whose voice guides his steps as surely as her death weighs his guilty heart.
When the hunt for the last wolf culminates in a fall festival coupled with a showdown between racist and progressive residents, readers will feel the full force of the currents tearing these disparate communities apart. And while there are other twists that draw on Cosby’s sometimes overused skill at depicting physical chaos, it’s the root causes and consequences of that violence that make All the Sinners Bleed his most haunting, timely, and timeless novel yet.
Woods is a book critic, anthology editor, and author of The Det. Secrets of Charlotte Justice.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
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