World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Cotton

Name: Cotton
Author: Christopher Wilson
ISBN: 9780156030458

by Christopher Wilson

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Overview

Lee Cotton is a black boy born white-skinned in segregated Eureka, Mississippi, in 1950. Over the course of Lee’s first twenty years, he will fall in love with the daughter of a local Klansman, get kicked senseless and left for dead on a freight train headed north, end up in St. Louis as a white man, and be drafted into the psych-ops corps in Nevada. There, a drunken accident will separate Lee from another part of his identity and change his fate yet again. Before he returns to Mississippi, he will experience up close and personal the women’s liberation movement and the dawn of the Lesbian Nation. Lee Cotton’s voice—equal parts Delta Blues and Motown—takes us on an exhilarating freedom ride through America’s preoccupation with identity politics. His funny, forgiving charm ultimately embodies a serious message: The freaks and oddities of this world may well be divine.

Synopsis

Lee Cotton’s voice—equal parts Delta Blues and Motown—takes us on an exhilarating freedom ride through America’s preoccupation with identity politics. His funny, forgiving charm ultimately embodies a serious message: The freaks and oddities of this world may well be divine.

The Washington Post - Jeff Turrentine

Cotton , a new novel by the British writer Christopher Wilson, delights in dialectics. Its eponymous main character resides in that poorly mapped territory between black and white, male and female, straight and gay, cultured and rustic. And because his highly unusual life takes place in America during the tumultuous third quarter of the 20th century -- a span of time that saw the Civil Rights Act, The Feminine Mystique and the Stonewall riots -- you can bet that the author has a few things to say about the messy manner in which America processes its conflicts.

About the Author, Christopher Wilson

CHRISTOPHER WILSON earned his Ph.D. in humor and works as a consulting semiotician. His first novel, Mischief, was short-listed for the Whitbread Award. He lives in London.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Forrest Gump has nothing on Lee Cotton, the charismatic protagonist of Wilson's second novel, whose exploits provide a humorous, clever, and provocative look at 20th-century America.

Mississippi, 1950. Lee is born a black baby with milky white skin, the result of a dalliance between his black mother and an Icelandic seaman. The local reverend surmises that Lee is God's way of showing "that He's got himself an Almighty sense of humor," but Lee's strange appearance is just one of the ways in which he fails to conform to the world around him. For Lee has a gift of hearing other people's thoughts that also sets him apart -- and gets him into plenty of trouble when he repeats those thoughts aloud. Lee's confounding presence causes ripples of tension everywhere he goes: Where should he go to school? Where should he sit on the bus? And whom is he supposed to date? It even leads to a run-in with Klan members that will set Lee on a course that leads to undreamed-of challenges.

Like nothing you've read before, Cotton is a big, rollicking novel, introducing a unique and highly sympathetic character who comes face-to-face with the politics of segregation, the Vietnam War, and the women's movement. (Holiday 2005 Selection)

Jeff Turrentine

Publishers Weekly

Wilson's winning 20th-century picaresque wanders from the Deep South to the Midwest and on to San Francisco, following its protagonist through multiple and surprising identities. If the locales exude a faint whiff of familiarity, Lee Cotton, the book's shape-shifting main character, has a body (and a mind) that keeps things interesting. Beginning life as a "black soul in a white wrapper," Lee leaves Mississippi after a horrific beating at the hand of a local racist. He passes for white in St. Louis, getting work as a hospital orderly. But fate has more changes in store. A freak accident and doctoring by an "offbeat" surgeon have him embark on a new life as a woman... and then Lee's skin starts to darken. Wilson (Mischief) offers readers both a sharp-eyed, amusing ramble through America from the 1950s to the '70s and a critique of exclusionary identity politics. As Lee tells a heckler late in the book, "All my life I been hounded for being born the wrong color, or the wrong sex, or dating the wrong person, or living in the wrong place. We ain't what we're born. We're what we do with ourselves." Though marred by a somewhat hokey ending, this book is nevertheless very funny, profoundly endearing and highly memorable. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

London-based Wilson's U.S. debut (he was short-listed for the Whitebread Award for Mischief) takes a fanciful and sometimes graphic look at 20th-century American culture as seen through the eyes of a Southern black boy named Lee Cotton, who is born with white skin and is able to hear people's thoughts. Cotton grows up and falls in love with Angelina, the daughter of a Ku Klux Klansman, who beats Cotton nearly to death after discovering their affair. After being found on a freight train in the Midwest, Cotton is brought back to life, only to have his penis severed in a freak auto accident. Under the care of a renegade surgeon, Cotton is transformed into a glamorous woman and finds work as a model in San Francisco, where he falls in love with a female investigative reporter who helps him reunite with his family and confront Angelina's father. During these dramatic episodes, Cotton's skin color darkens, and he discovers feathers protruding from his back, which forces him to conclude, "We ain't what we're born. We're what we do with ourselves." This whimsical tale, filled with highly entertaining puns and innuendos, explores race, gender, and sexual stereotypes through an unusual set of characters and bizarre circumstances. Recommended for all collections.-David A. Berone, Univ. of New Hampshire Lib., Durham Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Before he is 30, Lee Cotton experiences life as a black boy, a white man, a white woman, and a black woman. The son of a black woman and a white Icelandic sailor, he was born in 1950 in Eureka, MS. White skin and blond hair notwithstanding, he was raised to know his place in the world. When he has a relationship with the daughter of a local bigot at age 15, he is beaten up by the Ku Klux Klan and left for dead. The staff at the St. Louis hospital to which he is transferred knows him only as a brain-damaged John Doe, and he gets his first taste of life as a white person. His memory returns just in time to be drafted for the Vietnam War. A car accident and misplaced whiskey bottle result in a sex-change operation by a disbarred physician, and, after several years as a white woman, his genes catch up with him and his skin slowly darkens. Farfetched though the plot may be, Wilson writes with an easy grace and humor that make Lee a thoroughly delightful protagonist. The author paints such a compelling picture of the South in the mid-20th century that it is hard to believe that he is British. In introducing Lee, he does far more than spin an irresistible tragicomedy that combines history with flights of fancy-he challenges us to look at what truly defines us if it is not our race, gender, or socioeconomic status.-Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library System, VA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A picaresque odyssey about a shape-shifter-a kind of goofy Orlando-who embodies the upheaval of three decades. Leifur Nils Kristjansson St. Marie du Cotton is born in the mid-20th century to a black mother and a globe-trotting Icelander. This Nordic oddity is raised in a Delta dirt-farm setting that recalls Steve Martin's The Jerk. He falls in love with Angelina, the daughter of a racist, and joins voting drives and civil-rights marches. From his New Orleans aristocratic grandmother, Celeste, he inherits the ability to read minds. The narrator is beguiling, and the contortionist linguistic feats performed by this southern-fried, neurologically challenged savant are riveting. Ambushed by his paramour's father and the latter's Klan cohorts, he is left for dead, his battered body dumped on a freight car and shipped north. Rescued by a St. Louis brain surgeon, he takes on a new identity, Lee McCoy, white man. After being drafted, he is assigned to a special unit called the Beige Berets, dedicated to psychological warfare through telepathy. A clairvoyant buddy, Ethan, slips him some sports results that will secure Lee's financial future. But when a car accident damages his penis, he undergoes surgery and, courtesy of the defrocked but talented renegade Doc Gene, becomes a woman. From there, the only logical destination is San Francisco, where Lee is adopted by a teahouse coven of radical lesbian feminists who reject her when they learn she's a porn starlet. Then it's love and domesticity with a mousy journalist covering the Patty Hearst brouhaha. At some point the narrator's skin darkens naturally as a result of estrogen treatment, and there is a final reckoning with mentors and tormentorsalike. A bit of Touched By an Angel sanctimony near the end scarcely dampens the antic entertainment offered here.