Notes about Reece’s Novel “The Hawk and the Sun”
“The really great writers not only write spellbinding stories and insightful poetry, but they help us learn things about ourselves. Byron Herbert Reece was certainly such a man. He did not just write about life; he lived life and then as he allowed life to soak through the pores of his soul, he put words together in such a way as to enable us to understand important things about how life is to be lived. When Reece wrote “The Hawk and the Sun” in 1955, he opened a window to see the evil implications of living with the racial prejudice and hatred which was so prevalent in the South of his day. It is a story which not only reflects an ugly era of southern history, but also reveals to us what can happen when we live complicit to the presence of any evil in our midst. As we read of the people in Reece’s town of Tilden, we begin to see how we could be its citizens by the choices of our own day. There were present in Reece’s town actors of violent hatred born out of prejudice, silent watchers of what was unfolding in their midst, and even one man who knew the right and wrong of what he was seeing, but always seemed to be walking a step behind the cresting wave of evil. “The Hawk and the Sun” is not easy bedtime reading. The pace of the story is deliberate, perhaps, as a way of forcing those of us who read to know that the book is not so much about entertainment as it is personal reflection about who we really are. It raises questions about the injustices of our culture, the way we respond to those injustices as a community and enables us to see the logical conclusions of unchecked distancing from people who are different. When Byron Herbert Reece wrote this book, he was out of sync with the mainline thought of his own world which is a dangerous and risky place for any man to stand. As we see the simple farmer and writer standing in such a precarious place, we are caused to wonder, “Why not I?”
Bill Strickland
Original Published in the North Georgia News, Fall 2024
