Book Review

By Derryll White

Burke, James Lee (2025).  Don’t Forget Me, Little Bessie.

                  “Mama said the frontier wasn’t a new territory waiting to be discovered.  She said it was a necropolis already groaning with the dead.”    –  James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke’s greatest gift is that he loves humanity and shares that with his readers.  His characters are hard in hard times but their souls shine.  Bessie Holland grows up fast in early twentieth century rural Texas, brutalized by the first oil boom and the greed of men and buffered by the bible and her ability to embrace friendly spirits. This is an America which is the forerunner of what Trump is empowered by today.

The author digs deep into an America he believes transcends the dirt and slop being currently served by its political leaders.  James Lee Burke has seen enough and done enough and thought enough to see through the present oligarchic anarchy.  He knows what the roots of the American dream are and how it was founded on the souls and hearts of men and women from many countries.

He sings the praises of the Mexicans and black Americans, of the Irish and the East Europeans who believed and worked to create a strong and true America.  Burke also sees how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The author always uplifts his readers in the end. He believes in the founding principles of his country and in the strength and power of its history. Astutely critical, James Lee Burke remains a true believer in the promise of a free America.

                  Mama always said children didn’t get to vote on which womb they’re coming out of.   –  James Lee Burke

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Excerpts from the novel:

1914 – The next day he was riding the spine of a boxcar loaded with ice and strawberries, headed not only to Chicago but to New York City and a life he could have never guessed at.  As he looked over his shoulder through his good eye, he saw the melted ice whipping from the cars, wetting the tracks, the locomotive undaunted by curves or tunnels or bridges.  This was the power of the twentieth century at work, offering every kind of reward for the brave at heart.  He knew his time had come.

THE AMERICAN DREAM – Thirdly, the government allowed the oil companies to suck a reserve dry, and to claim it as a loss.  How many American businesses were given an opportunity like that?

FRIENDS – It’s funny how the simple people you grow up with on a stretch of land are always with you, no matter what happens.  You miss them when you leave home, and you see them in your dreams when you’re old.  The community you share with them has no borders nor does it have a beginning or an end,  no more than the deed  in the courthouse has governance over the rising of the sun or its passing across the sky into the west, nor the lightning that dances silently on the horizon and the dust devils gliding across the plains, nor the ticking of a clock that human hands cannot stop.

TEXAS – Growing up in Texas could surely be a challenge, I told myself.  Maybe other places were no different, but I doubted that.  Almost everybody coming to early Texas was running from somewhere else.  That’s why they were called GTTs, meaning ‘gone to Texas.”  It also meant they had probably robbed their local bank.

RESPONSIBILITY – “I’m sorry, Papa,” I said inside my mind, wishing I could send my words to him on a passenger pigeon.  Buit the passenger pigeons had been wiped out, never to return again, and for no reason at all.  Is it any secret who has proved himself the earth’s greatest enemy?

AMERICAN PRIDE – The state I came from was a necropolis, and its birthplace was a roofless church where 188 men and boys held out for 13 days and were slaughtered to the last man, but not before they took 1,500 of the enemy with them.

BELIEVERS – But what else could I do?  Depend on Papa’s note? Try to embarrass Tony Vale again in public?  That didn’t work very well.  The only thing I got out of it was a terrible lesson: people believe what they need to believe; they change their minds when they’re ready.  Noah’s neighbors probably dismissed the weather report.

BELIEF – “He doesn’t let everyone see him,” I said.

    Í gathered that.”

    “You don’t believe he’s real, do you?”

    “I don’t challenge the beliefs of others, Bessie.  The people who deny a greater reality than the physical one take the easy way out.  They destroy the great mystery, and with it the incremental discovery of art and science.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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