cover image The Ebony Keys

The Ebony Keys

Lloyd Campbell. SOS Publications, $0 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-938422-18-1

This is another volume in the publisher's mini-bound editions. Parnell Corby is a black enlisted man who saves the life of a white officer in World War II. A guarded friendship develops between them and after the war they form a partnership to expand Parnell's restaurant business in the South. Parnell's wife Leila, who witnessed her father's lynching and was herself raped by a white youth, holds to her belief that blacks and whites shouldn't mix. Then the Corbys' only son enlists during the Korean War and, stationed in Europe, forms a relationship with a German woman. He is killed by men of his own color, but has already fathered a daughter who, years later, is brought to the U.S. to meet her grandparents and reconcile her grandmother to hopes of interracial peace. This first novel by a retired Air Force officer is plotted with care, but its two-dimensional characters weaken the story and strain credibility. October 31