Texas Summer

Southern's modest, sensitive coming-of-age novel evokes Texas red-dirt country in the 1950s, when nitwits shoot deer or house cats for fun and a ``damn nigger'' is not worth anything. White 12-year-old Harold Stevens hunts, fishes, smokes pot and has adventures with black C.K., his father's hired hand. Trying hard to act grown-up, Harold assumes he's mentally superior to C.K., who's at least twice his age. Sly, clever C.K., who speaks a rich black idiom, is nobody's fool and the book's real hero, enduring the loutish whitefolk. When C.K.'s murderous convict brother, ``Big Nail'' Emmett, escapes from a prison farm, the stage is set for a tragedy that will presumably mark Harold forever. Screenwriter and novelist Southern ( Flash and Filigree ) faithfully records a time and a place, but the overall effect is rather slight. (Jan.)