Glimpse the Promised Land by Houston L. Crumpler, Jr. captures the entire complex tapestry of a 1970s Southern town. In this sprawling American tale of regular people who chase their own little piece of the “promised land”, that better life they’re always hoping for, and how the road to get there is never clear.
Stranded in an airport on September 11, 2001, Melody and Mrs. Penny pass the time with a story about Melody’s family in the 1970s, and an intriguing cast of characters living in their North Carolina hometown.
Brick and Marsh MacKoy, along with their uncle Mr. Malcolm, stir up the town with their new real estate project, Sunrise Acres. Meant to build futures, along with houses and paying off debts, the project ultimately exposes the complicated ties between families, both black and white, that go back generations.
Glimpse the Promised Land quickly expands beyond the construction site, to holiday barbecues, rescue squad fundraisers, and wild hunting trips to the Outer Banks. The era takes particular and evocative shape under the lingering shadow of Vietnam, with rhythms of beach music accompanying the quiet, daily negotiations of a South that’s still figuring out integration.
These forces collide upon Sunrise Acres, whose development depends on personal loyalties, poker games, and navigating the unspoken rules that have governed the area for a hundred years.
You can feel trouble brewing just under the surface. Marsh’s new wife seems restless, a shady albino hustler is circling the project, and you have to wonder if the cousins’ old partying ways and a sudden mystery of stolen cattle will end up undermining the whole fragile endeavor before the first hundred houses are even built.
Crumpler imbues an extensive cast with unique but interconnected personalities and embeds the narrative with fascinating historical details and events that influence the people of the region and beyond.
Along with the MacKoy family, Deacon Buckhorn, the Native American mason, works to pay a debt and get his daughter Melody through college. Donald, a young black man, is determined to find steady work and a family of his own. The good-hearted ex-con, Mingo’s talent for carpentry places him in the center of the project. They all feel real and flawed, trying their best with how the past has shaped them.
The characters speak with the Southern cadence and local color of their home, and the conversational tone of the prose itself will make readers feel as if they’ve joined the storytellers on a North Carolina porch.
Across their disparate lives, the cast is unified by the desperate search for a promised land. Not only for a simple, stable, happy life, but for a promised land with the aspirations of the total American experience and the desire shared by most of us to achieve a meaningful measure of individual fulfillment. Through their quest, the reader comes to see how connected we all truly are, even when society tries to pull us apart. Shared histories and the legacies left by their ancestors, both the good and bad, bind these characters together across racial and social lines.
Houston L. Crumpler, Jr. doesn’t offer an ending that’s wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow. Just like the Sunrise Acres project, Glimpse the Promised Land is a rich, ambitious family saga that peels back the layers of a specific place and time to show us who we are as a society. If you want to get lost in a fully-built world that feels true to life with all its complications and hopes, then you might just find yourself glimpsing the promised land too.
