49 pages • 1 hour read
Melissa Fay GreenePraying for Sheetrock
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3
Chapter 14 Summary: “Commissioner Alston”
Alston dresses in an ostentatious manner that upsets the other white commissioners, who find his manner of dress to be gaudy. However, they are more upset because Alston is a black man who will loudly advocate for his community. Alston’s presence on the county commission leads to an intense focus on poverty and civil rights in the black community. The black residents of McIntosh return to their everyday lives and leave the politics to Alston. His revolutionary fervor does not match most people’s simple desires to care for their home and family. Alston speaks his mind and upsets his white colleagues on the county commission, who are used to more compliant and submissive “token” black leaders like Thorpe. He also irritates his black friends from time to time with his heated worldviews, though people like Pinkney continue to support him. Alston sees himself as a revolutionary, or a “thorn in the side of white establishment” (248).
After Alston gets elected, Sheriff Poppell no longer runs the commission like his private council. Poppell’s influence is on the decline, and Alston’s is on the rise. Doctors diagnose Poppell with leukemia. On his deathbed, Poppell requests to see Alston, but Alston refuses to visit him out of fear for his safety. Pinkney visits Poppell, and Poppell asks Pinkney to look after his sheriff’s deputies, much to Pinkney’s astonishment. Poppell dies in 1979 without appointing anyone to take his place, so Poppell’s wife tries to assume his position. Alston is the only one on the commission to vote against hiring Mrs. Poppell.
In his personal life, Alston leads a pleasant family life with his wife, Becca, and their children, including a beloved son, Keith, and four girls that they are fostering in their home. However, Alston’s political work with the NAACP jeopardizes his family situation, and the local social services department takes the girls away after they receive complaints that the political situation in the home is inappropriate for raising children.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Through the Ocean of the Sea for Her Child”
Alston begins suffering from visions of strange places, and he gets the sense that he must get away from McIntosh and never return, in part to his disillusionment with his life in politics. He shares his feelings with his wife, Becca, who tells him to have faith in God. Alston seems to be on the brink of despair, but he finds solace in his son, Keith. Keith crosses the highway to get a snack, and a car hits him while he’s crossing the road; Keith dies. Becca blames Alston for her son’s death, stating that if Alston were home at the time of the accident, Keith would still be alive. Alston is also wracked with guilt, though he does not openly express it. Becca comes to despise Alston for leaving her alone in a broken home while he buries his sorrows in McIntosh’s nightlife and alcohol. Alston cannot bear to be home alone with Becca after Keith’s death.
Alston wins a case to get Social Security disability benefits, which they use to remodel their house. However, they can’t appreciate the benefits because of Keith’s death, and they’re still in financial difficulty because they have numerous children to support. To make matters worse, Alston is indicted for corruption while holding a public office. He’s alleged to have charged a woman for using a county bulldozer and pocketing the money he received from the transaction. Walbert—one of the white lawyers who had helped Alston back in the 1970s—flies down to serve as his legal representation. The jurors acquit the case because the evidence is lacking. Alston loses his county commission following the trial. He spends his time drinking with Irvin Brennon, an unemployed man who had spent time in jail for dealing marijuana. Alston eventually gets reelected in 1986, but he feels unimportant. Grovner and Pinkney express their concern about Alston’s behavior, but he dismisses them.
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Music Man”
A new man known as J.R. appears from out of town, and he befriends Alston. J.R. wants to open a black teen club in town, and he solicits Alston’s help. He implicitly offers Alston a bribe in exchange for his political help in getting a business with a liquor license established in town—and for his confidentiality. Alston feels hopeful for the first time in a long while. Greene writes that Alston is initially naïve, as he fails to see that J.R. clearly wants to establish a club as a front for drug dealing. Coincidentally, Alston is also the commissioner tasked with overseeing the fight against drugs.
Over time, Alston and J.R. develop an understanding that J.R. cares more about selling drugs through the nightclub. J.R. uses Alston’s address for the liquor license application for his club. The sheriff believes J.R. is a drug dealer and refuses to approve the application. J.R. appeals to the county commission. Meanwhile, J.R. works with Alston’s friend, Brennon, to purchase a large parcel of cocaine. However, Brennon does not know how to acquire such a large quantity of drugs. J.R. and Brennon arrange a day to meet to complete the drug exchange, and Alston comes along to oversee the transaction. J.R arrests Alston and Brennon for drug dealing, and it’s revealed that J.R. is an undercover police agent whose real name is William R. “Billy” Carter. Pinkney says of Alston, “He got caught into a situation he couldn’t get out of” (312).
Carter, or “J.R.,” regrets arresting a black commissioner, but he doesn’t believe there was racial malice behind the investigation. Carter doesn’t think Alston is a bad person—just someone who did something wrong. Alston projects an aura of innocence during his trial, claiming to know nothing about drugs. The jury convicts Alston of conspiring to possess and intending to distribute cocaine. The judge sentences Alston to 78 months in federal prison. He appeals his sentence based on an unfairly stacked jury—there is only one black person—but loses his case. Alston’s friends say that he was too eager to please, and that’s how he got caught up in this mess. Others say that he was entrapped and that those resources could have been better spent catching real drug dealers.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Head in the Lion’s Mouth, Got to Ease It Out”
This final chapter shows the fallout of Alston’s trial and conviction on his wife and children. While Alston is in prison, the children miss their father. Other children bully them at school because of their father’s fall from grace. The family also stops receiving Alston’s disability payments. Becca must suddenly become the sole financial provider for her family. Becca speaks of her husband coldly and says there is no relationship between them anymore. In jail, Alston finally has the time to properly mourn his dead son, Keith. Alston renews his faith in God.
Deep in McIntosh County, the black residents hear of Alston’s jailing and take strength in God; they believe that man controls his fate with God’s guidance. Curry shares a series of moral stories from his life with biblical lessons. In one story, Curry deceives a customer so he can sell them eggs at a higher price; years later, a young man lies and sells Curry a pitiful plum tree. Curry considers it a form of karmic justice.
Greene turns the page to the next chapter in McIntosh history: September 1989. A black woman, Evella Brown, runs and wins the post of superintendent of education, despite facing bigotry. The former black mayor pro term, Devillers, weighs in on the race and the history and current-day status of race relations. Other black professionals are also ascending to positions of power in Darien. Of the progress in McIntosh, Greene writes “Of course, it is not enough, but it is a beginning” (335).
Part 3 Analysis
Greene employs foreshadowing to signal Alston’s decline. Alston dreams of a large, nice house where he’ll stay and never return home, because “I have no reason to go back” (271). This dream may foreshadow his later prison sentence or foreshadow his future desire to escape from reality following the death of his son and the lack of fulfillment in his political career. Alston starts out his position on the county commission as an idealistic revolutionary. Through his advocacy for the black community, the reader sees the difference one person can make. They see the need for representation of minorities in positions of power, particularly given Alston’s focus on civil rights when no one else in his community is talking about these broader racial injustices.
However, the gap between ordinary people and politicians rubs up against Alston: “People’s lives do not consist, on the whole, of politics and large ideals, but of children and groceries and laundry and paychecks” (253). The fact that people don’t give him any more special regard than anyone else bruises Alston’s ego, particularly after the hardship he has endured to get to his position and all the effort he puts in to help his constituents. This realization marks the first step in Alston’s downfall after his hard-won rise to power.
Greene highlights the irony of Alston’s circumstances in the following examples: Alston is part of a major lawsuit to overturn discrimination in the selection of the grand jury in McIntosh County, but he can’t prove that the jury in his own trial—comprising 11 white people and one black person—is unfair. Alston is concerned about waste and graft, but he later becomes embroiled in a corruption scandal himself. Finally, Alston gets caught up in a drug dealing scandal when he leads the county’s fight against drugs.
Alston presents himself as naïve to J.R.’s true intentions, and while that may not be entirely the case by the end, he is initially lured into J.R.’s web under false pretenses. Greene expresses Alston’s naivete in the form of metaphor: “Thurnell [Alston] glided like an old bateau onto the stream of J.R.’s words and let himself be lulled into the promise of a safe harbor” (300). Although Greene often summarizes conversations or adds her own interpretation of events, in Chapter 16, she quotes long stretches of verbatim conversation between J.R. and Alston. Her purpose in doing this is to show how these two men talk in circles around each other—first in miscommunication but finally as a way of talking about illegal matters—bribes and drugs—in a less explicit fashion.
Although most black residents in McIntosh support Alston—to varying degrees—the white residents in McIntosh have other opinions: “The white people were more skeptical; they put up with Thurnell [Alston] as commissioner, but they weren’t easily impressed by him. Some thought him as corrupt as the rest” (256). Racial stereotypes also damage Alston’s reputation, as “to the judge and jury he appeared to be simply another corrupt black official” (319). We get a sense that Alston’s downfall is a tragedy for him and for the public perception of black professionals in the South, who have only recently overcome the yoke of segregation and rise to power. As one black woman says, “When Thurnell [Alston] went to jail, we all went to jail” (323). When a man who claims to represent the black community goes down for corruption, he taints his entire community by association.
In some ways, not much has changed since Alston’s fight for upheaval in the 1970s, as we see when some black women refuse to vote for a black woman they perceive as being less qualified than a white person. Nonetheless, Evella Brown—a black woman—wins the race, which would have been unthinkable just 15 years beforehand. Things do change but not fast enough, as Devillers says, “There are still too many bigots among both black and white. It has gotten somewhat better, but we still haven’t arrived. We have a long way to go” (334-35).
