Boys

BROTHERHOOD IS MORE THAN SKIN DEEP

Pete and Alex are brothers, raised together on a dairy farm in the Great Smokey Mountains during the Great Depression. Their hometown is beset by the ignorance and racial intolerance of the post-Reconstruction South. For the two boys, those challenges are magnified because Pete is white, and Alex is black.

As a boy, Alex takes refuge in the milking barn of the Forest Hill Dairy after the Rockingham County Klan murders his family. The Forest Hill Dairy is owned by “Poppa” Barnes, an abusive, emotionally remote Primitive Baptist preacher. “Poppa” Barnes allows Alex to remain on the dairy if, and only if, he is willing to work. About the same age, Pete Barnes accepts Alex as his brother, but to the remainder of the family, he is only “Boy.” Pete’s bond to Alex is strengthened by their crossing of their town’s color line.

Estranged from the rigid theology and racism of “Poppa” Barnes, the two boys leave home to join North Carolina’s Old Hickory Division in anticipation of war in Europe but are segregated again by Army policy. They do not see each other again until the pivotal Battle of Mortain where Alex heroically saves Pete’s life. In turn, Alex is grievously wounded and saved by Pete’s medical skills. Alex recovers in Margate, England but is re-wounded by the same bigotry and disrespect he had experienced prior to the war. Alex commits himself to discovering his own identity as a black man, no longer in the shadow of his white Barnes family.

Pete and Alex are finally reunited at Fort Jackson, S.C. in 1969. Now the Chief of the Military Police, Major Alex Broadnax, is responsible for investigating the brutal off-base beating of Colonel Pete Barnes, Chief of Womack Army Hospital. To solve the case, Major Broadnax must navigate the swirling racial waters of the 1960’s deep South, the hostility between military and civilian authorities, and his history with the Barnes family. Alex’s family knows nothing about his traumatic childhood, nor his white brother, and Alex must simultaneously protect them from the racial hostility that has always accompanied his “brotherhood” with Pete.