(he) felt ashamed of his country and his home state.' But with the weighty ambivalence shared by many Texans of color, Mathews also 'felt a hot rage at the students and professors around him, most of them white Northerners, clucking their tongues and whispering Texas in a way that suggested both pity and disdain for a land that Darren loved, a state that had made him a gentleman and a fighter in equal measure.' He was raised by his twin paternal uncles - one a Texas Ranger, the other a lawyer - who, despite often finding themselves on opposite sides of the law's ideological divide, ingrained a sense of responsibility in their nephew that, following the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, eventually lured him from law school in Chicago to the Stetson, boots and badge of the storied Texas Rangers.įor Mathews, '(it) was hard to put into words the fury he felt at the fact that someone had literally dragged a black man through a town not a hundred miles from the place where Darren grew up. It was an arrogance born of genuine fortitude and a streak of hardheadedness six generations deep.' was the most quintessentially Texas thing about them. Home for Mathews is rooted deep in the fertile soil of Camilla, the sleepy town in which the Mathewses have lived for generations, refusing to flee and carve a life in the foreign promise of Chicago or Detroit: '(W)hat they were not going to be was run off. But a family friend's missing gun and a dead ABT member - and his wife's thinning patience - call him back home to Shelby County. how easily a colored man's general comportment could turn into a matter of life and death.' Mathews works from the Houston office on a task force targeting the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a ruthless prison gang built on white supremacy. He acknowledges the benefits of the badge but adheres to 'the ancient rules of Southern living. But he knows that justice, especially for blacks, often isn't blind.

Darren Mathews, the raw-edged hero with a hankering for whiskey, is a black Texas Ranger who fights for justice - and battles with his own persistent demons.

Bluebird bluebird by attica locke