The Hanging of Ruben Ashford by Lauren Small Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Brick House Books/Stonewall, 2022
$20.00, 286 pages
ISBN: 978-1938144905

”Tell me about Baltimore,” Josie Berenson says to her new friend, Nell Winters, whom she has just met on Cape Cod. “I’ve never been there. Tell me everything.”

“Everything?” Nell replies. “That’s a tall order.”

Indeed, it is, but Lauren Small gives us deep insight into this city, “a border town,” as the lawyer, Norbert Richards later tells Josie when he enlists her aid in the Ruben Ashford case, a Black man accused of murdering a white woman, Constance Prentiss; Maryland was on the border between North and South during the Civil War and has always had attitudes appropriate to the Confederacy while Baltimore went full Jim Crow through the 1950’s.

“Would it surprise you to hear Maryland has yet to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment?” the lawyer, who is African-American, asks her.

“Josie didn’t know what to say,” Small writes. “Baltimore was beginning to seem very different to her from Boston indeed.” We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto!

For the record, Maryland did not ratify the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship and equal protection under the law to everyone, regardless of race, until 1959.

The year is 1918. Josie has moved to Baltimore to be with her lover, Nell. She had been expected to marry her Boston suitor, Freddie, who joins the army and is killed in France. Nell is a physician, born and bred in Baltimore. By chance, Ruben Ashford’s family have been among her patients. Nell had been in Cape Cod nursing a wounded heart after a disastrous affair with a married man, when they met.

The Baltimore of 1918 that Small describes is not unlike the America of 2020, in the throes of a pandemic (Spanish Flu) and racked by racial injustice.

Josie is interested in human behavior. She works at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Adolf Meyer, a psychiatrist, head of the Phipps Clinic, for whom Josie is a research assistant, has recommended Josie to his lawyer friend. It’s a highly unusual case, he explains. Ashford insists he is guilty of the crime, but he is unable to say why he did it. “I thought it might interest you to find out why.”

Indeed, Josie has already proven herself a capable investigator. When a society woman, Evangeline Bryce, attempts suicide by swallowing lye, and her husband tries to cover it up to “protect her reputation,” Josie skillfully investigates the circumstances for Dr. Meyer. She even goes to the Bryces’ exclusive home in Roland Park. Small’s depiction of the relationship between Josie and Nell offers insight into yet another of Lauren Small’s themes regarding justice – not just racial but gender equality – as does her research into this other case.

"There was another component to Evangeline’s suicide attempt that bothered Josie, although she wasn’t sure how, or if, she should include it in her report: the fact that Evangeline was a woman—and a wife. To what extent had her choices in life been constrained by expectations society imposed on her? Was her beautiful bedroom nothing more than a gilded cage? It made Josie feel ever more strongly about attending the upcoming rally for women’s suffrage with Nell. Choice: now there was something women might very well benefit from, beginning with their vote."

But it’s the racial divide that’s front and center in The Hanging of Ruben Ashford. The title of the novel already tells us that Josie is not able to exonerate the accused murderer, against whom the cards are already stacked, being a Black man accused of killing a white woman. But the psychological sleuthing in which Josie engages is utterly compelling. Indeed, Ashford’s own mentality, as Josie discovers, is key to the mystery. I will not spoil the suspense by revealing the plot, but trust me, Lauren Small tells a great story, even as she shines a light on Baltimore – and America. As she writes early on:

"The Baltimore divide. Nell had learned the term as a schoolgirl in geography class. The teacher stood in front of the classroom pointing with a long wooden stick at a map of their hometown. A divide, she intoned, was a line of high ground forming the division between two river valleys, in their case the Gwynns Falls to the west and the Jones Falls to the east. To the south was the harbor, to the north the green stretches of Druid Hill Park, and in between, their neighborhood: West Baltimore."

"Even as a child Nell knew the term had another meaning, harder to pin down but far more telling: the divide that ran through her neighborhood, separating the airy north-south avenues where the white people lived from the cramped east-west colored alleyways. The Baltimore she knew was not one city but two, or rather any number of cities, filled with people conducting their lives in close, overlapping proximity to one another while at the same time remaining infinitely far apart. The racial divide determined everything in her hometown: which streetcar you rode on, where you walked and where you shopped, where you ate, with whom you spoke, where you worked, where you worshiped. If you were unlucky enough to be sent to war, the divide determined which regiment you served in, and if you died, it dictated where you were buried."

"When Nell became a doctor, she’d determined to treat colored and white equally."

Dr. Nell Winters is as much a character to admire as Josie Berenson. Their relationship is at the heart of this story. Nell’s actions during the pandemic are vividly depicted as she administers to victims of the virus, eerily familiar in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic. While an insightful portrayal of the Baltimore of a century ago, the themes in this gorgeous novel are so contemporary, so timeless. Nor do they get in the way of the story; rather, they give it an exquisite urgency. This novel is both instructive, on so many levels, and a gripping read.