Black Water Rising

Black Water Rising is a crime thriller by Attica Locke about a black lawyer named Jay Porter who lives and works on the Texas bayou in 1981, just after Reagan sets up shop in the White House. The book has three concurrent story lines, all of which feed into the drama of events as they unfold. The first story tells of Porter's narrowly avoided prison sentence at 19 for his radical work as a Black Panther; the second reveals a long-dead romance with Houston mayor Cynthia Maddox whom Porter meets again when he is representing a sex worker in a case against an oil tycoon, and the third is a strange murder case involving a woman who jumps on a barge Porter rents with his wife, and who may or may not be covering up an elaborate conspiracy.

The novel opens on Jay Porter, who is struggling with money. His wife Bernie is pregnant, and his law firm, which relies primarily on small injury claims and other civil court cases to get by, has dried up. Despite a lack of money, Porter wants to give his wife a memorable birthday gift, so he finds a friend who can rent him a barge, and they go out on the bayou to look at the stars and float around at dusk.

During this floating excursion, the couple is startled by the sound of a gunshot, a woman's scream, and then a splash as if someone had fallen into the water. Porter jumps into the murky waters, and comes back onto the barge with a damp but otherwise unharmed white woman in his arms. The woman refuses to speak about what happened to her or why she was in the water, a fact which both Bernie and Porter attribute to their blackness. They drop the woman off at the police station and leave, hoping not to get involved in the situation.



Despite wanting to avoid trouble, Porter soon learns that a murder was committed that night near the bayou. He can't resist returning to the scene to determine what happened, though digging deeper brings up not only enemies he can't afford to have, but also traumatic memories from his past as a radical activist.

As Porter investigates the murder case off the books, his father-in-law approaches him about defending a porter who claims he was mistreated at the docks by a big oil company exec. The longshoremen are striking, and the city is up in arms. Porter hesitates, but his father-in-law, a known minister in town, encourages him to do what is right even if it means staking his own reputation on it. Porter does represent the man, and is only more motivated to take action when he discovers that the murder and the  white woman from the bayou are connected to Big Oil, too.

There is underlying tension for Porter as he grapples with the memory of his father's death – he was refused treatment at a white hospital after being kicked in the head repeatedly by racist rednecks, and he died. Porter is also struggling with a long-ago romance with a white woman named Cynthia Maddox, who was engaged in black politics as a youth, but disappeared during Porter's trial at 19. She resurfaces as the Reagan-loving mayor of Houston many decades later, and Porter still has feelings for her, despite the about-face she pulled.



Tensions are high for Porter as he navigates his own traumas and violent history, and the power of Big Oil executives who want to use their power to step on those without any authority.

Attica Locke is an American author and screenwriter. She won many awards for her thriller Bluebird, Bluebird, and worked on the critically acclaimed television show Empire as a writer and producer. Black Water Rising is her first novel, and won an Edgar Award and five other honors, including a nomination for an Orange Prize. Locke is a Houston native, and often writes about Texas and Texans, though she now lives in Los Angeles with her family.