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THE LIGHTWOOD TREE (378 pp.)--Berry Fleming--Lippincotf ($3).

Small politics usually make small novels, and The Lightwood Tree is no exception to the rule. Yet from the politics of his home town, Berry Fleming of Augusta, Ga. has succeeded in distilling enough of the historical essence of U.S. freedom and civil liberties to give The Lightwood Tree a realistic urgency rare among Southern novels outside the field of the race problem. The explanation is easy: large, balding Berry Fleming is a successful political operator himself. He was the intellectual sparkplug of a daring and determined revolution in Augusta.

For years this cozy little city has been notorious for the ruthless rule of the Cracker Party, an ignorant, illiterate conglomeration of mill hands, job holders, liquor dealers, and small businessmen. Boss Hague never ran a tighter system. Convicts and city materials went into private jobs; plain citizens were jugged for protesting. When Fleming, disgusted with the local scene, opened up on the Crackers, even his friends told him he was crazy to stick his neck out. He wrote, he spoke, he agitated, he became a zealot. In 1943 he published Colonel Effingham's Raid, a Book-of-the-Month novel whose harsh kidding of the Cracker Party and its dirty devices was lost on that organization's nonreading leaders. Last year Fleming's sowing reaped a triumphant harvest: the voters of Augusta kicked out the Cracker Party, and voted in a city-manager plan.

Some of this Fleming has now translated into The Lightwood Tree. George Cliatt, fortyish, teaches history at Fredericksville Academy, while his brother is fighting in the Pacific. At a football game where a minor ruckus develops, a friend of Cliatt's adds to the confusion by yelling "To hell with the Home Folks Party." The friend is arrested on orders of the boss.

Deeply disturbed, Cliatt gets him out and gradually becomes the local protagonist for civil liberties. Cliatt's attempts to rouse the people to their peril ends up in a drubbing at a revivalist meeting from which only Cliatt's conscience emerges clean and whole. A-Revolutionary War episode at Fredericksville is neatly interlaced to provide the historical perspective of the little man struggling almost alone for the common good.

It is doubtful whether Augusta's Crackers will see what Harvardman Berry Fleming is driving at, but most others will get his worthy point.

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