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| January 2005: Books About the South | |||||
| The Problem With Murmur Lee, Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother's Journey, Early Leaving, and many more in January's Books About the South. | |||||
Sometimes the most frightening and important journeys take us where we've already been. In this book, tentative steps lead to memory, unrelinquished sorrow, and ultimately to hope. "Past folds into present, present into future and back again," writes the author, "to the beginning of who I am and who I might become." At age 16, the author birthed a son and gave him up for adoption. In this memoir, she examines everything in her experience and explores the deep pores of her loss, hurt, and longing. Through honest storytelling and striking detail, she refines her dark, painful memories until there is light. As she did in Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, Karen Salyer McElmurray opens up her past to find meaning and peace. Somewhere in the writing of this memoir, she finds her son as well. "I have birthed this thing called a book," she writes, "and called to life the lost past I have so wanted." Taylor Bruce
Every mother who has ever indulged, protected, and adored her child too much will cringe at the results of the same for Kathryne Smallwood and her only son, Early. On the first page, author Judy Goldman delivers the public crumbling of this pillar-of-the-community family. A newspaper article reports Early's arrest for the murder of a young man. Then the North Carolina writer expertly takes us through Kathryne's memories of her marriage, Early's birth, and how her family arrived at this horrific point. With hindsight, Kathryne begins to see the damage she wrought. As she and other characters admit wrongdoing, they move past their formerly perfect, now ravaged, lives into an imperfect future they can face honestly--and even hopefully. Nancy Dorman-Hickson
What starts as a typical Southern tale about growing up in a poor, rural town becomes a saga of one woman's refusal to be a product of her environment. In Fierce, Barbara Robinette Moss, the Alabama author of Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter, shares memories from her youth up through her present life. As a child, she bought five "magic" beans, wishing for the life she wanted. Instead, she reaped an abusive, alcoholic father and then a string of failed marriages. Despite her circumstances, she nourishes a love for art, turning her sorrows into brushstrokes and using her once-broken life as inspiration. Eventually, the author achieves her childhood dream, becoming "A woman, a mother, an artist, a dreamer, a wisher, a hoper, a prayer, a magic bean buyer." Allison Barnes
"I grew up in a small Alabama community with music all around me. Cadence and interval, scale and syncopation, timbre and tone. There were no instruments, no melody as such, for the music came from the everyday language of people I encountered each day, especially the old folks. I worry these days that the music of our language--our own unique orchestration of the mother tongue--has about played out. As the South becomes more homogenized, we are in danger of losing some of the speech patterns, idioms, and accents that make our language sing. It gives me the weary-dismals, as Aunt Tess used to say. Southerners are a diverse and complex lot, which is why Hollywood and New York almost always get it wrong. It's why so many depictions of the South and its inhabitants have been reduced to cornpone--If we could only glad-eye some of those folks and get them down here, we could school them a little, as my Uncle Kin might opine. Traveling 100 miles from any given point in the South can bring marked changes in folkways, customs, terrain, politics, mores, traditions, and religious practices. And when it comes to the Southern accent--there isn't one, there are more varieties than you can say grace over." --excerpted from the book's "Measure for Measure" by Brenda Witchger. This is the first in an annual anthology about Southern culture. For more information visit www.mupress.org.
" 'Bailey.' 'Yeah?' 'I don't want you to be a waterman.' For a moment, Bailey thought he had imagined it. He stared at his father in disbelief, but Orrin, his jaw set, kept his eyes on a distant buoy. 'What?' He couldn't have heard right. 'I don't want you to be a waterman,' Orrin repeated, still squinting into the distance, a muscle in his jaw working spasmodically. The words made no sense to Bailey, like some new language. 'What do you mean?' he whispered, his voice inaudible over the rumble of the engine. He knew that other watermen, discouraged at the diminishing stocks and increasing regulations, told their sons not to become watermen, to come ashore, go into a trade, but Bailey had never imagined his father would be one of them. 'You're right,' his father continued. 'It's a pitiful haul. It's gonna be worse this year than last. It's comin' to an end, Son. I been thinkin' about it. I never had no choice. For a couple a' reasons. But you're smart, Bailey. You could do other things. I want you to have better'n to use up your life tryin' to make a livin' out here, blamin' yourself for what you can't change.' " --excerpted from the book
"Not everyone who reads this book will be pleased with it. One person's honest appraisal often strikes another as unnecessary criticism. Some will say I spend too much time on the negative and not enough on the positive, that my historical glass seems perpetually half-empty rather than half-full. To me, the fullness or emptiness is of less interest than the halfness. Why does a state with so much human and natural potential settle so often for mediocrity? Why are Alabamians' expectations so low when excellence is so often within their grasp? The incidence of world-class performance in so many spheres of life makes more poignant the persistent waste and inefficiency and backwardness of so much of Alabama's collective life. Alabamians who persist through the first painful chapters of describing the state's political economy will grow increasingly proud of what they encounter. They will discover enough nobility of spirit, courage under fire (literally and figuratively), creativity, and accomplishment to make even the most cynical citizen proud. They will also encounter enough corruption, opportunism, cowardice, betrayal of power, and lack of vision to make even the most chest-thumping booster ashamed. This is the way of history." --excerpted from the book's Preface. The book includes three parts: "Alabama's Political Economy," "Alabama's Society," and "Alabama's Culture."
"They followed the intermittent bursts of ax-chopping, until they reached the clearing in the woods where Luke was trying to build a barn. It's not like they did not need a barn; they did, but now that the TVA was building the Cove Creek Dam and making everybody move, there was no need. Besides, Luke's barn was a fool idea even if there were no Cove Creek Dam, no TVA, no relocation workers driving people to ragged land all over east Tennessee, pleading, How about this one? Won't this do? Because it made no sense to build a new barn in the middle of the woods. It was the kind of thing Luke did, though, to get it in his mind to build a barn, then not see clear to build it in the right place. There didn't have to be any Cove Creek Dam to make Luke think crooked. Arliss was used to hearing his parents talk about Luke this way, and he knew the problem. The problem was that Luke walked in an unchristian-like manner. He knew because he had been at the New Hope Primitive Baptist Church all three times Luke had apologized, and all three times Pastor Stiles had forgiven him in front of everybody, but now the question was, how many more times could it happen before they kicked him out for good? None, if Arliss's mother had anything to do with it. Marion was an Old Testament Christian, and when it was her turn to sit at the table with God, she was going to tell him exactly what she thought about this forgiveness business." --excerpted from the book
"Southern writers of fiction and poetry and the critics and academics of the literary world have been talking for a couple of generations about 'place' and 'the sense of place.' Does the sense of place still influence southern writers? Are we now indistinguishable from those in the rest of the country? Has southern place become the refuge of cliché-wielding sentimentalists and writers of gothic horror stories? Is the South disappearing? Has it, in fact, disappeared? All this sometimes seems to me blown out of proportion. Of course every artist is working in a place--the place his imagination makes of the world around him. And of course the South has been a compelling neighborhood--horrendously ugly in spots, breathtakingly beautiful, its people dogged, as human beings are, by the moral ambiguities and idiosyncracies of their place and time. And I think it's still OK for us to claim the South, largely because, even now, we don't move around quite as much as some folk do.
In the past, the South has seemed solid to me, permanent--green-black magnolia trees with leaves as thick as shoe leather, dark cedars weighed down with moss, oaks with their great boles and powerful stretched-out arms. I've been lucky to live in this place..."
"...A pick can do things, I tell you. A mound of dirt grew tall on the back side of the hole. Uncle Red was in the hole with me. That's all we called it when we were digging, the hole. Never called it a grave, never once. It was a hole in the ground, a hole in God's green earth. McMorris Funeral Home charged two hundred dollars to dig a grave. That's why we were digging our own. Money was tight most of the time. My uncle worked the shovel like a seven-armed gorilla. He was bigger than me, but not by much. The only one there bigger than me, and I wasn't but sixteen years old. I got his no-neck shoulders, arms like stovepipes. I got his temper. He's the only daddy I've ever known. He lit a cigarette with a wooden kitchen match. He smoked from a stubby unfiltered Camel. 'Go take five, son.' I grunted in agreement and pulled myself out of the dirt, the hole three feet deep and seven feet long. He took the pick and started striking the floor of the hole. Three other men watched, all my uncles, his younger brothers. They stood staring with cans of beer stuck in their hands. I walked over to the watercooler. The water was cold, and plenty of ice still floated around when I dipped the aluminum cup. I poured the rocky liquid down my throat and felt the metallic taste sting my tongue. I drank man-like, tired, worn out." --excerpted from the book
"...I found a chair, lit a cigar, and looked over the foreboding landscape of the nation's capital. The time and place were not lost upon me. It was December 7, 2001, Pearl Harbor Day, and the whole country was waiting for the other terrorist shoe to drop, and I was sitting on a balcony at the White House, what could well be the prime target of the enemy. I glanced up at the roof and saw two ninja-like figures, dressed entirely in black, creeping along the roof with automatic weapons. 'I hope they're ours,' I said to the Washington Monument. 'Stand tall,' the monument replied. By the time I got back to my room, a tray of rather coochie-poochi-boomalini hors d'oeuvres had been placed on the table and a beautiful hand-blown Christmas tree ornament in the shape of the White House and signed by President and Mrs. Bush was nestled in gift-wrapping on my bed. As a proud Red Sea pedestrian, I normally don't have a lot of uses for Christmas tree ornaments. I figured I'd either have to hang it or hang myself, and at the moment, I was leaning toward the latter. I hadn't seen a human being in quite a while now, and the somewhat disturbing notion crossed my mind that if the president didn't come back soon, I might have to become an Alexander Haig impersonator and take over the government." --excerpted from the book
This article is from the January 2005 issue of Southern Living. |
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