Southern Currents

Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, January 2001
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

The Persia Café by Melany Neilson (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 288 pages, $23.95)

"It was high summer, 1962. A summer when folks looked up from their lives." Fannie Leary runs the Persia Café, a friendly little diner near the Mississippi River where whites enter the front door and blacks slip in through the back door. Everyday life takes on a different meaning, though, when Fannie sees the murdered body of a young black man who "disappeared" after a showdown with her good white customers. As Fannie confronts the truth of the murder and the identity of the killers, which might include her new husband, she also confronts uncomfortable truths about her role as wife, friend, and white person.

If the story sounds familiar, the writing isn't - it's as fresh, airy and satisfying as a home-made biscuit made with single-acting baking powder. Neilson's debut novel moves smartly forward and creates an unforgettable portrait of a woman determined to do the right thing. At the same time, she avoids the kind of sentimentality and patronizing attitude that frequently haunts period novels like this. Fannie's language is simple, yet luscious. It's hard to resist an author who describes chocolate as "another cheap magic, its own amnesia, a float in a warm river."

Melany Neilson grew up on a farm near Ebenezer, Mississippi. Her widely acclaimed 1989 memoir, "Even Mississippi," won the Lilian Smith Award for Nonfiction and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The Literary Guild has chosen "The Persia Café" as a Dual Main Selection.

FIRST LOOK: The story begins in my nose. A smell of smoke, of blackening crust, of something in the oven too long. I was wiping the counter, refilling cups. I was accustomed to this since I was a young girl, the clink and brush of white china cups, their simple geometry. And the coffee's boil, the smell of blood, mud, and weather, hambone, spillstain and sour armpits, the tickle of fries in hissing oil, the porcelain stove aged yellow. A customer raised his cup and I refilled it with one hand; my husband, Will, pushed back a plate and I took it with the other.

Head by William Tester (Sarabande Books, 197 pages, $19.95)

The ten short stories in this collection fill in the expressionistic image of a man who "was never not mostly afraid." The stories are cool and sensuous as they trace Nim's downward spiral from a childhood in Florida to days of quiet despair in New York City, Rome, and East Hampton. Wherever he goes, his past is waiting for him. "I dream I'm the ghosts in the attic, a haunt in the ceiling, the howl in our corn."

Tester, a native of Charleston and North Florida, is the author of the 1992 novel "Darling." He has degrees from Syracuse and Columbia Universities, and is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Fiction. He lives in Richmond and teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

FIRST LOOK: Like it wants something, barbwire bites at my T-shirt and nicks my belly and my chest. But I take an end, lug up a roll with my brother. We heft the barbwire into our truck. The bed shudders-our truck has its own mind too, just like everything. Even my thin freckled arm.

I leave the barn, blink at the soggy green land on our farm with the palm trees' breezing fronds. Junk is everywhere. What doesn't still need to sleep? Already, the sun seems to vaporize last night's rain into a visible greenhouse heat, and everything glistens, or wavers, and steams a little.

By Way of the Forked Stick by Billy C. Clark (The University of Tennessee Press, 160 pages, $22.50)

The mountains come alive in these four stories set in the Kentucky mountains of the 1930s. With grace, intelligence and humor, the young narrator takes us behind the scenes at the picture show, the gamecock ring, and the little church where a revival preacher shakes up the congregation with the help of a huge rattler named Penance. Mostly the stories are about rights of passage, which includes trading with a termite man named Apache, who "was the high-water mark for swollen wants and the low-water mark for broken promises."

Clark is the author of 11 other books, including "Sourwood Tales" and "A Long Row to Hoe." He received the Appalachian Treasure Award in 1999 and is currently writer-in-residence at Longwood College and editor of "Virginia Writing."

FIRST LOOK: Most of what I knew about Apache, Weasel, and his woman, Lottie, was second-hand. It had come by way of my brother Caleb, Mom on occasion, the boys Caleb loafed-off with, and the old men who came to whittle on Saturdays at Kelsey May's general store in Sourwood. Most of what I heard was as mysterious and exciting as ghosts.

The Cock's Spur by Charles F. Price (John F. Blair, Publisher, $19.95)

Moonshining, cockfighting, race relations, and psychotic mountain men thrive in this novel set in western North Carolina (near Murphy) in the 1880s. Price's passion for details and his earthy portrayal of men living close to the earth - and even closer to the edge - move the story forward, with occasional stops along the way for some handkerchief-wringing melodrama. The most interesting character is Hamby, an ex-slave who manages to keep his dignity intact while grudgingly taking care of the last surviving members of the family who once owned him. Genealogist alert! The characters and stories are based on actual information the author has gleaned about his own ancestors.

Price's first two novels feature the same families as in "The Cock's Spur," and, taken together, form a loose trilogy. Price, a former Washington lobbyist, now writes and teaches from his home in Burnsville, North Carolina.

FIRST LOOK: Sylvester was his given name. When he was a sprout his pap used to call him Syl, but he bore his pap many a grievance, and once he got his size he swore never again to use the ill name Oliver Price, that fool, had fixed on him. So he called himself Vest instead.

Nineteen years of age, long and gangly, Adam's apple protruding like a walnut, Ves Price lay sprawled drowsing under a shebang of yellow birch bark at the edge of a ravine way up Tusquittee Creek nearly behind the peak of Piney Top, waiting for the mash to ferment.

Out of the Night That Covers Me by Pat Cunningham Devoto (Warner Books, $23.95)

After the death of his mother, it's sink or swim time for 8-year-old John McMillan as he leaves his toys and books behind to join his aunt's sharecropper family in lower Alabama. Set in the late 1950s, the novel also deals with the struggles of rural blacks to escape the stranglehold of the feudal South. Smooth, fast-paced and a tad predictable, the story glides along like a Hallmark TV movie.

Devoto, an Atlanta resident, is the author of last year's well-received, "My Last Days as Roy Rogers." This is her second novel.

FIRST LOOK: Earlier in the day, a bright Alabama sun had called up the dew. By now, its shine gave shade to only one small space directly beneath the eaves of the depot. He stood in this shadow, staring out.

It sat before him as repulsive as anything he had ever seen, steam rising from its bottom as if it were relieving itself on the tracks. Sweat glistening on its gray-back body, then dripping off onto the crossties. Horrible grinding, clanking noises as it readjusted to its coupling harness. He felt nauseated by the sight.

Terminal Bend by Patricia Mayer (Livingston Press, The University of West Alabama, paperback, 256 pages, $14)

Miz Melba, the 72-year-old narrator of the novel, spins colorful yarns that capture the feel of the 1940s in this fictional Alabama railroad town where trains headed from New Orleans and Pensacola turn north. Miz Melba is a funny and compassionate story-teller, though she leans too often on lukewarm expressions and moralizing.

Mayer, a Mobile native, once worked as a nurse in Florida's infamous Chattahoochee State Hospital. A mother of five sons, she now works at a small parochial school in Mobile. This is her first novel.

FIRST LOOK: If you drove through the patched and rutted streets of Terminal Bend, Alabama, you wouldn't see what I see because I'm looking through the eyes of living seventy-two years in the same place. All you'd see is a seedy town with the questionable distinction of having the most murders in the state, but I remember when "drive-by" was what we did when we went to see the live Nativity scene out in front of the Methodist Church. I've come to understand the strata of change. I know that there are layers of history below the line of vision.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Jan. 21, 2001