Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, September 2002
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Eighty years after the removal of Native Americans from the Appalachian Mountains, a Cherokee woman falls in love with a white man and starts a new life with his people. The year is 1917, and Vine has everything she needs in Silas House's A Parchment of Leaves (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $23.95). She has strong hands to work the soil, she has the love of a good man and soon enough, she has a daughter.

What Vine doesn't need is a brother-in-law whose infatuation with her grows into obsessiveness, eventually leading to a scene of terrible violence. In the mountains, there is a season for everything, and Vine must endure a long winter before her heart can feel light again.

I breathed in winter air and imagined it was spring. I conjured up the smell of dogwoods and redbuds, the warmth of an April rain upon my face. It had been so long since I had felt the sun on the back of my neck, but I nearly wished it into being.

In his second novel, House writes with simple eloquence about life in the isolated mountain hollows just as the first mountain homes and roads begin to appear. He captures the rhythms of a woman's life, the passages from courtship to marriage to motherhood. And he adds the wood smoke, stars and the sounds of a fiddle, guitar and banjo on an October night.

I imagined the music drifting over the creek like mist on an autumn evening, spreading itself out with its high notes pressed tight against the mountains. I felt like a bird had been let loose beneath my ribs.

House, afrequent contributor on National Public Radio, lives in Lily, Kentucky.

***

The bodies of the dead, once buried, should stay buried. But in the south Georgia town of Swan, someone has dug up the corpse of Catherine Mason and left it lying beside the gravesite. Frances Mayes' debut novel, Swan (Broadway Books, $25), looks at the fall-out of this shocking crime on friends and family. As they draw closer to grieve, unexpectedly, they find new sources of strength. (For the record, the novel was written before the discovery of human bodies strewn around a certain north Georgia crematorium.)

The Mason family was once the ruling elite in Swan. More than 100 years ago, they built the cotton mill that turned a railroad crossroads into a thriving town. These days, however, the mill is closed, the town's future is uncertain, and the Masons are scattered to the winds. J.J. spends his days hunting and fishing, disappearing in the nearby woods and swamps for weeks at a time. Ginger works on an archaeological dig in the Tuscany hills, examining Etruscan coffin lids by day, enjoying her Italian lover by night. She and J.J. have turned inwards, still reeling from the apparent suicide of their mother almost 20 years ago.

The desecration of their mother's body brings them back home to confront a crime for which there are no suspects. When new evidence turns up the possibility that Catherine was murdered, they begin to revise their understanding of their mother - and themselves.

Mayes tells the story through the eyes of many characters, including the maiden aunt who raised the children, the aging mistress of Big Jim Mason (family patriarch), the sheriff (a grandson of the sheriff who investigated the crime), various housekeepers, shop clerks, unemployed mill hands, and others. When the Italian boyfriend compares Ginger's family life to those "labyrinthine, plotless Faulker novels," he almost hits a bulls-eye.

In her fiction debut, Mayes describes the deeply entangled relationships of a small southern community with both a poetic sensibility and traditional gothic touches. She's adept at observing the nuances of the small-town elite, whose feelings of being connected to the land are as intense as their utter self-absorption.

From the crests of the rises, she looked down as she drove into a green sea of expansive longleaf-pine forests. As far as the eye, as if she did not exist. The smell blew through her hair, deeply fresh, one of the scents most basic to her memory.

Mayes is the author of Under the Tuscan Sun and five books of poetry. She is a Georgia native who divides her time between San Francisco and Cortona, Italy.

***

For anybody who needs a reminder that summers in the deep South are perfect for growing cotton and swapping tales, George Strange's collection of short stories in Generations (Mercer University Press, $24.95) provides fresh evidence.

In the first story, "Connecting Generations," a young boy becomes intrigued by his great-great-grandfather, who killed a man in a duel and later slipped away in a cloud of fireflies, never to be seen again.

After rummaging around his grandmother's basement during a family get-together, the boy finds a stashed-away portrait of his infamous ancestor. Before long, fortified with a jar of moonshine, he is sharing drinks and hanging out with the old killer in an apple tree.

In the apple orchard above the noisy clatter of people passing a year's news, the boy and his great-great-grandfather leaned against two tree trunks and looked down at their other relatives.

-I'm not sure, the boy said, but I think Granny Zell is really lonely after these years of looking down from the mantel all by herself. And talk about looking. Your son spent his life looking for you.

A later story, "Fireflies," describes the night of the duel from the point-of-view of the boy's grandfather. It's a riveting account with a surreal twist: a boy watching his father climb inside a steamer trunk that will soon be loaded onto an Atlanta-bound train.

Ma threw me up on the wagon and told me to look inside. In all the years since, in all the closings of coffin lids, I have never seen anything as frightful as that. Him alive and hunched up in a red shirt. His eyes moving back and forth almost as if they were out of control, speeding almost, except for that one moment, that one long moment when they held me with such heat I began to sweat.

In these simply crafted stories, Strange describes a place that thrives on connections - good or bad -- between generations. In his world, the past stays alive as long as people continue to feel deeply about their heritage and pass down their stories.

Strange divides his time between Pearson, Ga., and Wolf Gap Hollow, Kent.

***

Peggy Payne's Sister India (Riverhead Books, paperback $14) is a reissue of a last year's "New York Times Notable Book" selection. The riveting story is set in the holy city of Varanasi, India, where pilgrims come to bathe in the River Ganges. Against this modern backdrop of Eastern spiritualism and violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims, Madame Natraja, a North Carolina expatriate who traveled to India and never left, rules over American travelers (including a young Atlanta business woman) at her guest house.

Twenty years ago, when Estelle arrived in India, she was a young and lithesome. But the ensuing years have transformed her into a grotesque character, weighing over 400 pounds and exuding sweat and hostility and, far beneath the surface, surprising tenderness.

While the Americans venture out of the guest house and confront the turbulence on the crowded streets and river, Payne slowly reveals the details behind Estelle's transformation into Natraja. Just as violence and hatred now flow in Varanasi, similar emotions once spilled over her North Carolina home.

Payne, a freelance journalist and travel writer, lives outside of Chapel Hill, N.C.

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An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Sept. 29, 2002.