We're still reeling from our week of high literature, and we ended it with a memorable double feature.
On Thursday night, Ellen Gilchrist signed and read from her new novel, A Dangerous Age (signed copies available here). Anyone who has read her work can imagine that she's a sharp wit and someone who speaks her mind. Ms. Gilchrist has been writing for many years, touring and speaking at college campuses, and we hoped she wouldn't be too put out with touring by the time she came to Greenwood. ("Greenwood!? What the hell's in Greenwood?" we imagined her saying upon receiving her tour schedule.) She admitted to us that she did, in fact, hate book tours, though she enjoyed visiting the stores and meeting people, and we think she may have been pleasantly surprised by what awaited her here.
A nice crowd of 40 or 50 came out to meet Ms. Gilchrist and hear her speak. She read from the opening of the new novel and had the crowd laughing, then roaring by the time she delivered off-the-cuff remarks. Despite her insistence that she would not answer questions ("I've answered everything about my life I care to."), she took questions from the audience, as long as, she warned, we didn't ask questions like they ask in New York and California. She loathes political correctness and judgment of her personal views. Instead, the crowd asked her about her roots in Mississippi, and she delighted all with stories from her youth. Though she was born in Delta, her family had a place called Hopedale on Steel Bayou, close to Greenville, even closer to Grace. There was always family about — cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. "Children like to be around older people," she said.
Around the time of World War II, her father moved the family around the Midwest for his job, building airstrips for the nation's burgeoning air force. They made it back to Mississippi quite often to visit family, sometimes spending whole summers or winters at Hopedale. She considers herself a Mississippian still, though she has lived for a long time in Fayetteville, Arkansas. "You know, Mississippi is really as special as we think it is," she said. "It's the people." This special quality is, in general, the kindness, politeness and devoted interest that the folks in attendance showed her, and to which she responded with generous wit and wisdom.
"Is this age more dangerous than the World War II era?" someone asked, the closest we came to politics.
"No," she replied, assuredly. "We still live in paradise, compared to all the people who have ever lived at any time and anyplace else in this world."
We'd barely swept up before Rick Bragg arrived the next day for a noon signing and reading. Rick is one of the most easy-going, jovial souls we know. It comes through in his work, which may explain why his readers feel almost like kin, and cannot help but smile and laugh in his presence.
Still, he said, writing this book almost killed him. The book is The Prince of Frogtown (signed copies available), and it's the third in a series of family memoirs. "I hid behind my mama in the first two books," he admitted. This one looks both at his father and at his stepson, and it's every bit as strong as the previous two books (All Over but the Shoutin' and Ava's Man), with tragedy, humor and a rich sense of the South during the 1950s. (Read more at this previous post.)
It took him three books, Rick said, but he finally captured what the Bragg men were all about. From a section about his grandparents in The Prince of Frogtown, he writes:
"There are some people in the world who are not necessarily good at life if you see it as a completed work, but who are excellent at it one daub of bright color at a time. Bob, when drinking, lived in the twitch. He might never be respectable, in a Methodist kind of way. But the way he saw it, and raised his sons to see it, he could be free as a bird on a bunk in the city jail, as long as he showed some guts and left some blood on the ground — his, or somebody's. Bob, with a bottle, would wreak mayhem in disproportion to his size, and go find his angel, to hear his story, and bind his wounds.
"He was kind to her, when sober, but would forget to be kind when he was not. She just took it, and walked miles to bail him out of jail with money she made in that stifling mill. People recall that his dark red hair went white early in his life, as if he wanted it that way, because she had loved it so.
"The nature of their story, really, is that you laugh at Bob and cry for her, for her goodness and long suffering. But it is the nature of men that it is easier for us to laugh at Bob than cry for Velma, which is why women loathe us so."
Rick read three short sections from the book, highlighting the ups and downs, taking the crowd from choked-up to howling with laughter. He is exactly like his books, maybe even funnier. When asked about his next book, he said it would be a novel, and that when pressed by his publisher to give a synopsis, he had to think fast. "I tried to think of what made me happiest," he said. "And it finally came to me ... midgets. I'm not trying to be funny or politically incorrect. I'm serious ... I love midgets." Before they'd pay him, he said, the publisher wanted the opening line, which he vows to keep, no matter what the book turns out to be. Here we unveil it, paraphrased:
The carnival owner hated midgets, because they were always getting drunk on a thimble full of bootleg liquor and falling off their Shetland ponies.
The working title of this future masterpiece: Loose Women from Spartanburg.
And he says that next time he comes to Greenwood, it will be at night.
