John Pritchard's first book, Junior Ray, was the little novel that could. A small-press title told from the perspective of an ornery, racist sheriff in the Mississippi Delta, the novel lured readers past its rampant "cussin'," proud political incorrectness, and backwater dialect to present a hilarious and thoughtful character study. Most readers had never encountered anything quite like it, and so the author, taking delight in the book's reception as well as the prospect of spending more time with his character, brought Junior Ray Loveblood back for The Yazoo Blues. The semi-retired anti-hero is a now a casino security guard, a vantage from which he can report on the colorful surroundings and reminisce about the people and strange experiences he has known, all with profane glee. The result is a surprisingly profound and unlikely view of the post-civil rights South.
In stark contrast to his rogue character, Mr. Pritchard is convivial and enlightened, an upbeat personality who still embodies the Delta eccentricities of his roots. On the eve of his reading at Turnrow, we had a chance to lure him out from behind his chief character and ask him a few questions about his writing.
Turnrow Book Co.: Congratulations on the acclaim for this new book, The Yazoo Blues, but I'm terribly interested in any bad reviews. Especially people who have been offended by Junior Ray and presume you are using this character to speak your mind. How does a character like Junior Ray get through in this politically correct age?
I do speak my mind through him but not all the time. Some of the time I speak other people's minds through the voice of Junior Ray, and I expect they recognize this.
If only I could stir up more outrage! I am sure there is plenty to go around, but Delta folks tend to mute their feelings. Junior Ray does not mute his. Anyway, the odd thing is that I do get more positive comments than negative ones. And I can only imagine it is because a lot of people have an incredible sense of the ridiculous and, indeed, laugh now at the same things they laughed at in the days of Aristophanes and Petronius — and certainly in those of Boccaccio and Chaucer. In short there is something deep in the human make-up that loves the ribald, delights in the bawdy, and is always up for a satire on the Human Condition. Otherwise, I admit, I'd be baffled.
TBC: Does Junior Ray come from a stockpile of nasty people you knew growing up in the Delta, or is he an exaggeration? Is he irredeemable? What does he believe in?
Pritchard: Junior Ray isn't really nasty at all. He is rough, boorish, and uncouth in every respect, and he is an out-and-out fool. But he is the fool in us all. And we all think "our" fool is laughable if not in fact acceptable. A person would have to be pretty pruney not to grow fond of Junior Ray.
Junior Ray is — and isn't — an exaggeration. Almost everybody has known someone at least sort of like him. Indeed, he has a good bit of universality to his characterhood. Junior Ray is not redeemable, but in some ways he can become gentler, in the way, for instance, that the New Testament is gentler than the Old Testament. His beliefs are simple. If another person always comes through and does what he says he will do, Junior Ray respects that individual and likes him. It becomes axiomatic that when people like Junior Ray, he likes them. Remember, Junior Ray feels the class difference that separated him and his from others in his time and place who were socio-economically better off. The first book, Junior Ray, has a lot of that in it.
TBC: Tell us a bit about the Civil War skirmish here at Greenwood that consumes much of Junior Ray's imagination in this book.
Pritchard: As Mr. Brainsong put it: There was "the whole mighty pageantry of it all." Most people in the Delta have heard of the Yazoo Pass Expedition, but only a few understand the magnitude of that failed riverine maneuver. The idea was [for the Union Army] to come down the Yazoo system and get in "behind" Vicksburg in order to try to bring that stand-off to an end.
There were, in the late winter and early spring of 1863, around six-thousand (6,000) "blue-coated" Northern soldiers and sailors assembled on Moon Lake, waiting to enter the Yazoo Pass. That armed flotilla consisted of at least twenty-two vessels of war: Two ironclads, six tinclads, two steam rams, twelve light transports and a couple of coal barges. Some of those gun-ships were two-hundred feet in length and fifty-feet wide and carried a wide range of lethality — cannons, big and little, both smooth bore and rifled, and mortars. What a sight it must have been in a flooded land where there was so much water at the time that there was hardly any shoreline along the Pass, the Coldwater, and the Tallahatchie. The water was high that year anyhow, but when the North blew the levee, in the first part of February, across from Helena, and elsewhere down the line, the Mississippi River poured like Niagara into the Delta, and that is how all those gunboats and troop transports were able to chug their way from Moon Lake to Fort Pemberton, just outside present-day Greenwood, where they were "stopped dead in their watery tracks," mostly by a single 6.4 inch rifled Whitworth Cannon that the Confederates were able to obtain while the North had been occupied clearing the Pass.
Knowing even just some of that, one can look at Moon Lake today, and, when the light is right, have no trouble at all seeing ... "the whole mighty pageantry of it all."
Incidentally, the Union Commander of the Yazoo Pass Expedition was a fine officer, named Watson Smith. He was, however, suffering from the last stages of tertiary syphilis and was quite looney. He eventually had to be shipped back to Helena and on to his home in New Jersey, where he died not long after he arrived. In any case, as awful as the whole environment was and as terrible as it must have been for all those men at arms to be lost and sick and shot at in that hellish hardwood swamp, Lieutenant Commander Smith's incapacity was merely a drop in the debacle.
TBC: Have you always been a writer? What other work have you enjoyed in your life?
Pritchard: I have always been a writer, even when I wasn't one. And I mean by that the time before I knew the alphabet. However, I have done a variety of stuff that includes being a copyboy and, later, a news clerk at the New York Times, teaching college English, advertising and corporate communications copywriting, writing lyrics on Music Row in Nashville — indeed, as one of a hundred other writers in the stable at Tree International, the largest country music publishing house in the world, now, I think, Sony EMI Tree. After I came back to Memphis, I worked a short time as a jingle writer. But, in addition to those things I worked once as a deckhand on a Swedish merchant ship and went to Venezuela; I dug postholes for the Mississippi Power and Light Company, hung sprinkler pipe in a cotton-compress warehouse, worked as an office boy in a law office — sold camel-saddle footstools, trained two days as a cemetery lot salesman, sold Fuller Brush products door to door, and was once Assistant Area Supervisor for Europe, Africa, and the Middle East at Plough, Inc.'s, International section, back in the late '60s. I lasted about a year, never knew what I was doing, still don't, and got sacked.
TBC: What's a John Pritchard reading like? Should we recommend that folks leave the kids at home?
Pritchard: It's like all readings only much, much better. As for the profanity, I look at the audience, make an estimate of the terrain, and usually leave out the cuss words or change them into something benign. That is not a prostitution of the art — it is in fact the most useful approach because when people hear the profanity they stop paying attention for a moment and miss the message.
Readers are not jarred by Junior Ray's cussing when they read silently to themselves because, for one thing, the profanity is spelled phonetically instead of correctly, so the eye just lets it wash by as what it is meant to be, which is simply the rhythmic and super-salty ingredient in Junior Ray's speech pattern.
John Pritchard will sign and read at Turnrow Book Co. on Thursday, October 30, beginning at 5:30 p.m. We can reserve signed copies of both Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues.
