Rhythm and Books

The Southern Matriarch

We had to break away last week to get tomatoes in the ground, so we weren't able to recap our Week of Southern Humor.  Trust us, it was hilarious.  Among the hilarity was a visit on Wednesday from Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, the Greenville, Miss. duo who have just published their third book, Some Day You'll Thank Me For This.

For starters, let us say that, yes, there are more than enough cutesy instructional manuals on Southern speech, behavior and ritual, but if you want a true Rosetta Stone for deciphering the conspicuous eccentricities of Southern women (in the guise of a cutesy instructional, of course), we highly recommend the work of this pair.  Their books Being Dead is No Excuse (on Southern funerals) and Somebody is Going to Die if Lilly Beth Doesn't Catch That Bouquet (on Southern weddings) have created a bonafide sensation among ladies in the Delta who recognize that the customs and mores chronicled by this wise and hilarious pair come not from cultural exploitation but from a perspective of deep respect, authenticity and sharp, self-reflective wit.

Admittedly, these books play to a selective crowd, but we are always charmed by Mrs. Metcalfe and Ms. Hays when they visit.  They can handle themselves in any situation, converse with anyone, and are able to tell some of the most hilarious and politely off-color stories to illustrate their point on any given subject.  This genuine humor and playfully barbed civility is what makes their work so popular, and it's what always draws a crowd to hear them speak.  Their readings and remarks to the crowd at Turnrow on Wednesday entertained and honored the message at the heart of their books — manners and civility, a Southern virtue that withers in the face of suburbanization, yet is loathe to die in so many pockets of the South.  We observed how nearly every lady and gentleman present for the Metcalfe-Hays reading nodded in agreement at some clever truism delivered during the brief and entertaining remarks.

For anyone of this class of Southern family — and you know who you are — we recommend this book, which makes an especially appropriate Mother's Day gift (Sunday, May 10, signed copies available).  It will provide great laughs and spark fond memories, no doubt.  For anyone who has married into a proper Southern family, this book may serve as a useful guide to delicate social transactions, and your open-minded Yankee friend may even find some use in these pages.  Anyone else won't know what the hell Metcalfe-Hays are talking about, and that's just fine.

Incidentally, the subtitle describes this book as "the Southern Ladies' Guide to Being a 'Perfect' Mother," but it might just as well say "the Delta Ladies' Guide," for it's stories and traditions are so very much embedded in this wonderfully peculiar culture, and if it's true that Southern hospitality is dying, it may not die here, in these privileged classes, until we all do.

Cracker Queen

Our "Week of Southern Humor" kicked off Tuesday evening with a reading by Lauretta Hannon, author of The Cracker Queen.  After driving through some of the town's more squalid corridors, Lauretta felt right at home in Greenwood and was especially relieved to see we served cold bottles of PBR, the official drink of Cracker Queens.

After careful scrutiny of her book, the Cracker Queens, it seemed to us, wasn't so much a club Ms. Hannon was hustling us to join, but a set of personal aesthetics through which she lives and views the world.  She celebrates the anti-Southern belle, someone who refuses to live her life through facades and mannered behavior, but embraces her pain and suffering and uses her sense of humor to glide over life's rough patches.

Lauretta fit this definition to a T.  She was unflappable, punctuating her hard-luck tales — "The last time Mama saw her sister, she got a gun pulled on her" — with wild laughter.  She plucked tales from her book, telling us all about her outlandish, hard-drinking mother; her ham-radio-operating, WWII-vet jazz man father; and their backwater hometown of River Wall, "a place that called itself 'the Friendliest Town in Georgia,' but was, in reality, so mean it was featured in an encyclopedia entry on the Ku Klux Klan."  For every abandoned child, discharged firearm, rotgut-swilling husband, knife-wielding wife, and police intervention, Lauretta had a hearty laugh and a hilarious digression.  There seemed to be no way possible to get this woman down.

"Tell us something really dark," one audience member requested, and Lauretta was glad to oblige, though somehow, even her darkest stories seemed comically poignant. 

Mary Carol, one of our good readers, had read The Cracker Queen on a trip to Tupelo and back and pronounced it a success.  She likened it to Jeanette Walls' potent memoir, The Glass Castle.  "Just when you think it can't get worse for these people, it does."

Hard-luck memoirs are a dime a dozen, but what sets Lauretta's work apart is surely this defiant good humor in the face of adversity.  This book should provide comfort to anyone who has come through hard circumstances and has a hard time loving themselves, or anyone who loves to read about deeply flawed and eccentric, but still essentially decent, characters.

Incidentally, we're happy to perpetuate our goat motif by mentioning one of Lauretta's stories, which involved the famous Goat Man of middle Georgia — whom, she seemed surprised to learn, we'd never heard of — a wandering goat herder and folk preacher who often delivered his profanity-laced sermons in crazed roadside tirades and was purportedly a great influence on Flannery O'Connor.  Read The Cracker Queen to learn more.

Bring On the Ungulates

We hope it's not too late to mention last week's delightful visit from Kevin Wilson, a young writer currently residing and teaching in Sewanee, Tennessee.  Surely there is no harder task for a book-touring writer than to sell your debut collection of short stories in a recession economy, but Mr. Wilson succeeded masterfully.  He had two things going for him:

1.)  a great new story entitled "Goat," which involved burglary and possible bestiality, and held the attending crowd rapt, delivering much therapeutic laughter;

2.) it wasn't so much about peddling books for Wilson as eating, which he did with a heartiness and devotion that we all admired.

Touring with his father, a real sport, the Wilsons were eating their way across the South and were especially interested in burgers and barbecue.  Luckily they found Greenwood to be a worthy stop.  You should read Kevin's account of his visit with our pal Spooney at his blog.

Officially Kevin was at Turnrow promoting his book Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, and as a testament to his great reading, every party present at the reading purchased a copy.  That rarely happens. 

In addition to sharing our mutual love of meat and books, we were glad to have found another Charles Portis devotee.  Kevin told us that he'd heard the Coen Brothers were remaking True Grit, keeping more faithful to Portis' novel, which was less about Rooster Cogburn (made famous by John Wayne) than 14-year-old Mattie Ross.

Six Degrees of Squirrel ... and Other Noble Beasts

 A nice crowd turned out Friday evening for the signing and reading by Alan Huffman, author of the fascinating new book Sultana.  He kept everyone enthralled with details from the sinking of the Mississippi River steamboat and the particulars of his research.  After the reading, he signed a pile of books and regaled us with tales of woe — from the newspaper world, where he plies his journalistic trade in extremely uncertain times for print media — and wildlife.  Someone mentioned that there were an inordinately high number of squirrels scurrying around this year — surely a sign that the end times are near — and Alan agreed that the squirrels had gotten out of hand at his own rural homestead in Bolton, Mississippi.  We shared with him a fellow writer's strategy for squirrel eradication, and he in turn told us a story to illustrate how crowded the wildlife (mankind included) had become at his place:

"I had just finished a shower and was standing at an upstairs window when I noticed a squirrel digging around in the dirt to one side of a large tree.  It looked up at me and froze.  It was then that I noticed a deer in the woods, looking up into the trees. Following its line of sight, I saw a hawk, watching the squirrel. Then, when I moved, the squirrel jumped onto the tree trunk, frightening a crow that was also digging around in the dirt. The squirrel ran up the tree, the crow flew away, the deer turned and ran, and the hawk just sat its limb, no doubt muttering under its breath. I continued drying off from my shower, having interrupted the drama of the glen and foiled a hawk's breakfast."

With squirrels on our mind, we drove out to Carroll County Market, a fine eatery and music venue in the lovely and nearby town of Carrollton, where our buddy Jimbo Mathus was performing.  If you're not familiar with Jimbo's music by now, you're behind the curve, though you may be unwittingly familiar with his work if you ever listened to the Squirrel Nut Zippers during the great swing revival of the 1990s.

Carroll County Market, which has done wonders to liven up the nightlife in downtown Carrollton, was the perfect setting for the new songs from Jimbo's most recent album, Jimmy the Kid, an homage to classic country music with Jimbo's own distinctive modern twist.  Released late last year, it's been a staff favorite and enjoys steady rotation at the bookstore.  We could go on and on about the album's merits, but you should probably just go ahead and order a copy, along with our all-time favorite Jimbo disc, Knockdown South, a rowdy modern Mississippi classic, recently thought to be out of print until bassist Justin Showah uncovered a hidden cache from storage.  Also, read Alan Huffman's account of seeing Jimbo for the first time, as well as a flattering account of the bookstore, at his site.

As we've lamented in the past, Greenwood, despite sitting squarely in the cradle of the birthplace of American popular music, is not a hotbed of live music, so we often have to take it on the road when we get that jones.  A couple of weeks ago, several of us loaded up and drove to Oxford to see another staff favorite, Andrew Bird, who, many are unaware, also used to perform with the Squirrel Nut Zipper.  Jimbo had plenty of praise for his former band mate, a prodigy who learned classical music as a toddler and has plied his own trade with a Midwesterner's quiet dutifulness for years, and he now stands as one of the most unique artists in today's pop music scene.

We recommend purchasing his most recent album, Noble Beast, a collection of layered and fluid pop orchestrations that came out earlier this year on Fat Possum Records, the great Mississippi label who were known primarily, until recently, as a blues label (R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough). Stylistically, Bird forms a kind of bridge between the whimsy and lyrical prowess of top-shelf Beck with the dynamics and moody soundscapes of Radiohead, though the expansive sound of his album is created through acoustic instrumentation, including all manner of strings, percussion and his trademark whistling, used to great effect.  (He's no peanut-gallery whistler, mind you;  these are serious, bird-like melodies.)  The total package is one of the most refreshing sounds around, and we were impressed to see how he pulled it off live during his fine performance at Oxford's new Lyric Theatre.  His rock star qualities were not diminished by the fact that he totes a violin instead of a guitar, though, due to traditionally chatty crowds in Oxford, Bird and his band had to crank up to play over the din.

Sultana

Has the soul-sucking monotony of your dog-eared daily grind, with all its pointless obstacles and frustrating social combat, got you down?  Just read a few chapters of Alan Huffman's new book, Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, and you'll thank God for traffic jams, jerks and Mondays.  There's nothing like a tour of true suffering and endurance to make you glad for your own meager misfortunes.

In his last book, Mississippi in Africa, Huffman told the story of freed slaves who returned to their native Liberia, only to set up their own plantation society with themselves as masters.  Once again, the Mississippi journalist has exposed a fascinating, little-known piece of Southern history, lending his own rich moral texture and giving readers plenty to contemplate.

On April 27, 1865, the Sultana, an overcrowded steamship carrying Union soldiers home after the Civil War, exploded just north of Memphis, killing hundreds onboard and sending hundreds more spilling into the swift and frigid Mississippi River, which was flooded and stretched five miles wide from shore to swampy shore.  The exact death count is unknown, but the scope is larger even than the Titanic, making it the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history.

Rather than stretch the incident into 300 pages, Huffman expounds on the idea of survival and endurance, taking a soldier's eye view of the war by chronicling the sights, sounds and mental states of fighting men, and shows how humans overcome the most horrific circumstances to live on and prosper.  In particular, he follows a group of Indiana soldiers through their own nine circles of hell, from the battlefield of Chickamagua to Confederate prisons Cahaba and Andersonville (think Nazi concentration camps without the efficiency) to the sinking Sultana and back home, where they each tried to put aside the physical and emotional effects of war to lead normal lives. 

Huffman's reporting and interpretation is powerful, and the reader comes through with a more potent, perhaps even visceral understanding of such extreme endurance.  Sultana is a rare history book with profound reverberations.

We've had the pleasure of hanging out and talking to Alan Huffman, a well-traveled, thoughtful guy who answered a few questions we had after reading the book.

Turnrow:  We didn’t recall the Sultana disaster from history class, even though it was obviously a significant event in the Civil War.  Where did you first hear about it and what convinced you to write a book on it?

Huffman:   I've always been attracted to little-known stories, in part because they don't receive the high gloss of the more popular ones. They tend to be more raw. I originally heard about the Sultana in the late eighties when a guy in Memphis, Jerry Potter, announced that he thought he'd located the remains of this incredible steamboat wreck. The story had more or less fallen through the cracks because of when it happened. It's hard to compete for headlines with "Civil War Ends!" and "Lincoln Assassinated!" I was struck not only by the magnitude of the disaster but by the fact that the passengers had already been through so much by the time it occurred. By that point, their very significant troubles were supposed to be behind them. I was curious to know how anyone could survive so many life-threatening episodes in succession, and live to tell the tale. The book was a natural outgrowth of that, though obviously it took me some time to get around to writing it.

Turnrow:  Were you ever tempted to fictionalize the story?

Huffman:   Not really. That's often a temptation when there are big gaps in a story, but this one had everything. Not that there weren't any gaps, but with so many people involved, there was always someone available to fill in the blanks. Of the three primary characters in the book, two left comparatively understated yet absolutely astonishing records. The third wrote extensively about the disaster — it was his identity, which was true for a lot of the survivors. There was more than enough to drive the narrative and develop the characters.

Turnrow:  There are a lot of first person accounts here.  What was the research like for this book?

Huffman:   I was immersed in the story for a year. At times it was a dark place to be, and it might have remained so had I not chosen to focus on survivors. Ultimately the research was inspiring because no matter what got thrown at these guys they made it through. I started with the official records, then read everything that had been written about the key events and characters, and just kept going deeper until I found myself in a small town in southern Indiana, in an abandoned graveyard, standing over the grave of someone I now felt I knew. The hard part was deciding what to leave out. You have all these accounts from the war, all these accounts from the prisons, all these accounts of the train wrecks and the marches, and they're all riveting, before you even get to the disaster. Then you have the disaster itself. What I did not foresee was how interested I would become in the aftermath — in what happened to these guys during the rest of their lives. 

Turnrow:  Reading about the prolonged suffering of these soldiers, it makes you realize how good we really have it today.  Where in the world today do people have it this rough?

Huffman:   I think you can look at any war anywhere in the world and find people who are put to the test on multiple levels, perhaps not on the scale of this story, but then, everything is relative. Think of someone who perhaps was imprisoned under Saddam Hussein and somehow survived, only to be plunged into the current war. Maybe he lost his family, his home, his livelihood, and say he ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he gets sent to Guantanamo. That is an epic survival saga. What I learned from researching this story is that you never know when you've experienced the worst — at any point, it may still be ahead — but that it's possible to survive almost anything, if you're lucky and keep a cool head. There are lucky, cool-headed people surviving intense trials all over the world, and always have been. Some people just get put to more significant tests.

Turnrow:  This book is as much, if not more, about endurance as it is about a single tragedy.  You've had some adventures in the pursuit of fine journalism. What's been your greatest endurance test?

Huffman:   I'm not a seasoned war correspondent, so for me it was without doubt traveling to Liberia during that country's civil war, for my book Mississippi in Africa. The challenge was not so much the immediate threat of violence, because the actual fighting was outside the city where I spent most of my time, but the uncertainty of a government that was hostile to my presence, and not knowing where the most serious dangers lurked — basically, being totally outside my frame of reference, by several orders of magnitude. That, it seems to me, is always where the greatest threat lies. If you're an experienced mountain climber, the real danger comes when you find yourself outside your frame of reference, when there's a combination of weather and low oxygen and terrain and maybe panic and the actions of other people that you haven't experienced in concert before. The trick is to adapt to the new circumstances, but people tend to cling to what they had hoped their circumstances would be, rather than what they are, which can get you killed. I never faced imminent death in Liberia, but I faced the very real possibility of imprisonment, and that was the most unnerving experience of my life to date. I'm glad I experienced it, though, because I think it's important to know how it feels to be unmoored, and to see what works and what doesn't.

Turnrow:  Tell us about your last great journalistic assignment.

Huffman:   I don't know if it qualifies as great, but the one I enjoyed the most, recently, was searching for the eighties actor Jan-Michael Vincent, who had disappeared from the radar screen after his life went off the rails. It was a quirky story for Lost magazine. "Whatever happened to..." is one of my favorite phrases because I love tracking things down, seeing how the story ends, especially if it's a story that's fallen through the cracks. This particular story was more about the search than it was about what actually happened.

Turnrow:  Read any terrific books recently?

Huffman:   I really enjoyed Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting, and after belatedly discovering the late David Foster Wallace, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on that he wrote, including Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I also loved George Saunders' Pastoralia. Without doubt the best books I read while researching Sultana were Kenneth Kamler's Surviving the Extremes and Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival. Both of those will go in the glass-front case.

Gardening with Susan Rebecca White

We had a memorable visit late last week from Susan Rebecca White, a writer from Atlanta who recently published her debut novel, Bound South, with Touchstone Books.  The novel is getting raves ("Move over, Margaret Mitchell — and Tom Wolfe, too! Nobody has ever written about Atlanta with such insight and humor," said Lee Smith), and it's one of our most popular books at the moment, alongside Kathryn Stockett's The Help.  (Interestingly, the two writers live minutes apart in Atlanta.)

Ms. White, who is married to a writer (Alan Deutschman) and has a popular writer sister (Lauren Myracle), gave a delightful reading from her novel, which examines the lives of three unique Atlanta women from different walks of life.  Her brief readings from each of the three voices displayed a genuine humor and keen character insight, which runs deep throughout the book.  Congrats to her on a fine debut.  Get your signed copy here.

Among Ms. White's varied interests is a love of gardening.  Like us, she was inspired by Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  After reading it, she carved out a portion of her front yard to grow vegetables (photo left) and has since developed an obsession.  We toasted her earth-friendliness and commiserated about the travails of urban gardening, including all manner of varmintry.  A true vegetable gardener, we discovered, puts all animal-loving tendencies aside when critters raid the patch. 

Susan had a particularly intriguing method for warding off squirrels, which involves capturing said rodent, burning it, then spreading its ashes around the garden.  No doubt the scent and general creepiness of such a desecration would send a chill up any squirrel's spine and encourage its return to nut-foraging.  If this scenario sounds promising and you lack a small firepit or tin can in which to burn the squirrel, we suggest capturing the animal, decapitating it, and posting its tiny, big-eyed skull on a stake at the garden's entrance.  This method also works well for raccoons and house cats.

Having mentioned all of this, we feel it only fair to stress that Ms. White has not attempted the above squirrel-eradication plan.  Nor did she dream it up, though her fiction is not without its own dark humor.  Enjoy the book, and happy planting....