THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, is Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece.  The novel is about the life of Janie Crawford and her search for love and meaning in her life.

I can't do any better than the synopsis from the Cliffs Notes:  

"This novel is the story of Janie Crawford's search for love, told . . . in the form of a frame.  In the first few pages, Janie returns to her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, after nearly two years absence.  Her neighbors are curious to know where she has been and what has happened to her.  They wonder why she is returning in dirty overalls when she left in bridal satin.

Janie tells her story to her friend Pheoby Watson, and after the story is over, the novelist returns to Janie's back steps.  Thus, the story, which actually spans nearly 40 years of Janie's life, is "framed" by an evening visit between two friends.

The story that Janie tells is about love - how Janie sought love in four relationships.  First, she looked for love from the grandmother who raised her.  Next, she sought love from Logan Killicks, her first husband, a stodgy old potato farmer, who Nanny believed offered Janie security.  Her third relationship involved Joe Starks. Their union lasted nearly 20 years and brought her economic security and an enviable position as the mayor's wife.  Janie endured this marriage in the shadow of charismatic, ambitious Joe, a man who knew how to handle people, money, and power, but who had no perception of Janie's simple wish to be respected and loved.

Janie's final relationship was with migrant worker Tea Cake, who gave Janie the love she had always desired.  With Tea Cake, Janie was able to experience true love and happiness for the first time in her life.  As a widow, Janie would sell Joe's crossroads store, close up her comfortable home, and leave with her new husband to share his life as a bean picker in the muck of the Everglades.  Tea Cake introduced Janie to a new life in the Everglades.  There she met new people, Tea Cake's fun loving friends, and experienced another community.  Her life with Tea Cake was far different than her life with Joe.  This marriage and Janie's happiness lasted about 18 months - until a powerful hurricane devastated the land, and Tea Cake became a victim of it.

A few weeks after Tea Cake's death, Janie returns to Eatonville because she cannot bear to remain in the Everglades, where she is surrounded by memories of her beloved Tea Cake.  She returns to her hometown, with her quest for sincere love having finally been fulfilled by Tea Cake.  After an evening of retelling her past to her friend Pheoby, the story of Janie's life is complete."

Zora Neale Hurston

Just a few observations:

(1)  Janie is looking for spiritual fulfillment through the love of a man and no amount of material wealth can ever satisfy this longing.  When Pheoby comes to Janie in Chapter 12 and tries to talk her out of marrying Tea Cake the following conversation takes place:

"How come you sellin' out de store?"

"Cause Tea Cake ain't no Jody Starks, and if he tried tuh be, it would be uh complete flommuck.  But de minute Ah marries 'im everybody is gointuh be makin' comparisons.  So us is goin' off somewhere and start all over in Tea Cake's way.  Dis ain't no business proposition, and no race after property and titles.  Dis is uh love game.  Ah done lived Grandma's way, and now Ah means to live mine."

"What do you mean by dat, Janie?"

"She was borned in slavery time when folks, dat is blak folks, didn't sit down anytime dey felt lak it.  So sittin' on porches lak de white madam looked lak uh mighty fine thing tuh her.  Dat's whut she wanted for me - don't keer whut it cost.  Git up on uh high chair and sit dere.  She didn't have time tuh think whut tuh do after you got up on de stool uh do nothin'.  De object wuz tuh git dere.  So Ah got up on de high stool lak she told me, but Pheoby, Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere.  Ah felt like de world wuz cryin' extry and Ah ain't rad de common news yet."

Janie has found material wealth and high position in the community to be spiritually empty and meaningless without love.  She is happier with the gambler and drifter Tea Cake than she ever was with the wealthy Jody Starks.  

(2)  Richard Wright and other black intellectuals criticized Hurston for perpetuating black stereotypes and writing her novel in "Negro dialect."  This criticism was patently unfair.  In a review published in 1937 Wright wrote:  

Richard Wright

"Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley.  Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that's as far as it goes.

Miss Hurston vountarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the "white folks" laugh.  Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live; between laughter and tears. . . . The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.  In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.  She exploits that phase of Negro life which is "quaint," the phrase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race."

Wright's criticism was misguided.  He misses the fact that, like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Hurston's Florida is only a backdrop to explore universal themes.  Their Eyes Were Watching God is also a feminist novel, dealing with a strong, independent woman who will not accept what society says should satisfy her.  

In defense of Hurston's use of dialect, a trained anthropologist, she was trying to capture the actual flavor of the people's speech.  In the few places where white characters appear, they don't talk any better than the black characters.  

I suspect that Wright may also have been offended that, in a few places in the novel, Hurston explores racist attitudes among blacks.  The restaurant owner Mrs. Turner likes looks down on dark skinned blacks but likes Janie because of her light complexion and straight hair and thinks that Tea Cake isn't a fit husband for her because he's "too black."  

(3)  As a lawyer, I was fascinated by how Janie was able to use the racism of the white community to her advantage in her trial for killing Tea Cake.  Bit by a rabid dog, Tea Cake becomes crazed and attacks Janie who is forced to shoot him in self defense.  The black community is outraged over Tea Cake's death and wants Janie convicted of murder.  The whites, who don't really care about a black woman shooting a black man, are very willing to accept Janie's plea of self defense and the jury of twelve white men very quickly return a verdict of "not guilty."

(4) The end of Janie's story may really be the end of her life.  After she shoots him, Janie is bitten by Tea Cake.  The book ends with the reader not knowing whether or not Janie has been infected with rabies.  If she has been infected, left untreated, Janie will suffer the same agonizing illness as Tea Cake and die in pain and madness.  She may well have returned to Eatonville to tell her story and end her life.  We will never know.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is, truly, a masterpiece and a great work of literature.

THE FALLING HILLS

Perry Lentz (b. 1943) is a retired Professor of English at Kenyon College.  In 1967 at age 24 he published The Falling Hills  a novel about the notorious “Fort Pillow Massacre” during the American Civil War.

The Modern Reconstruction of Fort Pillow

Fort Pillow was located on the Mississippi River above Memphis, Tennessee and was garrisoned by a regiment of white Tennessee Union Loyalists and two regiments of black Troops.  When the Fort was stormed by the Confederate Army of General Nation Bedford Forrest in April, 1864 the majority of the black Union soldiers were killed, many of them after throwing down their arms and trying to surrender.

Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, C.S.A.

Lentz, a native of Alabama, clearly shows his prejudices.  When dealing with the Confederates, Lentz’s writing is vivid and his characterizations are life like.  We come to know and to like both the fictional characters and the real historical figures, like General Nathan Bedford Forrest, that populate the narrative.  The white Union soldiers, both historical and fictional, are generally disreputable and dysfunctional.   There is not a single black character in the novel who is not a caricature of a stereotype.

The main Confederate character is Captain Hamilton Leroy “Lee” Acox.  A Tennessee lawyer, Acox served in an infantry regiment in the Army of Tennessee through all of the terrible battles fought in that theater of war from Shiloh to Chickamauga.  Wounded at Chickamauga, Acox goes home with a commission as a recruiting officer hoping to sit the rest of the war out.  Acox desperately does not want to leave his wife, Amanda, who has just suffered the devastating deaths of the couple’s two children from disease.  However, Acox is reluctantly drafted to lead a company in the cavalry corps of Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

The main Union character is Lt. Jonathan Seabury.    Seabury is from a family of Bostin Brahmins and is young and idealistic.   A fervent abolitionist, Seabury wants to command black troops.  With his romantic and idealistic notions, Seabury is soon disillusioned by the reality of garrison duty with former slaves in the Western Theater of operations.

 

The other fictional Yankee is John Arness Suttell, who is best described as a homicidal sociopath.  The novel opens with Suttell, then a corporal, leading his squad in ambushing a group of Confederate officers as they come out of a house after having dinner with their mother.  Suttell, the son of a poor hardscrabble farmer from West Tennessee, harbors a deep hatred for the planter aristocracy of South, who he believes are responsible for the deaths of his father and younger brother.

Lentz is excellent in describing the horrors, deprivations and sheer savagery of war.  I was especially fond of Chapter 7 which is basically a short story stuck in the middle of the novel.  It involves the life and death of a Confederate trooper named Bob Perry who was a former “slave catcher.”  As I said, Lentz is much better when dealing with the Southerners than with the Yankees,  and the story of Bob Perry is one of the best works of fiction which I have read in a long time.

Fort Pillow was commanded by a regular army officer named Lionel Booth.  When Booth was killed during the battle, command passed to Major William Bradford, a minor Tennessee politician who was loyal to the Union.  In real life, when Forrest demanded the fort’s surrender, Bradford pretended to be Booth and refused.  In actual history, not covered in the novel, Bradford was taken prisoner and shot by Confederates several days after the battle for allegedly attempting to escape.

In Lentz’s hands, Booth is a washed up old regular army officer, just trying to survive the war so he can retire with this pension.  Bradford is depicted as a cowardly political opportunist.

I couldn’t help thinking that by today’s standards The Falling Hills is probably a racist book.  As I said there is not one fully developed black character in the entire novel and the black characters who are described are stereotypically lazy and ignorant.  Although there is historical truth in the lack of training and the assigning of second rate officers to command black troops, I feel that Lentz probably crosses the line.  Although this book is still in print, thanks no doubt to Professor Lentz’s stature as a distinguished literature professor, I doubt it could be published today.  The Falling Hills would have been a much better book if at least one black Union soldier had been fleshed out and made into a fully realized human being.  A student of literature and future professor, Lentz’s writing sometimes seems like it came out of Willy Wanka’s Faulkner Factory, and can be pretentiously literary.

Dr. Perry Lentz

Having said that, for those into Civil War literature, The Falling Hills is a great read.   The Bad Catholic gives it four out of five Rebel Flags.

The Confederate General Rides North

When I first read a review of Atlanta author Amanda C. Gable’s 2009 novel The Confederate General Rides North, I immediately knew that I would have to go to Amazon and order a copy.  I’m glad that I did. Ms. Gable has written an outstanding work of literature.

The “Confederate General” referenced by the title is eleven year old Katherine McConnell, an only child from Marietta, Georgia who spends most of her free time studying Civil War history and fantasizing about putting herself into her history books as a Confederate General.  The novel is set in the late 1960s.  Ms. Gable has done a masterful job of evoking the time and place of the South in the late sixties.

Georgia Author Amanda C. Gable

Kat’s beautiful but erratic mother, Margaret, packs up one day, throws Kat in the car, and heads north to where she is from in Maine.  Katherine fantasizes that the trip is a Civil War campaign and that she is a Confederate General leading troops north.  Gable has brilliantly woven the real history of the Civil War together with the story of Katherine and her mother.  Through a series of flashbacks, Gable has also done a great job of slowly revealing the dark secret which haunts Katherine’s mother.  To begin with, Katherine does not understand that her mother is seriously emotionally disturbed.  As they travel from one Civil War battlefield to the other re-living the campaigns of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,  Margaret’s mental illness reveals itself in more pronounced ways as the campaign continues, finally reaching its high water mark at Gettysburg.  Gable’s portrait of Katherine’s mother, Margaret, is simply brilliant.  This has to be the best portrait of a person suffering from bipolar disorder which I have ever read.

I cannot say enough good things about this novel.  It is a fun read, but it is also serious literature.  As other reviewers with similar experiences have said, the young Civil War buff from Marietta, Georgia also resonates with my personal experience.  I’m about ten years younger than Katherine McConnell, but my experience growing up in Norcross, Georgia, also a suburb of Atlanta, is very similar to that of young Katherine. Growing up, I visited the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield and the Atlanta Cyclorama.  I saw Gone With the Wind for the first time at the Fox Theater in down town Atlanta.  Like Katherine, I grew up hearing stories about my Civil War ancestors.  Like the 1960's Atlanta described by Ms. Gable, the Atlanta of the 1970s that I grew up in was saturated with Civil War history.  I grew up feeling like Sherman had burned Atlanta just the year before.  I had a copy of the American Heritage History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton and poured over the pictures and practically memorized it.  And I remember souvenir Rebel and Yankee hats at every gift shop at a tourist destination (I had one of each.)

If you haven’t read The Confederate General Rides North, don’t wait, go to Amazon right now and get a copy.  You’ll be glad you did.

PAX ET BONUM.

A Feast of Snakes

Flannery O'Connor famously said that "Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."

A Feast of Snakes (1976) by the late Harry Crews (1935-2012) is truly a grotesque novel.  However, it is rooted in reality.  And some of the more grotesque elements of this novel are the most realistic.  A Feast of Snakes is a sordid little tale about a former high school football star who, because of his lack of academic ability, is trapped in a nowhere life in a nowhere town in South Georgia.

Harry Crews (1935-2012)

I have known a lot of people who are not far removed from Crews grotesque caricatures.  Without frugal working class parents who sacrificed to give me a college education, I would probably have been one of Crews' southern caricatures.  As a practicing lawyer in Southwest Georgia for over two decades I have met many people who resemble the characters who populate Crews' fictional Mystic, Georgia.

A Feast of Snakes is the story of Joe Lon Mackey, former star of the Mystic High School football team, The Rattlers.   As the head Rattler Joe Lon gets to date the head cheerleader, Beredine.  Beredine is the daughter of the local doctor.  Joe Lon is the son of the local bootlegger.    At the end of high school, Beredine goes off to college at the University of Georgia, while Joe Lon is trapped selling bootleg whiskey for his daddy.

After Beredine leaves Mystic for college, Joe Lon gets a girl, Elfie, pregnant.  Now he lives in a mobile home with Elfie and their two infant sons.  Elfie is losing her teeth and her looks have been ruined by repeated pregnancies.  Joe Lon's daddy is not only the local bootlegger but also raises pit bulls to fight.  Joe Lon's sister went crazy after discovering her mother's suicide and now sits in bed all day and watches television.

And that's just Joe Lon's messed up family.  The local sheriff, who lost a leg in Vietnam, arrests black girls for the sole purpose of getting them in jail to have sex with them.  As a matter of fact, the black characters in A Feast of Snakes seem to be the most sane.  Although one of the Sheriff's victims will suffer from a mental illness brought on by the trauma of being raped and will gain sweet revenge.

The backdrop of the novel is the traditional rattlesnake roundup which has become a large regional tourist attraction.  In traditional agricultural communities in South Georgia, the community would get together in the fall and winter and try to eradicate poisonous snakes to avoid attacks on people and live stock in the summer.  As a matter of fact, I live about 20 miles from a town that has a yearly rattlesnake roundup which has become a tourist attraction.  It may be the inspiration for Crews' novel.

Other reviewers of  A Feast of Snakes have seen it as some sort of tale of redemption.  I don't see any redemption in this at all.  It appears to me to be coming from a totally nihilistic world view.  Although it has some comic elements to it,  I found A Feast of Snakes to be very dark material.

To wrap up, I don't think I can summarize A Feast of Snakes any better than Professor James C. Cobb's description in his fine book Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (2005):  In his fiction Crews presented a southern poor-white netherworld inhabited by characters whose desperation, depravity, and grotesqueness went well beyond anything Erkine Caldwell had dared to offer.  Crews's    A Feast of Snakes emphasized the widening chasm between the caricatured, commodified representations of regional culture currently in fashion among upwardly mobile white southerners and the grim realities of life facing those for whom upward mobility did not exist.  The novel is set in "Mystic," a small South Georgia town whose traditional rattlesnake roundup has exploded into a major tourist attraction.  The protagonist, Joe Lon Mackey, is a former high school football star who was considerably more adept on the gridiron than in the classroom.  Unable to pursue collegiate stardom, he descends into a miserable, hopeless existence, drinking incessantly and living in a mobile home with two smelly kids and a pitiful, long-suffering wife with rotten teeth.  Joe Lon finally erupts in a murderous shooting spree and is thrown by an angry mob into a pit of writhing reptiles, rising to his feet for the final time with snakes hanging from his face."

Although I don't really recommend it, A Feast of Snakes is worth reading for the warped "Southern Gothic" atmosphere.  If you are depressed this is not the novel to read because nobody in Harry Crews' South lives happily ever after.

Carl Hiaasen's Tourist Season

First the chairman of the Miami - Dade County Chamber of Commerce is found stuffed into a suitcase covered with sun tan lotion, wearing a flowered Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and sunglasses. He was murdered by having a rubber alligator stuffed down his throat. Then tourists and “snow birds” (Yankees who have moved south to Sunny Florida) start disappearing and being murdered all over Miami. A terrorist group calling itself Las Noches de Deciembre takes credit for the killings. Las Noches are headed by a disgruntled columnist for the Miami newspaper who is a rabid environmentalist, a former professional football player and a Seminole Indian who want to wage war against the white man, and a Cuban who was thrown out of a right wing anti-Castro terrorist group because he could never make a bomb which went off properly. Las Noches want to rid Florida of the pollution caused by tourists and out of state transplants and return it to the pristine untouched wilderness which it once was.


The above is loosely the plot of Carl Hiaasen’s wild dark comedy, Tourist Season (1986). Hiaasen, a columnist for the Miami Herald, is passionate about environmental concerns in his native Florida. In this, his first solo novel (Hiaasen had previously co-authored a couple of novels with another writer), Hiaasen writes the Florida environmentalist fantasy: Kill the tourists, run the snowbirds back up north to Yankee land, and blow up the condos and hotels.

While not nearly as funny as Striptease, Tourist Season has its comic high points. Anyone that can’t find anything funny about cold blooded murder should pass on this book. Taken all in jest, however, this is pretty funny stuff. The old widow from New York City whose husband insisted that they retire to Florida and is now stuck in the condo he bought even though she hates it, is murdered by Las Noches by being fed to a crocodile and goes to her death thinking that she hopes her husband is satisfied now. This is about what she expected from Florida. She would rather have stayed in New York where she could walk to the market.


The madcap comedy aside, like all of Hiaasen’s novels, Tourist Season has a very serious point: the destruction of the environment. Although the words are those of the psychotic environmental terrorist Skip Wiley, I am sure that the sentiment is Hiaasen’s:

Today the Florida most of you know - and created, in fact - is a suburban tundra purged of all primeval wonder save for the sacred solar orb. For all you care, this could be Scottsdale, Arizona with beaches.

Let me fill you in on what’s been going on the last few years: the Glades have begun to dry up and die; the fresh water supply is being poisoned with unpotable toxic scum; up near Orlando they actually tried to straighten a bloody river; in Miami the beachfront hotels are pumping raw sewage into the Gulf Stream; statewide there is a murder every seven hours; the panther is nearly extinct; grotesque three-headed nuclear trout are being caught in Biscayne Bay; and Dade County’s gone totally Republican.

Although it’s twenty four years old, Tourist Season is still good for a few laughs and some serious food for thought about the environment.

Carl Hiaasen's Striptease

I thought that my loyal readers, all four of you, might be tired of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh by now. So I read a tawdry comic novel about SEX. I know, this is perfect reading for the penitential season of Advent.

Florida author Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald. All of his novels are set in Florida. Hiaasen is an environmentalist who laments the passing of pristine old Florida and the coming of tourists and developments. (In Hiaasen’s first novel, Tourist Season, which I am in the process of reading now, the plot involves “environmental terrorists” who are killing tourists). Striptease (1993) is Hiassen’s commentary on the exploitative practices of big commercial sugar growers.


At the outset, let me say that Striptease is a much better novel than the awful movie with Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. One of the reasons that this doesn’t work as a movie is that this book really has no stars. It’s an ensemble of madcap characters. The movie would have been much better with a group of unknowns and B-actors rather than a couple of stars. There are entire chapters of the book in which the characters played by Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds do not appear.

Striptease is the story of Erin Grant. Erin’s ex-husband, Darrell, is a petty thief who is a professional wheel chair thief. That’s right, wheelchairs. Darrell goes around stealing wheelchairs from hospitals and nursing homes and then selling them back to other hospitals and nursing homes. Erin works as a secretary at the local FBI office until she is fired for being married to a man with a criminal record.


Darrell, who is an informant for the local police, is able to get his criminal record expunged and fights Erin for custody of their small daughter. Erin, who is desperate to get money to pay her expensive lawyer fees, becomes a stripper because she can make more in a night than she would make in a week at an ordinary job. Everything goes fine until one night when U.S. Congressman David Dilbeck comes in the club and breaks a champagne bottle over another customer’s head. Congressman Dilbeck has a problem: he LOVES NAKED WOMEN but he goes crazy when he's around them.

Dilbeck is chairman of the committee in the House of Representatives which oversees Federal farm subsidies for sugar farmers. The Rojo brothers who own the largest sugar operation in South Florida have Dilbeck in their pocket and want to make sure he gets re-elected and keeps getting them their subsidy. In the educational part of this comic romp, Hiaasen lectures us on how big sugar imports migrant workers from the Caribbean to harvest sugar cane for next to nothing in wages and pollutes the environment by dumping waste water in the Everglades.


A guy in the strip club wants to get a date with Erin. He recognizes Dilbeck and tries to blackmail him to get Dilbeck to contact the judge and “fix” Erin’s child custody case. The plan backfires and the Rojo brothers’ hit man takes care of him. He winds up floating down a river in Montana where Miami homicide detective Al Garcia (one of Hiaasen’s recurring characters) happens to be vacationing. In short order, everybody who knows about Dilbeck being in the strip club fight begins to disappear . . . You get the idea. If anybody who hasn’t read this wants to read it, I don’t want to spoil the fun.

This novel is full of one joke and outrageous situation after another. For instance, the name of the strip club Erin works at, “The Eager Beaver,” has to be changed when the owner is sued for trade mark infringement by the Eager Beaver Chain Saw Company. A local judge, who carries a Bible to the gentleman’s club with him so that he can say that he is just there to witness to sinners, dies while getting a lap dance. Apparently, the judge just had too much excitement and when the young lady removed her bustier his head exploded and the judge died from a cerebral hemorrhage. And on and on and on. Striptease is a very funny book.



Readers might tend to think that all of Hiaasen’s outrageous characters and situations are all made up and couldn’t possibly happen in real life. However, after growing up in the deep South and practicing law in South Georgia for almost twenty years, I personally am aware of personalities and situations which are not too far removed from Hiaasen’s madcap South Florida. For instance, there was the client whose Dale Earnhardt memorabilia collection was worth more than the trailer she lived in . . . I could go on.

Striptease was a lot of fun. I will definitely be reading more Hiaasen.


Carl Hiaasen

As I Lay Blogging

If he, the blogger, who had given himself the grandiose and paradoxical title of “the Bad Catholic,”wished to make a fool and a spectacle of himself, he could think of no better way than a pitiful and poor but yet still arrogant attempt to mimic the style and meter of the great prose stylist, the great novelist of the South whose feats with language and story were so unrivaled that he, the famous author, had had bestowed upon him the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and who was now universally studied as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and perhaps of all times, and whose novel the blogger had, through many stops and starts, finally persevered in completing.

The book, which the great Southern author had named If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, was published in1939 under the name The Wild Palms, although that title was only the name of one half of the story, because the publishers had a lack of faith in the vision of the great Southern author, and thinking his (the author’s) biblical title was too artistic for the public and failing to understand the sublime and profound genius of the author’s effluent prose, had demanded that the name of the part be made the name of the whole.

The great Southern author’s technique in this book, counted by the critics to be among his lesser efforts, is to interpose in alternating chapters two different but related tales. The Wild Palms is the story of the illicit lovers Charlotte Rittenmeyer, who is bored in her upper middle class bourgeois marriage, and Harry Wilbourne, a medical student who is finishing his internship in a New Orleans hospital. Charlotte and Harry meet in a party in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and being the victims of love at first sight, resolve to abandon the prison of respectability and to ride the wild uncontrolled flood of their passion. The counter story is called The Old Man, referring to the great and wild body of water which Mr. Lincoln called “the Father of Waters” and whose unchecked power rolls relentlessly from its headwaters unvexed to the sea and which man has operated under the illusion of controlling by means of building levees and dredging channels. The Old Man is the story of the Tall Convict, who came to prison in his late teens for a failed train robbery and now has become so acclimated to the enforced monasticism of Parchman Farm, the infamous state prison of Mississippi, that he wishes nothing else than the security of working at hard labor all day and retreating to the contemplative cloister of the prison barracks at night. The stability and peace of the Tall Convict is breached by the great Mississippi flood of 1927, when the Tall Convict is taken with other inmates to work on shoring up the levee and is sent with another inmate in a small boat to rescue a stranded woman and man on the roof of cotton house. The boat over turns and the Tall Convict is thought to be drowned and the boat lost, but the Tall Convict recovers, finds the boat and finds the pregnant woman who has been stranded by the flood.



The lovers of The Wild Palms wish to abandon all the fetters of respectable society to live life on the edge. Charlotte abandons her husband and her two daughters to run off with her poverty stricken lover who has originally financed their amorous flight by the happenstance finding of a wallet containing a considerable sum of money. The lovers go to Chicago where they eventually settle down to a stable situation. But a stable and respectable situation is exactly what they have fled and viewed as a prison. In order to feed the fire of their irresponsible and irrepressible passion they feel that they must live life on the edge. The lovers, whose fire filled passion is just as wild and uncontrollable as the flooding Mississippi River, go to a dead end job in a bankrupt mine in Utah. After Charlotte becomes pregnant, and fearing the enforced conformity to the bounds of social order which raising a child would entail, she persuades Wilbourne to perform an illegal abortion. Wilbourne botches the abortion which eventually kills Charlotte after the lovers have returned to a fishing cabin on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Charlotte dies, and Wilbourne is arrested and sentenced to prison. So the lovers, who wanted to throw off all restraints and not be bound by any social or moral conventions, ultimately wind up with one lover in the ultimate prison of death and the other in a human prison to pay the price for the death of the object of his passionate love which was the only thing he had to live for.

On the other hand, the Tall Convict just wants to turn the pregnant woman over to a Sheriff and go back to the peace of the Penitentiary. Despite his best efforts, the Convict and the woman are swept uncontrollably down the flooding river. The woman delivers her baby herself and the convict hand makes an oar and wrestles alligators with his bare hands. After many adventures, during which the Convict remains chaste and pure and does not lay his hands upon the woman, but does make advances to a married man’s wife which forces him and the woman to flee, the Convict takes off the civilian clothes that he was wearing and puts back on his prison uniform and returns the woman and the boat to the first Deputy Sheriff he runs across. Embarrassed that they reported the Convict dead when he was just lost, the prison officials charge the Convict with escape and he is sentenced to another ten years which the Convict stoically accepts and happily returns to his life of quiet contemplation on the Mississippi chain gang.

The point of the great Southern author, Mr. William Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi, appears to be that all of us are bound one way or another in a prison, whether of shotguns and fetters and walls or of society or career or morality, and although we may for a while break the bounds of our prisons, whether through the means of wild nature or of wild and passionate love, we are all, in different ways confined for life by the limits of our human situation. It is possible, that like many of the sublime and powerful works of this paragon of literature, that the great Southern author’s book may be a masterpiece.

Heathen Valley

Heathen Valley, first published in 1962 by the noted playwrite Romulus Linney, is a beautiful book which deserves a far wider readership than it has enjoyed.

The novel is the story of Episcopal Church Deacon William Starns who is sent by the Anglican-Catholic Bishop of North Carolina to establish a mission in the far reaches of the Appalachian Mountains.

The book traces Starns life from his early childhood until his death. Starns was born in poverty in the Mountains, becomes a drifter, kills a man, goes to prison and escapes, and finally is hired by the kindly Bishop as a janitor in the Cathedral Church in Raleigh. After being rescued from alcoholism by the Bishop, Starns undergoes a profound conversion experience. After an experienced Episcopal minister and his wife fail in establishing a Mission Station in the mountains, Starns is ordained as a Missionary Deacon to the mountain people. Eventually the Bishop attempts to found an Anglican Religious Order at the Mission Station.

There is much human drama in this novel which is well written and beautifully told. There are also many horrific episodes and some graphic depictions of sexuality. The descriptions of the Mountain culture and the natural beauty of the Appalachia are wonderful.

For Anglican groupies, the novel also deals with the Evangelical verses Anglican Catholic divide in the Episcopal Church. The novel is very loosely based upon the real story of North Carolina Episcopal Bishop Levi Stillman Ives who eventually left the Episcopal Church and converted to Catholicism. The character of Starns is based upon Deacon William West Skiles who established the Valle Crucis Mission Station in Western North Carolina in the 1850s.

Heathen Valley is a great work of literature which deserves to be read.