Tag Archives: North Carolina

Blood and Moonshine: Gods of Howl Mountain

30 Monday Apr 2018

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In the autumn of 1952, with “I Like Ike” signs sprouting in the North Carolina lowlands, up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Maybelline Docherty is her own authority, thank you. Known as Granny May, like most mountain folk thereabouts, she’s had a hard life. Her husband died young in the First World War; their daughter lives in an institution and hasn’t spoken in twenty-odd years; and Granny May’s grandson, Rory, lost part of a leg fighting with the Marines in Korea and has been drifting and moody ever since. But Granny May doesn’t know the meaning of the word surrender, and she intends to continue enjoying life to the fullest. As a former prostitute, she makes polite folk turn away. But they still drive up the mountain for her herbal remedies, which they fear as possibly un-Christian yet wish to believe in, and she’s famous for her cakes.

The Blue Ridge Mountains, as seen from Blowing Rock, North Carolina (courtesy I, Zainubrazvi, via Wikimedia Commons)

Rory troubles her, however. He earns a good living running moonshine to buyers off the mountain, which puts him in the crosshairs of the police, who can sometimes be bribed. But there’s a new Federal revenue agent in town who plays by different rules, and as Rory soon learns, he’s a sadist of the first order. Meanwhile, Rory feuds with Cooley Muldoon, a young buck with more swagger than brains who’s willing to match Rory blow for blow, and whose father owns the largest piece of the moonshine business. Between these two threats and an attraction for a preacher’s daughter who handles venomous snakes as part of the church service, Rory has chosen to live dangerously. But Granny May says, “Christ’s father let him die on that cross.… But Christ never had no Granny like me.”

In my review of Fallen Land, Brown’s previous book, I loved the prose and the pacing but faulted the too-easily resolved conflicts between the main characters and the intellectually sophisticated observations that came from the mouths of unschooled teenagers. Not here. Gods of Howl Mountain is a much better, more complex, more believable novel, and its power propels you through the narrative, much like the engine in Rory’s beloved souped-up muscle car, named (of course) Maybelline. Rory and Granny May are compelling characters, their dialogue credible, and often a hoot besides.

Once or twice, you may come across a reference to something you might not expect, or said in a way that seems out of character, but those instances don’t intrude. If there’s a weak link, it’s Cooley Muldoon, the villain, who’s got nothing to recommend him and is simply villainous. He’s relentless, though, and very inventive, so nothing will be easily resolved, you can bank on that. Granny May’s traumatized daughter, Bonni, seems idealized, as though Rory’s view of her is actually accurate. I also wonder whether Bonni’s silence is too convenient, being essential to the plot. Rory has undertaken to find out exactly what renders her speechless, and who’s responsible. I like that part of the narrative, but I think it might have worked better had the story not turned on that device.

The prose, however, needs no qualifiers, and it’s the first thing that strikes you about Gods of Howl Mountain:

[Granny May] squinted down her nose, eyeing the tree in the yard. This tree, lone survivor of the blight, stood a centerpiece of all she surveyed from her porch. The others of its kind, chestnuts, had once covered these mountains, the bark of their trunks deeply furrowed, age-twisted like the strands of giant steel cables. Their leaves sawtoothed, golden this time of year, when the falling nuts fattened the beasts of the land, sweetening their meat. That army of hardwoods had fallen, victims of death-black cankers that starved and toppled them. Some exotic fungus had slipped in through wounds in their bark, the work of antlers or claws or penknives. This tree stood alone in the meadow, crowned high against the impending light.
A spirit tree.

This is Granny May’s first appearance, and it’s as though she were that tree, unblighted, standing tall, determined to live her way, from the land and part of it.

With Gods of Howl Mountain, Brown has gone a big step further from the promise revealed in Fallen Land, and I recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Too Much, Yet Too Little: The Last Road Home

14 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: The Last Road Home, by Danny Johnson
Kensington, 2016. 324 pp. $15

As a young North Carolina boy in the late 1950s, Raeford Hurley loses his parents in a car accident. He goes to live with his grandparents, who farm tobacco in Chatham County, not far from Durham. They’re kind to him, and he loves them, but he misses his mother and their brief joyful moments:

We laughed, jumping around and making fools of ourselves, until we had to sit down on the floor. Her happiness would flow out like a circling wind and wrap me up, pulling me into her joy, letting me know it was okay to be alive and be silly. Daddy was the only one I ever saw who could make Momma’s eyes water. I think he would sometimes be mean to her on purpose just to show us life was serious and hard, and not to be wasted being childish. My momma was too gentle to die.

Right away, you understand what Raeford, known as Junebug, is looking for. And where he tries to find it, or, rather, with whom, makes for a gripping premise. Junebug’s only friends are two African-American twins, Lightning and Fancy Stroud, whose sharecropper parents work for white families. By the time they’re fifteen, in the early 1960s, Fancy and Junebug realize their attraction for one another. Despite the threat of exposure and violence in a community where the Ku Klux Klan holds sway, they have a passionate, all-consuming affair.

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Evicted sharecroppers, Parkin, Arkansas, 1936 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

What’s more, Fancy’s the sexual aggressor, making so many passes at Junebug that there’s no doubt she’s willed them to be together. Hasn’t she been raised to fear such impulses, especially where white boys are concerned? She says she has, yet her romance with Junebug feels inevitable. You know they’ll sleep together; you just don’t know exactly when.

Johnson writes as if Fancy and Junebug were like any two teenagers, who, given time and mutual attraction, will do what comes naturally. There’s naive charm in this, to be sure, but it’s also hard to believe. Surely, they’ve been taught that their relationship is anything but natural, so you’d expect them to struggle against that constraint and get to where they can embrace one another and damn the bigoted world. Instead, the process unfolds externally, based on facts rather than psychological depth–they’ve known each other since they were kids, they find warmth and laughter in each other, and their hormones are overflowing.

Consequently, The Last Road Home feels too self-conscious by half, and the failure to evoke time or place suggests a rootlessness, much as with the orphaned Junebug himself. Johnson excels at interiors; you see the tobacco farm, the chores, the general store in town, and so forth. But you don’t see the town itself, the red dirt by the roadside, or the Confederate flags on the license plates; you don’t smell the tobacco curing when you drive the highway; and the 1960s never emerge, at least not to suggest that the characters live and breathe in their milieu. Even civil-rights protests rate barely a mention, and then only so that a character can predict that the racial landscape will surely change one day.

Rather, Fancy and Junebug exist in a private vacuum. They have no other friends to provide a context or influence their outlook, and Johnson has kept their families small–and, except for Junebug’s grandmother–mostly out of sight. This may seem convenient, because there’s nobody around to upset the grand design, but that’s precisely the difficulty. Rather than explore the interracial love to which other people object, Johnson stuffs the plot with extraneous obstacles, as if blind hatred and the risk of lynching weren’t enough trouble. Without giving anything more away, I’ll paraphrase the jacket flap (too revealing, as is typical). Junebug gets involved in a business deal that goes wrong, leaving him “with a dark secret” he can’t tell anyone. Later, he goes to war, and though the flap doesn’t say where, you know it must be Vietnam.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting just to separate star-crossed lovers. Johnson could have accomplished the same thing had he not restrained the town bigots, who take their time to react and pull their punches when they do. As a result, though The Last Road Home sometimes hits its stride (the Vietnam combat sequences are especially vivid), the novel seems like an explanation rather than a story, a collection rather than a synthesis.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Strength Comes in Different Forms: The Land Breakers

21 Monday Sep 2015

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Review: The Land Breakers, by John Ehle
NY Review of Books, 2014 [reprint of 1964 edition], 345 pp. $18

In 1779, two young Americans of Scotch-Irish ancestry, Imy and Mooney Wright, settle in the North Carolina mountain wilderness and try to make a life for themselves as farmers. This simple premise, which provides no built-in tension between characters and develops as episodes rather than a conventional plot, would seem thin fare, as I’ve just described it.

Blue Ridge Mountains, seen from Deep Gap, western North Carolina (Photo by Ken Thomas, public domain; courtesy singout.org).

Blue Ridge Mountains, seen from Deep Gap, western North Carolina (Photo by Ken Thomas, public domain; courtesy singout.org).

But The Land Breakers is a very satisfying novel indeed, of many pleasures. The first and most obvious is the prose. To say that Ehle has the time and setting in his soul may be no understatement, for he was born in western North Carolina in 1925, and his ancestors numbered among the first white settlers in the area. However, Ehle’s grasp goes even deeper than that, for The Land Breakers contains many beautiful passages of nature writing, like this one, about a mountain autumn:

About them now the woods were changed into a fairyland of color. The buckeye turned yellow and dropped its eye-shaped seeds. The box elder near the spring turned into a bank of yellow leaves and pods; the maple in the valley just to the edge of the clearing got red as fire and beside it a white oak turned into the color of old wine; the sourwood was a rich red, the red oak was orange, and the possums climbed higher every night into the persimmon trees.

But nature can threaten life as well as inspire awe. The Wrights, as with the few other settlers who plunk down on neighboring acreage, struggle with wolves, bears, panthers, poisonous snakes, and mysterious illnesses, one of which kills Imy. Her death at first plunges Mooney into a deep depression, during which he can barely carry on his work, once his great solace. How he manages, and whom he takes up with afterward, changes lives throughout the settlement. As Mooney comes to grips with his loss, he grows as a man.

Along the way, Ehle has much to say about men and women, where true self-image lies, and the pull of what may seem exciting but is actually disastrous. Most of all, I think, The Land Breakers is about strength and weakness. Mooney is tall, physically imposing, and has an insatiable appetite for work, all of which earns respect, if not admiration. But Mooney’s greatest gift, which doesn’t always come easily for him, is the knowledge that emotional flexibility can be a strength in itself. This contrasts with Tinkler Harrison, a wealthy landowner who sees in every difference of opinion a contest he must win, never gives anything for free, and then wonders why his children desert him. When Harrison suffers loss, you sense that he’ll only become more bitter and even less reachable; when Mooney suffers loss, there’s more chance that he’ll rebound.

I also enjoyed The Land Breakers as a study in frontier life. The mind-boggling amount of labor involved in building a weather-worthy house, plowing and sowing, keeping animals, cooking, sewing, raising children–you name it–it’s amazing that anyone managed. Some didn’t, of course, but enough did, and as Ehle tells it, their ingenuity takes the breath away. If you want to know how people of that time cleared and plowed land, put together furniture, made sweet syrup from sorghum, or myriad other acts of craftsmanship, this novel will tell you.

The Land Breakers is the first of Ehle’s seven Mountain Novels. I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Different Southern Belle: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

06 Sunday Sep 2015

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Review: The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, by Anton DiSclafani
Riverhead, 2013. 390 pp. $30

Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has it made. Her family, which consists of her parents, her twin brother, Sam, and herself, live in a manorial home on a thousand acres in Florida. She has her own pony and is an expert rider, a cool daredevil on horseback. It’s the early 1930s, but the Depression hasn’t touched her; a citrus farm supplements her father’s income as the local physician, the only doctor for miles around.

However, as the story opens, Thea has been banished, with no explanation or negotiation, to a girls’ riding camp in western North Carolina. Something has happened for which she takes the blame, though part of her objects, even as she struggles with her shame. Nevertheless, she believes her punishment to be temporary, for the summer only, yet you sense that she’s kidding herself. There’s a reason two hundred girls have gathered here, and it’s not just to improve their equestrienne skills or learn to become ladies in the Southern style, perfect in posture, manners, and elocution.

That reason, however, is a secret, which DiSclafani skillfully keeps, drawing out the tension. The careful reader may guess, as with much else that happens, but if so, that doesn’t matter. Thea’s story, a coming-of-age with a sharp edge, is well worth following, and she learns some very hard lessons at a young age. The rawness may put some readers off, but the author has much to say worth hearing about sex, gender, families, and the stifling nature of white Southern gentility, though many attitudes she explores are of course not peculiar to the South.

Perhaps to heighten Thea’s sense of dislocation, as if her shameful exile to a different state weren’t enough, DiSclafani has made her a hothouse flower. She has never attended school beyond her father’s lessons and never socialized with anyone her own age except Sam and their cousin, Georgie. Consequently, Thea has no clue how to act when suddenly thrust among hundreds of strangers, and every glance, every gesture, carries the potential for acceptance or ostracism.

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1932 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

Unemployed man eating at the Volunteers of America soup kitchen, Washington, D.C., 1936 (Courtesy FDR Library, National Archives).

I found this hard to swallow, both as a premise and in the writing. Some emotional transitions feel overwrought, especially when Thea flip-flops from, say, hope to misery within a single sentence, all of it told, none of it earned. That bothered me but was less pervasive than the trouble with her family life, which seems hermetically sealed beyond belief. Has she really never seen anyplace except the homestead? The Great Depression ravaged the South more than any other region of the United States, yet Thea has no sense of it. People still continue to get sick, so her father continues to collect his fees–or so the narrative says, as if they always had the money to pay. There are no shacks, no Hoovervilles, no pellagra, no summonses at midnight for dirt-poor patients who put off getting medical attention until they’re dying. There are no black people, either, or stories of violence, interracial or otherwise. The culture of the riding camp feels lived in and may reflect the time, but the story doesn’t quite feel Depression-era.

What’s true in Yonahlossee, however, is Thea’s hunger for love and acceptance, and how she goes about finding them, sometimes in forbidden ways. She also begins to question her family’s motives and behavior, realizing their dishonesty and selfishness, and, to some extent, how unfair they were to punish her. As the most sympathetic adult character in the book–significantly, from New England, not the South–tells her in confidence:

Parents never trust their children. I don’t know what happened exactly, and you don’t need to tell me. I believed for a long time that I had shamed my family. But it’s in a family’s best interest to make a child believe that.

This passage spoke loudly to me. What Thea does with this notion makes her story important enough to overlook narrative flaws or implausibilities.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.