Whistling Past the Graveyard

Susan Crandall
Whistling Past the Graveyard

Gallery, 2013

Summer of 1963, Cayuga Springs, Mississippi. Nine year old Starla Claudelle lives at her grandma's house. Her father works at an oil rig and spends little time at home, and her mother had gone off to Nashville six years ago to become a singer, and now only sends rare postcards. Stubborn and independent, Starla is often punished by her grandmother Mamie for petty mischief. Despite Grandmother’s harsh words about her mother, Starla praises her mother and waits for the moment when she becomes famous and take Starla from her grandmother.

It seems like Starla doesn’t go to school. She studies a little at home, plays with the neighbor girl, kicks older boys, in the beginning even breaking the nose of one of them. For that Mamie grounds Starla on Independence Day, not allowing her to leave the house to watch the fireworks. Starla nevertheless is out of the house, plays on the playground, where a neighbor catches her. The neighbor threatens to complain to Starla’s grandmother, and then the girl, still in fear of harsher punishment, runs away from home and gets to the highway. Starla plans to walk to Nashville, finds her mother to live with her. Tired to walk, the girl changes her plan and takes a ride. A black woman named Eula on a truck picks up Starla, who are puzzled by a baby inside, a white baby. It begins to darken, and Eula offers Starla to spend the night at her ho,e, and in the morning Eula’s husband Wallace will take the girl where she wants to go. Starla agrees, but when he sees bear-like Wallace, the owner of bad temper and addiction to strong alcohol, the desire to spend the night at Eula’s house disappears. Wallace pulls his wife, baby James and Starla with force home and closes the door on all the bolts.

Whistling Past the Graveyard can be compared with fireworks: it’s, too, something noisy, incessant, kind to the eyes, catchy and colorful. The plot of the novel is as realistic as it is implausible in its fabulousness. I walked from my grandmother here is piling on rights of African Americans, dear, but distant Mother is a witch, and a nine-year girl giving battle to Ku Klux Klan.

Much of the credit that the novel was a success, belongs to the protagonist Starla. If she were not so independent, persistent and resourceful, all the adventures, sooner or later, would have turned sour, and would have made a moist cake of journalism and ordinary story of the runaway child. Crandall made Starla an insightful storyteller, but childishly naive, fair, but merciful. It's hard to write more than 300 pages from the POV of the nine year old child, so much so that it was authentic. Crandall gives Starla as much knowledge about the world as it is needed for the story. 300 pages look convincing, the final 30 are not quite. Actually, in the final pages, we read about the rights of blacks, Martin Luther King, protests, and here it turns into unconvincing journalism. Child will hardly understand this difficult matter.

The story of Starla’s wanderings is a story of splitting the world into black and white, literally. Child maybe for the first time sees an unfair balance between black and white, and begins to realize that the world is not black and white, and everything is mixed. Black can be white. White can be black.

The plot of the book is a whirlwind, flying swiftly, you do not want to be interrupted even for a second. But stylistically Crandall is more conservative and cautious. The novel is written in the southern dialect, but only to some degree. All the characters here, black and white, speak with dialect. And yet the author is afraid of losing literary style. Characters express themselves with something between a dialect and correct speech. So, illiterate people still express themselves not quite illiterately. Crandall gear ups on the dialect, then she reduces the pressure and the characters then almost completely switch to the literary language. We won’t find a complete authenticity there, but the novel reads without much effort.

Susan Crandall has written an excellent novel, which, if not placed in the annals of fiction of the South, then certainly delivers a lot of pleasure.

Half of Paradise

James Lee Burke
Half of Paradise

Hyperion, 2011 (ebook)
(originally published in 1965)

A part of Forgotten Books Friday

Three young men in Louisiana of early 60s are experiencing the difficulties of life and trying to find their place in life. Avery Broussard returned to his father's farm after work on oil wells. Father soon for debt was evicted, the farm was sold by auction, the father then dies immediately, and Avery instead of agriculture switches to the moonshine whiskey trade.

J.P. Winfield comes from the countryside to the city and spends the last five dollars to participate in the talent competition. A talented blues singer, Winfield gets a job at the club, and then even goes on a tour. Success comes to Winfield with addiction: first pills "for pleasure", and then cocaine under the tongue.

Black Toussaint Boudreaux worked as a longshoreman, moonlighting as a part-time boxer. His last fight ends with a victory, but the price of victory is a broken arm. Injury leads to loss of work (and part-time work), wandering, and then to a prison.

The debut novel by James Lee Burke's written in the not too widespread genre of "hard life of hard men". Hardships and difficulties stick to the three characters of the novel, which brings together youth, lack of education and poverty. Despite the "paradise" title , the novel tells of the circles of hell, whose name is Louisiana. Even when one of the characters starts to climb, do not assure yourself - he will drop even lower than he had been.

All three heroes, definitely clean and decent people, eventually break down. Reasons for this are drugs and alcohol, but these are external causes, the same major weakness of all three characters is their assertiveness. They rush forward not seeing that the abyss is under their feet.

Plot-wise Burke tightly packed in his novel several sub-genres: prose of the South changes to the prison novel, then to out-of-prison novel, and then to the confession of cocaine user. The central part of the novel takes place in prison: in labor camp Broussard and Boudreaux will meet. I can quote prison dialogues for hours:

"This tastes like Evans washed his socks in it," he said.

"Drink it or go dry," the trusty said.

"Fuck you, ass kisser."

"Maybe you don't get no water the rest of the day," the trusty said.

"And maybe you'll get your fucking throat slit while you're asleep," Billy Jo said.

The trusty put the lid back on the barrel. "That's all your drinking water for today."

"Let me have a drink. I'm like cotton inside, "Daddy Claxton said. ...

"You'll have the runs for a week," Billy Jo said.

"His tongue won't be blistering by one o'clock," the trusty said.

"Screw you, punk."

The dipper was passed around the gang. The trusty replaced it and the lid when they had finished.

"There's a freshwater spring over in them trees," he said. "I'm going over directly and have a drink."

"You mean there's clean water over yonder?" Jeffry said.

"It's coming right out of some rocks."

"Go fill up the water barrel. We'll pay you for it, "he said.

"What with?"

"I got three bucks hid in the barracks."

"That ain't enough."

"The sonofabitch is riding you," Billy Jo said. "Don't pay him no mind."

"It's coming out of some rocks with moss on them. '

"I believe him," Jeffry said. "This is hill country There's always springs where there's hills."

"You're in barracks two, ain't you?" Billy Jo said to the trusty. "Well, I got buddies in there, so you better forget about sleeping for the next few nights unless you want to get operated on. It takes one swipe with a knife and your whoring days are over. Now get the fuck out of here, punk. "

"It's a long day without no water," the trusty said and lifted the barrel and moved down the ditch.

Half of Paradise makes us to remember of what used to be old school prison and novels about them: no gangbangers, no Mexican gangs, no Aryans.

Burke is a confident narrator for a debutant, and it is sad that he sometimes missteps. The novel is written in the third person, but such that almost the first. The reader knows only what the character knows. But Burke sometimes adds a few sentences of what the character can not know: dialogues of the secondary characters, when the main character is already out of the room, or the actions of the characters when the main character is blindfolded.

The title of the novel could be interpreted in the sense that for a novel as this you can give a half of paradise.

Dream with Little Angels

Michael Hiebert
Dream with Little Angels

Kensington, 2013

The small town of Alvin, Alabama, 1987. The narrator of the story, the 11-year-old Abe, lives with his mother Leah Teal, a local police detective, and his older sister Carry, has a talkative friend Dewey, and a tendency to watch the neighbors. Strange neighbor is set aside when a 14-year-old girl, a student in a parallel class with Leah Teal’s daughter Carry, is missing. One day, after getting off the school bus, Mary Ann Dailey has not come home. Mother after a few hours is raising hell, alarming the police and all the inhabitants of the town. Teal and her colleagues are beginning to find the girl among her friends, hoping that Dailey just is just staying at a frind’s house. But on the first day the girl was not found.

Leah Teal takes the disappearance of Mary Ann Dailey close to heart. 12 years ago, when Teal was still new in the force, in Alvin also a teenage girl 13-year-old Ruby Mae Vickers had gone missing. The police worked hard, looking for Vickers, but found her only three months later. The body of a girl who was tortured and raped, was found by a local farmer near his home under a willow tree near the swamps. The murder remained unsolved, and Teal could not forgive hermself for the death of Ruby Mae.

After a while, Abe and his friend on the bike ride to a nearby town, and there meet black girl Tiffany Yates. She eats ice cream and chats with the boys. After talking to Tiffany, Abe and Dewey go back, and three hours later the girl's mother calls the police and reports the disappearance of her daughter.

Story that takes place in the South, is written by a Canadian Hiebert, and this story is not new: the killing of children by unknown perp, with background of racism and emotional tension throughout the city. Hiebert immediately determines the range of three suspects, although police can not find any evidence until near the end. Although the novel presents no major surprises, the intrigue is here, though not as close to a really nail-biting excitement.

The author’s diligent style and his storyteller’s talent is not supported by convincing describing of the life of the South and the cast of characters. Hiebert writes that Leah Teal works without sleep searching for the girl and\or her killer, but what she was doing, if there wasn’t any suspects and the obvious places have not been checked, is unclear. In addition, the presence of a detective in the town like Alvin, is doubtful. It is most likely that a number of detectives from the state capital would have been called for help. Helpless of Leah has confirmed that the case for her is actually solved by the 11-year-old child. That, in turn, is also unlikely.

Little Abe, of course, is smart for his age, but it is unlikely he would be able to unravel the complex case. Hiebert is trying to make him more adult, but even then, the boy seeing the dead bodies is yet not an evidence of that the child will be smarter than the team of experts. Hiebert comfortably made the narrator the son of the chief investigator, allowing the boy to overhear adult conversations at the police station. Though Abe is a sympathetic character, sharp-witted and kind boy, his speech is full of opposites. He spoeaks as a collega graduate, and then he speaks with the southern dialect and sounds like a uneducated child.

With dialogue here, there are too many inconsistencies. Characters speak the literary language, then suddenly begin to swallow the words and syllables, but so the whole laguage here can be called pseudosouth.

Against the background of the investigation sometimes racial issue flickers, and Hiebert handles this issue timidly. Every now and then we read the word "racist", but then, especially in the South, this word was used rarely and has yet become fashionable. And how is posible to be talking about racism, when in the book the author have never used the word "nigger" or “Negro”. It’s laughable.

Quite an interesting story here is ruined by a not credible background. And the atmosphere is sometimes more important than the plot.