Just returned to the USA from a trip to Europe, where I
bicycled from Maastricht, Netherlands, into the little corner where that
country meets Belgium and Germany, then rented a car with my family and drove
the autobahn to Munich. We stopped along the way to spend time with my German
relatives in Wallerstein and the nearby Medieval town of Nordlingen along what
the Germans call the “Romantische Strasse” (Romantic Road).
All along the way people asked us about Donald Trump and
what is happening to Americans. Can’t blame them. We Americans aren’t really
sure what’s happening to us. I was also struck by how much more efficient
everything is in Europe compared to us. The infrastructure is solid—whether
along the highways and bridges or in the personal lives of Europeans who by and
large don’t have to worry about health care or retirement. More about that
later.
One thing we do still have going for us here in the USA,
however, is our writers. Maybe it’s the pressures of U.S. society, with its
unhinged greed and that greed’s hold on our institutions, the recklessness of
our politics, the insecurities at practically every level of life. Writers have
a lot to write about—and certainly the South’s long and proud literary traditions
attest to that.
So let’s look at a couple upcoming books from the South, one
of which I edited and served as a contributor, and see what they tell us about
ourselves.
Mojo Rising:
Contemporary Writers (Vol. 2)
Edited by Joseph B. Atkins (Sartoris Literary Group)
Edgar Allan Poe called the short story the supreme literary
art, one that requires the “loftiest talent.” Poe, a Southerner from Richmond,
Virginia, was a master of the genre, and he’d be proud of his fellow
Southerners---particularly in the fertile land of the Deep South
writer/publisher James L. Dickerson calls the “Mojo Triangle”—for proving him
right over the years.
The short story tradition that includes masters like William
Faulkner and Eudora Welty continues in the South today, and proof of that is in
this collection of short stories by contemporary Southern writers, already available
for pre-order on Amazon’s Kindle and other venues. A September 23 event at
Nobel Literary Prize winner William Faulkner’s home of Rowan Oak in Oxford,
Mississippi, will celebrate its publication that month along with its
companion, Mojo Rising: Masters of the
Art (Vol. 1). That companion volume, edited by James L. Dickerson, will
include stories by Faulkner, Welty, Richard Wright and many others.
As I say in my introduction to Mojo Rising: Contemporary Writers, most Southern writers share with
their Russian counterparts a visceral connection with the poor, and like
literary editor Thomas Seltzer once wrote, they see the poor “as human beings
like the rest of us”—multi-dimensional, good, bad, ugly and beautiful, not as
charicature or ideological constructs.
From the old gumshoe in Ace Atkins’ The Long Last Ride of El Canejo and Sheree Renee Thomas’
vision-haunted protagonist in Aunt
Dissy’s Policy Dream Book to Larry Brown’s lost soul Fay in Girl on the Road, these stories share a
gritty earthiness even if the people find themselves in sometimes fantastical
situations.
I’ll shamelessly here put in a pitch for my own story in the
collection, The Singapore Holy Man,
which takes you from a rooftop in downtown Memphis to the streets of Singapore
and Hong Kong, where the deals are made to use sweatshop and slave-shop labor
to make shoes, clothes and computers for Westerners.
The Last Ballad
By Wiley Cash (William Morrow)
When Wiley Cash, a fellow North Carolinian, asked me to be a
reviewer of this book, a novel based on the life of martyred labor leader Ella
May Wiggins, I was both flattered and eager to read it. Cash, a New York Times bestselling author,
resurrects the life and times of a real working class hero who should be
familiar to all high school history students but sadly is not, and likely never
will be.
Cash deftly shifts from character to character as he builds
his tale of the poor, uneducated mother of five who decided she’d had enough of
the injustices of cotton mill life and became a leader of the protest at the
notorious Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. She became a
balladeer as well as an organizer, but her conviction, her determination to
cross racial barriers, and her beautiful, inspiring voice ultimately led to her
murder. Five men were later indicted for her murder, but they walked away free
men after less than a half-hour of deliberation at the trial. Justice was never
served.
(Ella May Wiggins)
Central to Cash’s powerful novel are his characters. We get
to know Ella, her children, her friends. We go inside the mansion on the hill
where the aristocrat Katherine McAdam wrestles with the injustices taking place
down below in the cotton mills that made her family wealthy, and we see her
reach out to Ella. We understand just how much courage was needed when we see
the workers confronted by the menacing presence of Percy “Pigface” Epps, the
mill security boss who uses every means available to him to make sure unions
never gain a foothold in his mill.
The novel will be published in October.
Good reading ahead, folks, and that’s some good news to
share!
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