This is one of those utterly charming books which conjure up a particular place and time so well that it transports the reader into that world. Set in the Appalachian mountains, this novel depicts a very deprived community in Baines Creek, where men customarily and casually ‘beat on’ women, where prospects are bleak, and where lives are small. Small but not mean. There are deep friendships, there is the fight for a better future through education by a few enlightened members of the community, and there is love amongst the people, sometimes even when they are not kin.
There are many protagonists in the novel, each taking a chapter or more, and all forming the community. Sadie Blue is our first, a mere slip of a girl but pregnant already, and beaten up badly by her husband, Roy Tupkin.
Today was beating number three since I got legal. I figure Roy don’t need a reason no more. I close the trailer door against the chill, then shuffle to the bathroom to wash off the dried blood. The face in the cracked mirror shows another loose tooth, a split lip, and a eye turning purple.
p5
Sadie goes to her Granny Hick for help, but Granny Hicks is not particularly sympathetic. Her language is also wonderfully colloquial:
“I cut my eyes to see if she sasses me” (p16)
“I pull the chew outta my pocket” (p16);
“I coulda told her he was looking for easy, and a woman’s life is hard” (p17);
“I prayed hard to the devil cause my prayers to God won’t never answered” (p33).
From the tough, almost sour Gladys Hicks, the next chapter is from Marris, Gladys’ cousin by marriage, and neighbour. She is the vein of sweetness running through this community: she looks out for Gladys although she is often rebuffed by her, she looks after Sadie as best she can manage to and feels helpless to stop Roy beating Sadie up; she cooks for the DIllards who are even worse off and need her food charity, and she is able to love her son’s new wife because she sees there is a bond between the couple. She is named for Mary Harris Jones, or Mother Jones, a champion of the working people, “That name got put on me in a fit of birthing pride…” (p46). Marris comes from a place even poorer than Baines Creek, and tells of it vividly in her own particular idiom:
Everybody was poor in Rock Bottom, and no amount of work changed it. Even when my three brothers went in the mines with Daddy, we can’t get ahead of the bills for medicine and sundries. They were grown men starting to court when Daddy was home with Mama and me cause of a broke arm. The mine blew up, and my brothers died, and so did all the men underground. Everything broke inside Daddy that day. He turned old and never found his strong self again.
Rock Bottom cut the heart outta folks and let em walk round thinking they was alive when they won’t.
p46-47
We get some more perspectives from truly good hearted people – Eli Preacher, and the teacher from out of town, Kate Shaw, both endearing characters. It is warming to read of how Kate tempts children to school by giving them apples to eat, knowing they are hungry, and then with penny sweets as rewards for learning. Then we get some chapters from some truly unusual folk, idiosyncratic by any stretch, Birdie Roca who has a crow living in her hair, and is a medicine woman of sorts, and Jerome Biddle, a loyal, simple man, with one leg shorter than the other, both of whom secretly help and look after Sadie Blue and Kate Shaw, understanding their different vulnerabilities and needs. Then we come near the end of this remarkable read with the chapters of 2 characters we’d think of as wastrels perhaps, or gangsters even, Roy Tupkin and his henchman, Billy Barnhill. However, even their stories are interesting and they are humanised despite their behaviour; they are, after all, an integral part of this community too, even if on the underside, even if all the deprivations and meanness seems to find their way into some of these desperate, unhappy men. They are dangerous men, because they are so quick to violence, because they hold little sacred, because they have so little to lose. They have so little which is of worth that it almost feels as if they are unpractised in finding worth and value. Billy Barnhill’s mute devotion to Sadie Blue is touching and sad; he apparently can do nothing as his protector and childhood friend and partner in crime, Roy, marries the woman he loves and then mistreats her badly.
This pages just fly by, driven by the delightful way the characters think and talk; the writing is so strong, and the idiomatic speech patterns so riveting and distinctive. The author herself says she is a picky reader.
“I look for a great story written exceptionally well, with the prose highly polished and the deadweight removed from the storyline”
p297-8
and that is precisely how Weiss herself has crafted her novel. Weiss tells us she was well into her fifties before she wrote a book, and when encouraged by a friend, her very down-to-earth reaction was,
“Does the world really need another book?”
p297
Well, whether it does or not, I am glad Weiss added hers to the world; I could read Leah Weiss all day long and stay in that beguiling southern community with her, and watch those characters endlessly.
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