FICTION
‘Minnow’
By James E. McTeer II
Hub City Press, $24.95, 240 pages
“Minnow,” the immersive debut by James E. McTeer II, unfolds over a handful of days during a hot and wet South Carolina summer, yet the scope of the novel feels much larger. This dreamy coming-of-age story evokes the mysterious alchemy that occurs when the restlessness of boyhood meets the apparent boundlessness of midsummer afternoons. McTeer sets his preadolescent hero, Minnow, loose on the untamed and deeply segregated Sea Islands perhaps a hundred years ago. What follows is an anxious, eventually heartbreaking adventure that takes place long before the advent of Amber Alerts and helicopter parenting.
We’re never certain about Minnow’s age, only that he’s under 12 and acts a lot older. He isn’t the big fish in the gang of boys who meet each day in their secret hideout to trade ghost stories, but he may be the most serious. Minnow’s forced maturity stems from a crisis at home: His father has been bedridden for a month, slowly dying of a lung illness. His mother appears to have lost hope.
The time setting also remains vague. A dusty portrait shows Minnow’s grandfather in a gray Confederate uniform. But other details of life on the islands would fit much of the first half of the 20th century. This is the Jim Crow South, racially divided and rough not only around the edges.
When Minnow volunteers to retrieve his dad’s medicine from the town pharmacy, the simple errand sets in motion a fantastic and dangerous quest. McTeer, an elementary school librarian in Columbia, S.C., makes his storytelling intentions apparent from the get-go. Much of his Lowcountry fable sticks to the framework of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the narrative road map followed by everyone from Odysseus to Katniss. The underlying formula doesn’t detract from the richness of the writing. Minnow navigates a vibrant, believable world of juke joints and shrimp boils that the author undoubtedly knows by heart.
The journey hits the first snag when a scheming pharmacist sends Minnow to see Dr. Crow, a hoodoo man in nearby Port Royal. From there the quest grows even more complicated. To make the father’s medicine, Dr. Crow demands dirt gathered from the grave of Sorry George, a legendary witch doctor known for deadly black magic. Before it’s over, Minnow crosses paths with yet another witch doctor, plus a trio of gun-happy bandits, a bloodthirsty boar and a stray dog with an uncanny (and later infuriating) sense of timing.
Surviving this series of ordeals forces Minnow to make troubling sacrifices, each more traumatic than the last. As an archetypal hero, the boy can come across as a little flat in his determination. His steadfastness to do whatever it takes to get the medicine may seem hard to swallow, even in a story inhabited by haints and swamp monsters.
But McTeer knows a thing or two about perseverance. He spent almost a decade trying to land a book deal. After four young adult novels failed to get nibbles, McTeer switched bait and began writing a story inspired by his grandfather, a sheriff and part-time witch doctor. The result, “Minnow,” won the South Carolina First Novel Prize presented by the South Carolina Arts Commission.
Those early experiments writing for young audiences may help explain the novel’s temperamental prose. The author shows a real capacity for poetic phrasing in his descriptions of landscape: “The surrounding forest was more a jungle now: tight with pines and saw palmettos, tangled with twisted vines and moss. The world smelled damp, and cool, and dark.” Elsewhere, though, the narrative stumbles through monotonous, redundant paragraphs that sound like the stuff of grade-school primers. It doesn’t take a witch doctor to exorcise awkward syntax, just a fastidious editor.
Similarly, a smattering of overused metaphors sometimes detract from the momentum. It’s unnerving when Dr. Crow is depicted as “only a shadow”; less so once we start counting the times men “move like shadows” or are “hidden in shadows.” Ditto for the “chocolate-skinned” women — a phrase that might work in an India Arie song but nearly nowhere else.
This underlying issue of race haunts the novel, even as it skirts center stage. “Minnow” pays particular attention to matters of class and ethnicity, but mostly avoids any soapboxes. The author couldn’t have known that his book would land in a summer of race-related controversies for South Carolina. Still, the implications are worth considering.
Minnow, a white kid, leaves the comfort of his familiar society to enter a melting pot of sailors and immigrants in Port Royal. He later encounters self-segregated villages on the outskirts of the islands. His journey is helped along by a series of kindly African-Americans. The treacherous Sorry George is both black and a villain, but it’s implied that his evil stems from the legacy of colonization itself. Says one character: “These islands are old. … Old since explorers have been coming from across the water. … Blood is out here. Brought with the slaves. Magic. Dark things.”
At the book’s climax, McTeer veers slightly from the typical hero quest. Minnow and the dog are trapped in a furious storm conjured by black magic. They must make split-second, potentially lethal decisions — choices that trump matters of race for the sake of survival.
It would be reductive to say that “Minnow” transports readers to a simpler time. True, many of the hero’s wilderness misfortunes could be avoided if he only had a smartphone with GPS. Yet the novel’s central questions about the loss of childhood innocence and the nature of sacrifice remain timeless. The handling of race and class are harder to parse; serious subjects, no doubt, but this fast-paced adventure doesn’t waste summer daylight on navel-gazing.
