ANTHOLOGIES
“Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader”
Edited by Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin
The University of South Carolina Press, hardcover, $59.95, paperback $24.95, 336 pages.
“Homegrown in Florida”
Edited by William McKeen
University Press of Florida, $24.95, 304 pages.
On the day Harry Crews realized that his brutal, poverty-stricken childhood was nothing to be ashamed of, he discovered his literary mother lode: “The only things worth writing about were all the beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that made me the Grit I am and will always be. Once I discovered this, I was home free.”
You’ll find a lot of beautiful, dreadful and sorry in “Grit Lit,” a new anthology of memoir and fiction that’s as potent as a Mason jar of white lightning, featuring some of the hardest-hitting writing to ever come out of the South.
Editors Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin (“Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter”) have assembled 28 connoisseurs of the art of the dirty South, most of whom you’ll recognize — Harry Crews, Lee Smith, William Gay, Tim McLaurin, Larry Brown, Ron Rash, Rick Bragg, Barry Hannah, Tim Gautreaux and Dorothy Allison — and some you might not, but should: Jim Grimsley, Breece D’J Pancake, Chris Offutt, Lewis Nordan, Ann Pancake (no relation to Breece) and Brad Watson.
Be forewarned: Their subject matter is grim.
“It’s some people in this world has got thangs,” one character says, “and some that ain’t,” and these stories mostly concern themselves with the ain’ts. There are snakes and liquor and chewing tobacco. There are fights between dogs and roosters and over women and fences. There are threats: “If you and that boy come out here for me and Ray, have your boxes built and ready. You gone need’m before you git out again.”
To paraphrase a classic, the characters in these stories make the alligators look tame — and their authors aren’t far behind them. From Georgia to Alabama, Mississippi to North Carolina, from dismal corners of Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, West Virginia and Missouri, these writers hail from the same places they write about: the wrong side of town and its undying population of losers. The characters in their stories, marginalized and poor for life, work — if they work at all — in strip mines or cotton mills, as “truckers and plumbers and waitresses and route salesmen.”
What’s remarkable is that any of the authors managed to crawl from the wreckage, much less chronicle it with such eloquence and power. You can’t read Grimsley’s “Your Daddy in Time” a single, sustained scene of unalloyed horror, without wondering what magic he employed to escape his past, like Houdini slipping his chains underwater.
The same goes for McLaurin’s autobiographical “Keeper of the Moon,” about a dogfight that exposes the awful “dignity gained in the belief in a clear superiority of man over beast.” The battle so painstakingly described might just as easily work as a blueprint for getting the hell out of East Fayetteville, where McLaurin grew up.
So might the events of Brown’s “Samaritans,” whose narrator, determined to avoid getting tangled up with a desperate woman he meets, nevertheless edges close enough to see “that she had been stomped on all her life and had probably been forced to do no telling what.” It’s not hard to imagine, watching him lean in too far, page after page, that the experience was one Brown knew well.
The fates of the family members Dorothy Allison reels off in “River of Names” read like a backwoods version of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”: “Caught at 16, June was sent to Jessup County Girls Home where the baby was adopted out and she slashed her wrists on the bedsprings.” “Cousin Melvina married at 14, had three kids in two and a half years, and welfare took them all away. She ran off with a carnival mechanic.” “James went blind. One of the uncles got him in the face with home-brewed alcohol.”
By “having survived,” asks Allison, “am I supposed to say something, do something, be something?” This question is answered by every story in “Grit Lit.” But to do it, the authors — and their characters — have to stand precipitously close to the edge.
Humor, as sly and painful as a wink from a black eye, mitigates the hurt, from the sinister good-ol’-boys barbecue in Watson’s “Kindred Spirits,” to the tongue-in-cheek kidnapping in Gautreaux’s “Sorry Blood,” one of the strangest role reversals to ever take place in a Walmart parking lot. As Nordan says, the comic comes from the same place as the tragic: “Something about me believes that comedy comes out of darkness and that all comedy is underpinned by loss.”
Grit Lit is easily one of the best anthologies of its kind, offering an unbeatable cross-section of writers who, by their own admission, have “never learned a damn thing from peaceful or good things” and whose stories are, at times, so like a tight-rope walk across a live wire that you’ll want to look away. Good luck.
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If "Grit Lit" represents the side of the South that wrecks the car and runs off with your teenage cousin, then "Homegrown in Florida" pays a visit to the side that pays the rent and cuts the grass every Sunday. Its contributors recall mostly happy memories: growing up Cuban in Hialeah and Miami; coming of age in the safe harbor of an all-black neighborhood in Crescent City in the 1950s; being accepted in a Citrus County high school as "a fellow Copenhagen-chewing, Coors-chugging, Lynyrd Skynyrd-head-banging redneck" despite being a recent transplant from Israel. Not all is perfect — there is racism and Khrushchev threatening to bury the U.S. — but for the space of time captured here, innocence prevails.
“These are stories,” editor William McKeen writes in his introduction, “of a vanishing place and a lost time,” when the Panhandle was “a great undiscovered wilderness.” Well-known writers such as Carl Hiaasen, Michael Connelly, Zora Neale Hurston and Tim Dorsey, along with journalists, poets and musicians (Tom Petty and Sister Hazel’s Ken Block), team up to reminisce about coming of age in that once unspoiled paradise.
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