Some novels are so forthrightly, languorously Southern that they alter the barometric pressure in the room.
Reading “The Cicada Tree,” which is only one Misfit shy of the Gothic hit parade, you may feel the mercury rise, reflexively mop the sweat from your brow, and scan the sky for signs and portents, that is, when you are not engrossed in the coming-of-age page-turner.
This assured debut from Atlanta writer Robert Gwaltney explores many familiar tropes of our region’s holy writ, but he has polished his words like heirloom silver until they gleam like new.
“The South is indeed a central character in the novel, but I didn’t initially endeavor to make social or political statements about the South,” says Gwaltney, who also is a contributing editor for The Blue Mountain Review. “I felt at the beginning that I would be addressing human nature, but the subconscious is always at play in the creative process, and I am just now processing the ways that the book addresses the South’s complicated and troubled history: the idyllic myth of the place and the ugly reality of racial social suppression. And through childhood eyes, I also offer those facets of the South I hold close: family tradition, language, and the physical beauty of the place.”
It is 1956 in sepia-toned, segregated Providence, Georgia, when a brood of cicadas descends, leaving their amber husks behind — play-pretties that hint at Biblical apocalypse. “It was the cicada’s singing I remember best — their courting song,” muses Analeise Newell, our white, working-class narrator, who has not yet developed the lingual filters prized by Southern ladies. “It was this frenetic beckoning for the affection of another that stirred the humid air to reckless speeds that summer, the summer I turned 11.”
There is much frenetic beckoning for affection.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Eleven can be a bittersweet age for girls, who are still young enough to hold hands and skip, braid each other’s hair (adorned with cicada shells), and yearn mightily for that grail of early adolescence: social approbation. Analeise enjoys a pinky-swearing friendship with Etta Mae Johnston, the Black granddaughter of formidable Miss Wessie, the “help.”
Race relations are rendered matter-of-factly without much elaboration in “The Cicada Tree”; it is the class-oriented inequities of haves and have-nots that obsess Analeise, who desperately wants to belong to the Mayfields, the family of haughty, gilt-edged aristocrats in the plantation on the hill. Every small town has such a family and such a mansion, and we all must learn the hard way not to envy them, that they are not as easy in their silks as they look. In the South, beauty can be corrupt and treacherous, the more it is coveted. Or, as Miss Wessie puts it, “This world is full-up of pretty things to chase after. Some ain’t what they seem.”
When he is not writing, Gwaltney, who grew up in Cairo, Georgia, serves as vice president of Easter Seals North Georgia, a nonprofit that strengthens children and their families during critical times in their development. Perhaps it is this experience that enables him to write so knowingly of playground politics, especially those of little girls with their sugar-and-spite alliances and rivalries. Some of the most enjoyable scenes involve Analeise at the piano with Etta Mae singing and hitting high notes; their talent and simple love for each other are palpable:
“Etta Mae hummed. The music took hold after the first few notes, as it always did, as if little magnets were stitched to my fingertips. And I played. Yearning. That was the sound. Something far off and out of reach. . . . I tasted it right away, the feelings in Etta Mae’s soprano — the taste of want. It was like cinnamon. Only a smattering. Red hot and honeyed. Then fading. Lingering just long enough to scald my tongue. And my legs, how they ached and burned.”
Gwaltney has written a book celebrating the feminine. Male characters do not do much in “The Cicada Tree,” except step from the margins from time to time to cause problems; neither Analeise nor Etta Mae has a worthy father figure. At school, it is that maddening Marlissa Mayfield who calls the shots. “With a smooth turn of heel, she glided to the door and down the hall. If you listened closely, you could have heard it. The quiet tap of her expensive shoe — a sort of Morse Code only girls can hear. *Follow me. I am in charge now*. We hurried behind her, our heels tapping back, agreeing to this new order.”
Analeise will learn soon enough whom to follow, but not until a disastrous reckoning. Gwaltney knows how to build suspense, with foreshadowing as dark as a plague of locusts. The lesson? Listen to Mama, gifted with the clairvoyant “sight” after a tussle with a rattlesnake. When she says run, take Etta Mae’s little hand and start sprinting away from that cursed plantation on the hill.
Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in Atlanta magazine, Garden and Gun, Georgia Trend and other publications. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
Working closely with the American Press Institute, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is embarking on an experiment to identify, nurture and expand a network of news partnerships across metro Atlanta and the state.
Our newest partner, ArtsATL (www.artsatl.org), is a nonprofit organization that plays a critical role in educating and informing audiences about metro Atlanta’s arts and culture. Founded in 2009, ArtsATL’s goal is to help build a sustainable arts community contributing to the economic and cultural health of the city.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be introducing more partners, and we’d love to hear your feedback.
You can reach Managing Editor Mark A. Waligore via email at mark.waligore@ajc.com.
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