Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Crazy in Alabama (1993)

by Mark Childress

Industry, Alabama

Alabama: 9/18

   It's the half-way mark for the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  The Alabama chapter is weak, and it got me thinking how editor Susan Straight made her picks for this state, where the only sure-fire canon level pick is To Kill a Mockingbird.   I realized, walking the dog last night, that you can use the subject categories from the Library of Congress, like Alabama - fiction, to look at every title so classified, and that there was likely to be a 100% overlap.  The Alabama - fiction tag in the library of congress returns about 330 titles.  I looked through 80 of them on my walk and saw 40% of the titles from this chapter, so I think it is likely that Straight must have had the same insight.  

  Crazy in Alabama is the kind of title that would have driven me nuts as an Audiobook but was fine to read in physical form.  It's a comic novel, later turned into a film by Antonio Banderas, of all people, starring Melanie Griffith, about an abused housewife in small-town Alabama who murders his husband and escapes to Hollywood to pursue her dream as an actress.  Meanwhile, back at home her relatives deal with the consequences of her actions and their own feelings about the incipient civil rights movement.

Four Spirits (2003) by Sena Jeter Naslund

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Four Spirits (2003)

by Sena Jeter Naslund

Birmingham, Alabama

Alabama: 8/18

   I'm mention again that Northern Alabama is the biggest literary dark patch I've observed since upstate New York.  The sole exception is four novels set in Birmingham, all within six blocks of each other.  Three of the books are works of historical fiction about the Civil Rights movement, the last is set at a strangely integrated high school.  Four Spirits is a complicated mutlti-viewpoint novel that switches between white and black characters. The four spirits are the four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15th, 1963.  Naslund is nothing if not committed to the bit, including as one of her characters a highly unconvincing Klu Klux Klan bomb maker.  The characters closer to her own experience are more believable but overall, I thought the single incident was thin source material for a book that tries to convey multiple points of view.   The chapters involving the actual Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King and his local counterparts were interesting but also reminded me of the almost total absence of political fiction in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- it's domestic fiction till the cows come home in the Deep South.

Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dessa Rose (1986)

by Sherley Anne Williams

Marengo County, Alabama

Alabama: 7/18

  Dessa Rose was a genuine surprise from the Alabama chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, a transgressive work of fiction about a white plantation wife and a band of escaped slaves she shelters- set in the 1830's.  It is the first book set in the 19th century in the South which depicts a sexual relationship between a male slave and a female mistress- which- if you just kind of described the outlines of the culture in this part of the country, you would think relationships between black men and white women would be, whatever else, an interesting subject for literary fiction.  But it is not, and I think that is because, unlike relationships between white men and black women, relationships between black men and white women were punishable by immediate extrajudicial murder.

  I'd like to say that this idea is either a myth or exaggeration, but the essential truth of this situation is revealed in cases like the murder of Emmett Till, an African American murdered for allegedly cat-calling a white woman in public.  I imagine there are still parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia where a black man/white woman couple would face trouble.  The relationship depicted here is a casual one, but the utter absence of any fully developed relationships between black men and white women across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana is enough to give one pause.  Really?  Not a single novel written on the subject.  Perhaps there is a work of science fiction out there that covers such a relationship in an alternate universe. 

Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001) by Barry Hannah

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)

by Barry Hannah

Clinton, Mississippi

Mississippi: 2/18

  Both Mississippi and Alabama scored eighteen titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  That ties them for last place in this specific chapter, behind Florida, Louisiana and Georgia.  18 titles does put them both above the single digit states of the mid-Atlantic.  I've also moved away from the original 13 colonies of the Atlantic seaboard and into the first of the hinterlands that were settled (excepting those that lay within the original 13 colonies).  Here, the dynamic was first, the clearing out/removal of the Native tribes- most of whom were property holding and "civilized" within the usage of that term at the time.  Second, it was the cotton revolution which opened up huge swaths of Alabama and especially Mississippi for enormous, slave driven cotton plantations.   The need for slaves, exhaustion of the soil in the upper south from Tobacco farming and the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad drove a huge, forced population movement, as the slave holders of the Virginias and Carolinas sold their slaves "down the river" to work on the plantations of the newer south.

   Not that Yonder Stands Your Orphan, by moderately well-known southern author Barry Hannah, addresses any of that.   Instead, Orphan is a loosely assembled collection of eccentric and violent characters living around a lake.  It's not a great book- it was the author's last novel- but it, at least, interesting, and neither a work of chick-lit or a YA title.  I will say I've never read a book where so many people were sliced open by knives.

The Saints of Swallow Hill (2022) by Donna Everheart

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Saints of Swallow Hill (2022)

by Donna Everheart

Valdosta, Georgia

Georgia: 24/24

  I started the Georgia chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America back on April 15th of this year, meaning these twenty-four titles took over seven months to knock back.  The Saints of Swallow Hill is last because it's an Audiobook, and my time spent listening to Audiobooks is way, way down this year.  Also, I thought The Saints of Swallow Hill was mostly tedious, a depression-era work of historical fiction set on a Turpentine Farm in South Georgia.   One main character is a rootless jack-of-all-trades with a penchant for banging the wife of his immediate supervisor everywhere he goes.  The other is a childless widow who is forced to flee the Carolinas after a neighbor sees the immediate aftermath of her shotgun abetted mercy killing of her sick husband.   The plot is a conventional will they or won't they romance enlivened by the Southern Georgia swamp-forest setting- not an environment with which I am familiar.

  Looking through the 24 titles representing Georgia, a handful stand out- Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, Tayari Jones and Honore Jeffers- all women.  The classics portion includes Cane and Gone With the Wind, which are both canon level American Lit.   Most of the "discoveries" were in the African American authored books- Appalache Red by Raymond Andrews was particularly memorable.   Bringing up the bottom, as always, the chick lit and YA titles.  Georgia is a solid mid-tier literary state- third in this chapter behind Florida and Louisiana, but if it had been in the prior grouping it probably would be a close second to Virginia, and maybe the number one state from that chapter.