In three of the five states I’ve read so far, a character in one of the state’s books finds a dead body beneath the surface of water: in the bayou in Alabama’s Train Whistle Guitar, in the Mississippi River in Arkansas’s “Ark of Bones;” and in the Pacific Ocean in California’s Cannery Row. This wouldn’t seem odd to me – dead bodies make for interesting stories, right? – except that in all three cases our protagonist happens upon the body, reacts or doesn’t react, and then the event disappears from the story. The characters take no action, the discoveries do not cause later trauma, and though I keep expecting the story to come back to it, the body is never referred to again beyond the scene in which the character finds it.
The first time this happened, when I read Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar, I waited for the body to reemerge in the narrative, and when it didn’t, I was confused as to why it was there in the first place. When it happened again, in Henry Dumas’s “Ark of Bones,” the language of the discovery was eerily similar.
He seemed to be a white man, but you couldn’t really be certain about that either. All I could make out was that he was a dead man.- Albert Murray ¹
His body was so ate up by fish and crawdads that they couldn’t tell whether he was white or black. Just a dead man. – Henry Dumas ²
In both of these stories, the protagonists who happen upon the bodies are young African American boys, and in both cases, the author makes a point of telling us that the race of the dead man is indeterminable. In both cases the young boys leave the bodies and take no action; they find the corpses, note them, and the stories continue, influenced in no way that I could discern by the discoveries of the bodies.
Similarly, in Cannery Row, marine biologist Doc discovers a dead body trapped beneath a rocky ledge when he is on an octopus-collecting expedition at low tide. Unlike the Mississippi River bodies, this Pacific Ocean body is intact – a girl with hair that swirls with the ocean’s movements, white faced and with eyes open – and Doc is momentarily traumatized. He staggers back to shore, gasps for air, and when a passerby asks if he’s okay, he stutters about the body, is too troubled to call the police himself – can the bystander please do it? – and the body never appears again in the story.
The scene in Cannery Row is awfully dramatic for us never to return to it. I would have been jarred by it without two other books already featuring floating corpses, but together with the Murray and Dumas bodies, Steinbeck’s deserted corpse – the third of its kind – alerted me that perhaps I am missing something. Many writers know Chekhov’s rule:
If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there. ³
All three of these writers – Murray, Dumas, Steinbeck – are accomplished authors who know what they are doing. And all three put dead bodies in their works. Why are those bodies there? Random corpses have appeared in 3 out of 15 books I’ve read since I began my Andrea Reads America project. Is this an American lit thing, and if so, what’s it all about?
In the Murray and Dumas stories the bodies may make a larger point about race: in death we are all the same, indistinguishable by the color of our skin. That is an important point that struck me about those passages, and one that I still carry with me, that we are all the same in death – why not in life, too? The corpses also reveal some things about place: their existence suggests a place of violence and murder, and the fact that the bodies have gone undiscovered indicates an isolated, rural setting.
The purpose of the Steinbeck body is not as clear to me. It plays an immediate role of putting Doc in a state of confusion and vulnerability, but beyond that I am at a loss. He does not reflect on his own mortality later, or at least not in a way that was obvious to me.
I am alert now to these bodies as I read my way across the US. Perhaps I won’t come across another; perhaps it’s just coincidence that three piled up at the beginning of my tour. I plan to keep a body count, though, and to read closely if I come across another corpse. Because to me, these corpses are like Chekhov’s gun: they are hanging there on the wall, why did they not go off?
Can you recall a similar story, with a dead body that is discovered and never discussed again? What are your thoughts on the purpose of these corpses?
¹ Murray, Albert. Train Whistle Guitar. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. 1974. Print.
² Dumas, Henry. Ark of Bones and Other Stories. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1975. Print
³ Valentine, Bill T. Chekhov: The Silent Voice of Freedom. New York: Philosophical Library. 1987. Print.
I was excited to get to Arkansas on my reading-road-trip of the US. Despite my mom living in Blytheville for a couple of years when she was growing up, I knew nothing about Arkansas except that President Bill Clinton hailed from that state. I couldn’t even locate it on the map.
Now, I know that Arkansas borders Louisiana in the south, Oklahoma in the west, and Missouri in the north, and the Mississippi River marks Arkansas’s eastern border with Tennessee and Mississippi. What fascinates me about its geography, and I saw this reflected in the books I read, is that Arkansas is both a Southern state – with deep South sensibilities and a history of cotton, slavery, and Baptist faith – and a Western frontier state with outlaws and cowboys and a border with the Indian Territory. Its literature reflects both of these histories: True Grit is bandits and gunslinging (with one of the best female protagonists in the Old West), Ark of Bones is the smoldering legacy of slavery, and The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is rural riverbanks, biscuits, and the family of a preacher man.
Novel: True Grit
Author: Charles Portis, born 1933 in El Dorado, Arkansas
Setting: 1870s Dardanelle, Arkansas and the Oklahoma Territory
Categories: Western
True Grit, set in Arkansas and the Oklahoma Territory in the years just after the Civil War, when Texas Rangers chased fugitives in Indian Territory and the frontier was pushing west, is the story of Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl who seeks a man “with grit” to help her apprehend the man who killed her father.
Mattie Ross is one of the most endearing female characters I have come across – not because she is sweet-natured and charming, but just the opposite: she is hard and blunt. It does not take long to figure out who in the book is the one with True Grit:
“You are impudent.”
“I do not wish to be, sir, but I will not be pushed around when I am in the right.”(Mattie)
“You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away.” (Mattie)
“I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?” (Mattie)
Before reading this book, before I even knew True Grit was a book, I watched the John Wayne movie of the same title. The movie tickled me – I loved the characters and the wandering through Indian Territory in pursuit of a murderer – but then when I read the book less than a month afterward, I heard the actor’s voices when I read their lines, and I saw their faces as the characters moved through the story. The movie was very true to the book, so that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing – I was delighted to see some of my favorite lines in the movie were quoted directly from Portis’s pages:
“I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.” (Mattie to Rooster when he offered her whiskey)
it’s more that I’m not sure what my experience of the book would have been had I not seen the movie first. It is unusual for me to experience literature in that order: movie then book. It is almost always the other way around. Either way, both stand up as everything you want from a rolicking Western tale: drunkards, bandits, campfires and horses, and frontier women with sand and true grit.
Collection: Ark of Bones and Other Stories
Author: Henry Dumas, born 1934 in Sweet Home, Arkansas
Setting: 1950s and 60s Arkansas and Harlem, New York
Categories: African American Literature, Short Stories
Ark of Bones and Other Stories is a collection of nine short stories by Henry Dumas, an Arkansas native whose family moved to Harlem, New York when he was ten. These stories, some set in Arkansas and some set in Harlem, are dark and smoky, and are infused with mojo and a deep spirituality. His characters and his ghostly magic were refreshing to me in their differentness: the strong, male, African American voice was not strictly of the here and now; there was an ancientness to it, as if these stories came up from the depths of the earth and through a long line of African-rooted souls. Spirit magic swirls thorughout the stories, as in “Ark of Bones”, when the Mississippi River rises to carry the Ark – Noah’s Ark? our character wonders – to Headeye, a chosen one from Arkansas:
“Only river people know how to talk to the river when it’s mad. I watched the light on the waves way upstream where the old Sippi bend, and I could tell that she was movin faster. Risin.”
At the same time, in “Boll of Roses” Dumas paints beautiful, earthy scenes of his Arkansas roots:
“That little brown girl bout the prettiest thing I ever seen in a cotton field.”
“He was off the porch, into the sun, passing the garden, when the smell of cotton… then the rose garden, and then wet dew…”
Never far from the surface is the struggle of the young black man in the pre-Civil Rights South – the struggle to escape the vicious cycle of servitude, of poverty, of ignorance, and the cotton fields that kept him shackled to all three:
“He felt ashamed of staying out of school just to pick cotton.”
Ark of Bones and Other Stories reminds us that many Southern blacks were still stuck in the cotton fields as recently as the 1960s, missing school, missing out on education, so that they could eat. Unlike farmers’ children, whose lives look the same during harvest time, pickers do not own the land, they do not own the cotton, they cannot sell the cotton. There aren’t more hours in the day to earn more money, there are not opportunities to get ahead, to educate themselves, to move on to something better. Not until the Civil Rights movement:
“‘I picked cotton all my life, chopped, planted, cleared land, and I aint got nothin to show for it. You younguns oughta get out of the field and get with them rights people. They got the Lord on their side.'”
These are important stories. They are vivid reminders of not just our history, but our recent history, and the effect this history has on a significant portion of the American population.
Novel: The Homecoming of Samuel Lake
Author: Jenny Wingfiled, born Fountain Hill, Arkansas
Setting: 1950s Columbia County, Arkansas
Categories: Southern Literature, Southern Gothic, Christian Fiction?
Set in 1950s southern Arkansas, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is reminiscent of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: it is a story of both vileness and tender beauty, told from the perspective a a spunky eleven-year-old girl.
Swan Lake is the daughter of Methodist preacher Samuel Lake, and though the novel shows us the lives of the adults, and bedrooms, and other people’s homes, it is Swan who is the heroine of this story. Normally Swan and her brothers move every year when their father is transferred to a new parsonage, but this year he has been let go all together. He has no church, and the Lakes move from Louisiana back to Arkansas, to the childhood farm home of Willadee, Samuel’s wife and the children’s mother.
The summer is filled with the antics of children, as summers should be, but it is also filled with tensions: seduction, suicide, Samuel’s feeling he has been abandoned by god, and most stomach-turning, the entry of Ras Ballenger, a cruel child-beater of a man. The characters are entertaining, the plot is well-paced, and the narrative, while sometimes making me hold my breath, gave me a sense of hope. Wingfield does a wonderful job with the landscape of southern Arkansas, and she made me nostalgic for my grandparent’s farm in middle Georgia; I felt at home on the banks of the creek, in the woods, on the land as if I were eleven again, ranging Grandaddy and Nannie’s hills:
“He stood out in the yard, sucking in air tat smelled of damp earth and autumn, and he wondered why people even had houses.”
“I think sitting in the backyard watching the kids catch lightning bugs is a pretty good way of worshipping God every once in a while.”
For a large portion of the book I wondered if The Homecoming of Samuel Lake would be considered Christian fiction – it is unflinching and unapologetic in placing God and Christ, church and faith at the center of Samuel Lake’s life – but by the end of the book I wasn’t sure if that was enough to classify it as Christian lit. There are miracles and Samuel Lake’s faith, but there are many “good” characters who don’t give a whit about religion, who don’t share Samuel’s fervor, and who are treated just as well by the author without depending on Christ to get them through. Because I have never read Christian fiction, I was curious about the author’s intention, and when asked in an interview about her reaction to some reviewers labeling it as such, she answered, “To Samuel, God is as real as his wife and children are, and nothing is more important…None of the other characters care one way or the other about religion…This is not a religious story. It’s a story with one main character who is deeply religious.”
The Homecoming of Samuel Lake was a compelling read that kept me turning pages.
Books I have read and can recommend: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Books that have been recommended to me and I have not yet read: Daisy: Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Janis Kearney Cotton Field of Dreams by Janis Kearney Butterfly Weed by Donald Harington The Choiring of the Trees by Donald Harington The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks by Donald Harington
I am reading America: 3 books from each state in the US with the following authorships represented – women, men, and non-Caucasian writers. Follow along on Goodreads and here at andreareadsamerica.com.
The authors’ original words do their work more justice than any book review I write, and when grouped together, the quotes become atmospheric of the state they are set in. I hope you enjoy this addition of a “Favorite Quotes” series to my Andrea Reads America coverage.
From True Grit by Charles Portis
“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood.”
“I can still see him mounted up there on Judy in his brown woolen coat and black Sunday hat and the both of them, man and beast, blowing little clouds of steam on that frosty morn.”
“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
“‘The youth of Texas are brought up to be polite and to show respect for their elders.’
“‘I notice people of that state also gouge their horses with great brutal spurs.'”
“As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”
“You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away.”
“‘They say he has grit,’ said I. ‘I wanted a man with grit.'”
“Shooting cornbread out here on this prairie is not taking us anywhere.”
“I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?”
“Lucky Ned Pepper laughed. He said, ‘I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!'”
From Ark of Bones and Other Stories by Henry Dumas
From “Ark of Bones”
“His body was so ate up by fish and crawdads that they couldn’t tell whether he was white or black. Just a dead man.”
“I aint want nobody with a mojo bone following me.”
“By and by the clouds started to get thick as clabber milk. A wind come up. And even though the little waves slappin the sides of the bank made the water jump around and dance, I could still tell that the river was risin.”
“If that Ark was Noah’s, then he left all the animals on shore because I ain’t seen none.”
“The under side of the whole ark was nothin but a great bonehouse.”
“We all be leavin if the Sippi keep risin.”
From “A Boll of Roses”
“That little brown girl ’bout the prettiest thing I ever seen in a cotton field.”
“He was off the porch, into the sun, passing the garden, when the smell of cotton… then the rose garden, and then wet dew…”
“He felt ashamed of staying out of school just to pick cotton.”
“‘I picked cotton all my life, chopped, planted, cleared land, and I aint got nothin to show for it. You younguns oughta get out of the field and get with them rights people. They got the Lord on their side.'”
From The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield
“Everybody knew that preachers (especially Methodists, like Samuel) were the vilest bunch of bandits alive.”
“Swan yearned to get close to somebody. Really close. Soul deep.”
“From Swan’s observations, there seemed to be a conspiracy among church members to keep the preacher and his family from knowing them too well. Playing cards were hidden when they came to visit. Liquor was suck back in the pantry…”
“Preachers’ kids are the worst kind.”
“She could feel Ballenger… No direction was safe. The June breeze was his hot breath. The rustle of leaves was a sinister whisper.”
“The long, lead-colored banks looked as if they had been sheared off, flat across the bottom, and regular sky showed underneath.”
“‘Why is the sky turning green?’ Bienville wanted to know.”
“Maybe the answer is that we’re supposed to cut a watermelon and let the juice run down our chins.”
“I think sitting in the backyard watching the kids catch lightning bugs is a pretty good way of worshipping God every once in a while.”
“It seemed to her that, when you’re constantly seeking God’s will, you may just be ignoring the obvious.”
“He stood out in the yard, sucking in air that smelled of damp earth and autumn, and he wondered why people even had houses.”
