New South Editing by Percival Everett, Wiley Cash and Andrew


Local 105-year-old “root doctor” Mama Z has documented nearly every lynching in America since 1913 and chastised the prolific academic author of a two-volume study on the biological and philosophical origins of racial violence in America. United States” for his ability to “build 307 pages on a topic like this without an ounce of anger.” However, the professor is enraged when he reads Mama Z’s files on the lynchings and copies the victims’ names. “Crime, practice, the religion of it,” writes Everett, “became more dangerous as he realized that the similarity of their deaths caused these men and women to come together as one piece, one body at the same time. It was all one number and no number at all. , many and one, a sign, a sign.”

This fusion will take a supernatural form as the murders continue, as practitioners of “revengeful justice” move in one syllable, “make a collective sound” and chant “stand up” in one syllable.

WE IMAGINE IT WAS RAIN
by Andrew Siegrist
193 p. Central City Press. Paper, $16.95.

Siegrist’s first collection to win the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Award is a silent affair. Sorrowful fathers of disappeared sons and disappeared daughters fill these silent stories in a book combined with a slightly mournful tone, heavy symbolism, and homage to Tennessee.

The mothers in this book are often distant or dead, and Siegrist treats these fragile, abandoned men and boys with compassion. In “Whittled Bone,” a mother sleeps or looks out the window, while her husband copes with her daughter’s disappearance, collecting and organizing the dead wasps, cobwebs, and cattle bones she recorded in her dream diary before escaping. The “Satellites” motherless siblings must decide whether to help their father, who plots to kill himself the day NASA’s UARS satellite burns down and falls from the sky. Another grieving son learns magic tricks from his father, who “swallows fire on street corners for money” and dreams of an even greater illusion of resurrecting his mother.

Politics is almost nonexistent in these worlds, but there is social context to be found in the ingenious details: the nesting of cotton-mouthed snakes, caterpillars collected in ball jars, a father examining a childhood scar on a father’s forehead, an overdose of a wound on the forehead of his lying son. There’s a sense of feeling, and there are intriguing clues to lives influenced more by myth than history. A grieving young father tells the story of a girl with lashes up to the waist, who cultivates holy things by planting Bible pages in the ground. Another father recalls the story of a woman who worked miracles by sending floating candles from the river to the sea.

Coffins and coolers fill with water as the characters always pray for pouring rain. Perhaps South of Siegrist is that the floods of the past and the floods of the future are the same flood, because, as he wrote, “every drop of water in the world has been here since the beginning of time.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *