Southern Gothic

I first met Southern Gothic in an old copy of Flannery O'Connor's Everything that Rises Must Converge, a library cast-off with a broken binding.  I was in my first years of high school - or maybe I was even still in middle school. In those days I binged on books, sat down with them on lonely afternoons and curled up, barely moving until I turned the back cover and stretched cramped limbs.

So I started in on this book I'd chosen for its interesting title and the charm of its deterioration - no deeper planning, no name recognition.  I liked the eponymous story for its biting depiction of race relations, didn't get the title, gave up trying to.  I read the second pulled along by the tension, the same way I read mysteries, skipping chunks of narration for the plot.  And then I hit the third story, "A View of the Woods."  

I had slowed down a bit by now - the book was making me nervous.  I preferred my dystopias to be clearly delineated alternate worlds, not this just-twisted, recognizable planet.  At that age, I might have never heard of southern gothic, and was definitely not prepared for this.  As the grandfather and girl sniped at each I wondered whether there was a point to this interminable fighting, worried a little, wished it would end.  I was enough of an innocent that when the murder finally happened, written so bluntly, so sparingly - "then he brought it down twice more" - I was truly and deeply shocked.  

I closed the book, only three stories in, and fled to the kitchen.

Since then I've grew a little more of a taste for southern gothic - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in the form of another battered secondhand book, stands in the part of my bookshelf reserved for rereading - and I've also grown more careful about what exactly I choose to binge on.  But I never finished that particular O'Connor collection.

And I think sometimes that I'm still just as innocent.  Gathering stories in the South, I did not expect or imagine that real life would imitate fiction, in content or in style.  Southern gothic is just a genre, the grotesque turn a plot element, right?  But family stories every now and again took a twist to the horrific.  The grotesque writ large - "So they hunted him down and hung him in the woods" - or small:

But listen, I’d do anything my daddy told me. 

(My great-uncle Sid is in story-telling mode, an old man with a smoker's cough and a sly look in his eyes.)

I don't care what it was, I believed him. Lemme tell you what I did one time. I wanted a knife so bad. I was a little boy. I’d see these little knives they had about thaaaat long, closed up, little penknife things, and I wanted one so badly but mama was scared of me having one because she thought I’d cut myself. So I never could get one. I tried and tried and tried. Finally I got one, don’t remember how exactly I got it but I got one and boy, I was so happy to have that little knife. And I was just carrying it around and showing it to everybody and talking about that little knife. I was probably about three, four, maybe. 

Daddy came in and I had to show it to him. He said "man, that's a fine knife." He said, "Now, I tell you what you do." He said, "You go out into the edge of the field and plant this knife like that, and it'll come up and make a whole tree full of knives, and you'll just have a whole treefull." Well, see, I knew they planted corn and beans and stuff and it would come up and make all that stuff, so I believed him! 

I went out to the edge of the field and planted a knife. Well the next day I thought about it and I went out to see if a tree came up and I couldn't see a thing. I couldn’t figure out where it was. I couldn’t find my knife. And daddy had got what he wanted all the time, get rid of the knife. But see, I believed him. 

He told me one time when I caught a crow, I caught a crow one time, and I was going to make a pet out of it. And I bought it home and I told him, see, I’m going to make a pet out of this crow. He said, "Aw, you can't make no pet out of that crow." I said "Mmm, yeah I am, I’m gonna pet it, pet it." And he said, "well, if you wanna make him talk, you take a knife and split his tongue. And he'll talk."  I said," Ohhh, that's a good idea."  

So I got my knife and split his tongue. The next morning he was dead.  

That's what daddy wanted all the time. Again he got me. He'd get me all the time.

(Uncle Sidney laughs.  And because every gothic tale needs an innocent, I sit at his kitchen table, swallowing hard, eyes wide, trying to chuckle.)