But I have kept the impulse in check. For a century and a half, outsiders have come to the South to explain what’s wrong with it, which is of course very annoying to southerners. Think about it: If you hear someone saying nasty things about your hometown, you’ll likely find yourself defending it, even if you hate your hometown. I think this natural defensiveness at least partially accounts for the post-Civil War lies that dominated the 20^th century—and which have been incredibly detrimental to southern race relations—so for three years, I refrained from writing about the massacre. But a few months ago, something happened.

As the end of my stay in Wilmington drew near (I would soon be moving west for work), I started taking long walks around the downtown part of the city. You can live in a city for years without really seeing it, unconsciously navigating the familiar blurs for days on end, but once you know you’re leaving, everything rushes into focus. Wilmington is a tourist-heavy city of about 100,000 in southeastern North Carolina, bracketed by the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean. It has a very walkable riverfront area, and as the city was never shelled during the Civil War, old architecture is the norm. Protestant churches with arrowed towers and antebellum mansions quartered into three-bedroom apartments line the sidewalks of Market Street. The riverfront area is home to several brick warehouses converted into bars, restaurants and boutiques, and a little north of downtown, tunnels of trees shade the roads past traditionally segregated graveyards.

But as I walked the city, the most distinct characteristic that kept popping up wasn’t old buildings—it was the signs that mark the old buildings, telling the history of the structures.

During one of my walks, I strolled down a block on 2^nd Street in which eleven of the fourteen houses have official plaques from the Historic Wilmington Foundation. One of the three remaining homeowners had put up their own plaque, which reads: “On this site in 1897 nothing happened.” Interestingly enough, most of the official plaques—of which there are nearly six hundred—tell similarly uneventful stories. In front of the Dickinson House on 2^nd Street the plaque reads: “Neoclassical Revival style house built as rental property for Charles R. Dickinson (1877-1956), native of Beaufort, N.C., insurance agent, and wife Lillian Walker (1879-1904), native of Brunswick County, N.C. This house is one of a pair of mirror image dwellings; other house, demolished in 1969…”

The more plaques I read, the stranger I found it that none of the plaqued homes had housed anyone involved with the 1898 massacre, which thousands of Wilmingtonians had participated in.

But I thought maybe it was just the domestic markers that told an incomplete story. Why would you pay for a plaque—which cost a few hundred dollars apiece and are written by the Historic Wilmington Foundation based on research the home owner provides—to commemorate an atrocity that you’ll be reminded of every day when you pick up your mail? So I started looking for city markers that commemorated Wilmington’s darker moments.

I went down to the site of the old slave market at Water and Market Streets, right at the center of downtown, and found a plaque dedicated to a Confederate shipyard that had been located miles away from the site. There was no marker that mentioned the sale of slaves. I walked to the corner of 4^th and Harnett, where the first African Americans were killed in the 1898 massacre, and found no markers at all. On my way back through town, I saw a statue of the former attorney general of the Confederacy, a memorial to the Confederate dead, and a sign that memorialized the captain of an ironclad Confederate ship. I looked for markers that mentioned the 1898 massacre, but found only two, both of which went up within the last five years.

One marker, which stands on 3^rd Street, told the story of a black newspaper editor who was driven out of town by the violence in 1898: “Alex Manly 1866-1944. Edited black-owned Daily Record four blocks east. Mob burned his office Nov. 10, 1898 leading to ‘race riot’ and restrictions on black voting.”

I found it odd that the sign said the burning of Manly’s office led to a “race riot,” since a state-commissioned historical investigation released in 2006 proved conclusively that what happened in 1898 was not a spontaneous outbreak of violence, but rather a carefully planned coup, orchestrated by patrician white Democrats in order to regain political power and segregate the city.

In 1898, Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina, and one of the most integrated cities in the South. There was a thriving black middle class, with African Americans in the government, in the fire department, and on the police force. The white gentry weren’t happy about this, and when the progressive Republicans won elections in 1896, white Wilmingtonians began conspiring to retake the government. They held secret meetings, bought high-powered machine guns, and assigned each district of the city a “captain” to command the area when the violence broke out. When the bloodshed began on November 10, prominent whites had been planning it for months.

It’s also misleading to call what happened a “race riot” in the contemporary sense, as the marker does, because the event in question consisted of up to 2,000 whites storming the most traditionally black part of town and shooting African Americans dead in the street. (As I would later learn, the naming of the violence is a contentious topic in Wilmington. The white supremacists who took part originally called it a “rebellion” or “insurrection” to justify their actions, and one historian I spoke to referred to it as a “political conflict.” Others call it a “coup” or a “massacre”—the author of the state-commissioned report on 1898 told me that what happened was in fact a massacre—while the most popular moniker is the totally inaccurate “race riot.”) Between at least twenty-five and one hundred black men were killed during the massacre, depending on whose estimate you go by. (Estimating deaths is quite difficult because of the black bodies left in the streets as an example to others, the black bodies thrown in the Cape Fear River, and because so many blacks fled town after the violence, which makes it hard to know who died and who left. The lowest estimate of the dead stands around ten, and the highest at over two hundred.) No whites died, though one white man was injured by a stray bullet.

After the killings, hundreds of armed whites went to city hall and persuaded the Republican mayor and Republican members of the board of alderman to resign. The Democrats then swore in a white supremacist board of alderman and a new mayor—a former Confederate soldier who had given speeches encouraging whites to shoot any black man they saw trying to vote. The federal and state governments did nothing to prevent the takeover, and the mutinous Democrats held power well into the twentieth century. In the days after the massacre, they gathered up hundreds of prominent blacks and progressive whites and forced them onto northbound trains.

But in all of downtown Wilmington, there’s only one sign that mentions 1898, and that sign presents a sanitized version of history. To find the only other marker that mentions the massacre, I had to walk about a mile and a half north, far away from the foot-traffic of the city’s touristy area.

***

Tourists come to Wilmington for the beach and the bars—up to tens of thousands on any given weekend—but they also come here for the history. The city has successfully marketed its downtown as “Historic Downtown Wilmington,” and offers several walking tours and historical horse-drawn carriage rides every day. (The click-clack of horse hooves wakes me up every Saturday morning, and the sound often sneaks its way into my dreams, which involve a disproportionate amount of jousting.) Though Confederate markers are prevalent, I have never seen a Confederate flag flying outside a home or business. The city is stunningly segregated, but in my three years here, I have heard exactly two racist remarks from strangers, which is fewer than I heard while living in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Austin. Wilmington is a college town filled with educated people, part of a county that came within one percent of going to Obama in 2008, so why, I wondered, were Wilmingtonians trying to hide the day that segregated the city and disenfranchised black voters for decades to come?

I started asking local historians. One of the first people I interviewed was Bernhard Thuersam, Director of the Cape Fear Historical Institute, and former Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Cape Fear Museum in downtown Wilmington. When we first spoke, I was surprised by Thuersam’s lack of accent. He was born in New York state, but moved to the South at a young age, and has lived in Wilmington since the early ‘90s, immersing himself in local history ever since. He interrupted me a few times to ask me to why I chose a particular term over another, and when I would present him with a piece of information he disagreed with, he would turn momentarily heated, but he quickly returned a friendly conversational ease after getting his point across.

When I asked him to tell me about the coup, he said, “It was not a coup. People are just searching for words to use to make it sound more important.”

I asked him how an armed takeover of the government could be considered anything but a coup.

“It might have had some coercion to it, but coercion has been used a lot of times in the past,” he said.

As our conversation progressed, Thuersam also took issue with my calling what happened in Wilmington the only coup in American history, which is the way it was characterized in nearly every text I had encountered.

“I think the first coup was in Baltimore in 1861, when Lincoln had city officials and legislators arrested through the government,” he said. “That’s a coup.”

Thuersam’s version of the 1898 violence is that blacks started firing on whites, which instigated the bloodshed. His view contradicts almost all the history I had read about the massacre (excluding the clearly racist website 1898wilmington.com, which sprang up around the time the state ordered a commission to investigate what really happened in 1898). But as I spoke to more historians, I learned that Thuersam’s incredibly implausible narrative had been the accepted version of events until well into the 1990s.

This popular narrative said that on November 10, 1898, white Wilmingtonians burned down the local black newspaper in reaction to an offensive editorial. (The black editorial was in response to a white editorial that promoted lynching “1,000 negroes a week” to protect southern womanhood from black rapists; the black editorial suggested many of these “rapes” were actually consensual relationships, and that if white men took better care of their women, maybe their women wouldn’t fall in love with black men). After burning down the paper, the white mob marched back through the city and encountered a group of African Americans on the corner of 4^th and Harnett streets. Even though the blacks were outnumbered and highly out-armed, the story says that they started shooting at the white mob. Both sides fired on each other, and as the day progressed, whites did what was necessary to restore order. The popular narrative suggested that the violence was regrettable, but whites were not to blame. If anyone or anything was to blame, it was—as Thuersam told me—first politics, and second the black newspaper editor who printed the risqué editorial.

But if both sides were firing on each other, why didn’t any whites die? Whites had all the high-powered weaponry, the numbers, the support of the local military, and had actually planned for the violence for months in advance, but even with limited access to primitive rifles, one would think that if the blacks were actually firing on whites, they would have killed at least one white person. (The one white man who was hit with a stray bullet was sitting on his porch, half a block away from the shooting, and there is debate as to which side actually shot him.) And if whites were restoring order, why were groups of white men seen riding in streetcars and shooting into black homes? And if whites and blacks were shooting at each other, why did all the killing take place in the traditionally black part of town? Why were black bodies the only ones left in the streets?

 ***

Melton A. McLaurin, Emeritus Professor of History at UNC Wilmington, was instrumental to the movement to correct the myths about 1898, and I wanted to speak to him because he’d published one of the definitive essays on Wilmington’s discomfort with its violent past. During the course of our conversations, he laughed more often than almost anybody I’ve met. In response to every question I asked, McLaurin would crack up and say, “Well, yeah!” before explaining to me the obvious nature of my question. (“That’s like saying, if you jump off a building, you’ll fall!”) But it wasn’t mean-spirited at all. It felt more a necessary mechanism that developed from growing up a white civil rights activist in the South—from spending your life explaining the painfully obvious.

McLaurin, who was one of the leaders of The 1898 Foundation, said that trying to start an honest public discourse about the topic was no small feat. He related the story of a local Republican who sat in McLaurin’s office and said that if McLaurin and his cohorts ever built a monument to 1898, he would be the first to tear it down.

“I think by and large the whole community tried to avoid it,” McLaurin said. “And the white community—which is the community in power, of course—was fairly determined that it wasn’t going to be a topic of conversation in the public sphere.”

As the centennial of the massacre approached and momentum for the 1898 Foundation began to build, one of the catalysts for revising Wilmington’s skewed history was a historical novel. In 1994, Philip Gerard—Chair of the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington and a former professor of mine—published Cape Fear Rising, a meticulously researched fictionalization of the 1898 massacre.

“The book was an early reminder that 1898 could not be swept under the rug,” McLaurin said. “The people that [Cape Fear Rising] really informed were the people that had a conniption fit about the book. Those were the older families that took such exception to real names being used in fictional work.”

Some of the 1898 conspirators have buildings, plazas, parks, and streets named after them all over Wilmington. (The building in which Philip Gerard teaches at UNC Wilmington is named after one of the conspirators.) Many of the conspirators’ ancestors still live in Wilmington and belong to influential families that were generally not too eager to dredge up the past.

When Philip Gerard was writing Cape Fear Rising as an untenured professor in the early ‘90s, he was called in for a meeting with the Chancellor of UNC Wilmington.

“I walk in and it’s not just the Chancellor,” Gerard said, “it’s every Vice Chancellor and Dean sitting around this conference table. And the Chancellor says, ‘Now Philip, can you tell them what your book is going to be about?’”

Gerard said he was unaware that many of the descendants of the 1898 conspirators were influential members of the university. “I didn’t realize at that point that Mrs. Hugh McRae was the chair of the board of trustees, George Rountree [III] was on the board of trustees, and a number of other families mentioned in the book had close ties in one way or another to the university.”

Gerard was quick to note that he was not threatened during the meeting, but he was later told that, after he left the room, “that there was a spirited discussion and a motion among the board of trustees to not grant me tenure.”

“The great mystery to me was why people were in such denial about it,” Gerard said. “Because it isn’t like I had to make tremendous leaps of logic to get from here to there. Everything in the novel that is public is verifiable.”

When I spoke to Gerard, I asked him if Bernhard Thuersam was correct in his assessment that there was no coup in 1898.

“No, it was really an accident that [the Republicans] all resigned on the same day and white supremacists took their places,” Gerard said, eyebrows clenched. “I mean, give me a break.”

I later contacted the authority on the topic, historian LeRae Umfleet, who in the mid 2000s was assigned by the state of North Carolina to research and write the 600-page 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission Report. Umfleet is the kind of exceedingly friendly person who puts exclamation points in emails to strangers asking her for interviews (“I would be glad to help!”). Over the course of our interview, whenever I confronted her with quotes from people who criticized her report for being biased or using a limited bibliography, she would laugh and say, “I bet I know who that was,” before clarifying that everybody is entitled to his own opinion.

“Up until [the centennial], it was a hush-hush in Wilmington,” she said of the 1898 massacre. “It didn’t matter which race you were, you just didn’t talk about it.”

She explained that, “A coup did happen. Regardless of which side of the story you want to fall in, there was a coup d’etat. And that is an armed overthrow of a legally-elected government, and that did happen.”

 ***

The further I got in my research, the clearer it became that Bernhard Thuersam belongs to a school of Lost Cause mythologizers who, since shortly after the Civil War, have been writing southern history in a way designed to promote white southern honor and minimize the racism of the past.

Melton A. McLaurin described the central narrative of Lost Cause mythology as such:

The mythologized view of southern history presented a wealthy, antebellum planter aristocracy that was morally superior to its northern counterpart. The planter elite benevolently treated slaves supplied by greedy, cruel, Yankee traders, and the Civil War resulted from Yankee jealousy of the South’s success. After four years of gallant resistance, the numerically superior northern forces subdued the South’s heroic troops, after which the region endured the horrors of Reconstruction, including the rule of ignorant, rapacious blacks supported by a northern Republican party bent upon destroying the South.

The motivations of the first wave of Lost Cause mythologizers are obvious: the South needed to create a new identity for itself following the Civil War, and southerners needed a narrative that could erase the humiliation of being the only Americans to suffer foreign occupation. So southern historians changed the past. But the question, for me, is why there are still so many people desperately clinging to these myths.

“Lost Cause mentality just dominated the American South until about 1970,” McLaurin said. “It was taught in the school system; it was taught in the churches.” He believes that a revised history of the KKK also plays a large part in the mythology: “To save white civilization and the virtue of southern womanhood,” the story goes, “the gallant men of the South organized into such groups as the Ku Klux Klan. Using violence only when forced to do so, they overthrew their black and Republican oppressors and reestablished the rule of honest, God-fearing whites who continued to look out for the true interest of the region’s blacks.”

When I interviewed Thuersam, he echoed this narrative: “The Klan was simply an outgrowth of a war, because once you disarm the army, the people will find a way to resist. That’s really what the Klan represented,” he said. “People will react that way; they’re just human beings.”

What surprised me wasn’t just Thuersam’s opinion—though that did give me pause—but the fact that he started defending the Klan without my even asking. Thuersam characterized the Klan’s activities as “a defensive mechanism” and blamed Republican Union Leagues—which empowered black voters—for forcing the Klan into existence. “The Klan was created by the Union Leagues,” Thuersam said. “They were basically organizing the black people to vote down here and terrorizing the white people away from the polls.”

I was quickly learning that the main argumentative tactic among Lost Cause mythologizers is to respond to any racist or unethical behavior on the part of southern whites with rhetoric about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the wrongs of Lincoln’s Party.

“You just absorbed it through osmosis,” McLaurin said of post-Civil War revisionist history. “For people under fifty who didn’t grow up with that mythology except in families and in some churches, it’s dying, thankfully.”

But with monuments, markers, and museums commemorating racist history all over the South, and vocal supporters of what one North Carolina historian categorized as “history grounded in the writings of the first wave of southern historians after the war,” Lost Cause mythology won’t just die on its own. The defensiveness caused by common stereotypes of southerners—racist, parochial, ignorant—and the wounded pride lingering from the Civil War leads to perpetuation of the myth. But the Lost Cause mythologizers I spoke to did not confirm the stereotypes I had unconsciously assimilated about Civil War fetishists. The ones I encountered tended to be intelligent, well spoken, and, besides believing a delusional version of history, friendly, sane people who do not believe themselves to be racist. They also have massive amounts of research to back up their arguments. (After our interview, Bernhard Thuersam sent me a long email with relevant passages from a 1979 Kent State doctoral dissertation about 1898 to help me with my article—not his dissertation, just one he read for pleasure.) But Lost Cause mythology is plagued by confirmation bias. The same could be argued about any written history (I’m sure at least some people will make that claim about this essay), but when you refuse to admit that two hundred armed men in a city hall forcing government officials to resign is a coup, and in the next breath argue that the president of the United States ordering the arrest of government officials accused of treason is a coup, that’s a special kind of reading.

 ***

The mid ‘90s were an important time for correcting the myths of post-Civil War race relations. In 1994, the Florida legislature awarded reparations to the survivors of the Rosewood Massacre. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution apologizing for its racist past and its defense of slavery. In 1996, Tulsa erected a memorial to commemorate the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. And in 1996, a biracial group of Wilmingtonians formed The 1898 Foundation, “with the goal of creating an organization that would commemorate the events of 1898 in the centennial year and…improve racial relations in the community.”

LeRae Umfleet said that it was the efforts of The Foundation that precipitated government involvement.

“They were able to pull biracial groups together to talk about what happened and to try to get a grip on dealing with something so significant that happened in their community. And that’s what gave rise to the impetus to create the Wilmington Race Riot Commission in the legislature.”

In 1998, the 1898 Foundation held a series of events aimed at creating discourse about the massacre, in hopes of working towards acknowledging the wrongs of the past for the betterment of current race relations.

“Wilmington in 1898 was probably very much more integrated than it is now,” said Philip Gerard, who has lived in Wilmington for over twenty years.

“It’s like there’s a line,” said Umfleet, who agrees with Gerard’s assessment. “This is a white street, and then the next street over there’s a black street. Before, it was mixed. We saw that change from 1898 to 1900. And by 1905 it was very clear.”

Some of the Wilmingtonians I spoke to believed that denial about the 1898 Massacre has perpetuated more recent racial violence in the city. In 1971, following the integration of Wilmington schools, rioting broke out in Wilmington, and the “Wilmington Ten” were sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. (Amnesty International subsequently took up their case—on the grounds that they were political prisoners—and they were eventually freed.)

“It wasn’t garden variety confrontation of the type that had happened in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi,” Philip Gerard said of the Wilmington post-school integration violence. “The ghosts of 1898 were still in the room.”

So in 1998, when the grandson of one of the 1898 conspirators—George Rountree III—agreed to participate in a public discourse, it seemed like a big step forward in the healing process. But what followed turned out to be the most contentious event of the centennial year.

George Rountree’s grandfather was “a primary facilitator of the coup,” according to the Race Riot Commission Report, and after the coup, he championed the Grandfather Clause, which would prevent blacks across the state from voting for decades. When his grandson, a Wilmington lawyer, rose to speak to the large biracial crowd at a local church, Professor McLaurin was in the crowd. As McLaurin recalled the events:

[Rountree III] began with a declaration of his support for equality by evoking his appreciation of a childhood mammy, and the silence thickened. He refused to apologize for his grandfather’s actions, insisting that he was the product of his times. He then spoke of his personal relationship to his grandfather, of his boyhood image of this almost God-like figure.

Though McLaurin, like many in attendance, appreciated Rountree’s participation in the public forum, he couldn’t understand Rountree’s thinking. “My grandfather was an enormous influence on my life,” said McLaurin. “[He’s] a man I still admire tremendously. But he had major flaws. And he was a patrician racist of the first order.” McLaurin wondered why “Rountree couldn’t admit that his grandfather had good characteristics, and that he did things that were terrible. It seems to me that that’s just denying the human condition. I just don’t understand why George couldn’t say, ‘I love my grandfather, he was a wonderful influence in my life, and I disagree with what he did in 1898. End of story.’” McLaurin called it “ancestor worship” and worried about its effect on the community.

After Rountree’s speech, several young African American Wilmingtonians stood up and called for reparations. Forced reparations, as anyone involved with contemporary southern race relations knows, are the greatest fear of Lost Cause mythologizers.

“I think we’re race conscious today to an extent we don’t need to be,” Bernhard Thuersam told me. “We dwell upon it too much. We’re fixated on race, and of course that fixation leads to the reparations thing.”

As an example of the ill effects of reparations philosophy, Thuersam recalled the recent renaming of the Smith Creek Parkway in Wilmington to the Martin Luther King Parkway, which he personally went to Raleigh to try to stop. “[The Parkway] was named for Chief Justice William Smith. He was an integral person in the development of Wilmington…You don’t throw him out in the ditch and say someone else is more important. Find a road that doesn’t have a name yet.”

Thuersam said of the young men who demanded reparations from Rountree, “I think those kids at that Rountree thing should have been yelled at and told to sit down, shut up, and open some books up, and read more about history to understand more and realize that you can’t put today’s standards on people a hundred years ago.”

While the centennial proved very effective in bringing the events of 1898 into public discourse, permanently revising the lies of the past proved more difficult. Following the centennial, the North Carolina Office of Archives and History put up a marker on 3^rd Street to commemorate Alexander Manly, the black newspaper editor who was run out of town in 1898—the very same marker I saw when I first went looking for the history of the massacre. Except it wasn’t the same marker.

“Not long after we put [the marker] up, it disappeared,” LeRae Umfleet said. “I had people in the community tell me they knew who took it down and they knew whose garage it was in but that they weren’t going to tell me.” It took several years to replace. “We eventually put another one up [in 2007] and it’s still in place, as far as I know,” Umfleet said. “[The markers] are not light—they’re iron-cast—but somebody did a lot of work to get rid of it once.”

It wasn’t until ten years after the centennial, in 2008, that The 1898 Foundation finally succeeded in one of its biggest goals: to erect a memorial to commemorate the victims of 1898. After securing a plot of land, soliciting private donations—from sources as varied as local civil rights activists, to descendants of the conspirators, to the Historic Wilmington Foundation, to the city of Wilmington—The 1898 Foundation unveiled the 1898 Memorial on the corner of Davis and 3^rd Streets. The memorial depicts six large oars, which symbolize the importance of water in African spirituality. The oars were to honor the African Americans who lost their lives in the massacre, and The Foundation saw the erection of the memorial as a major triumph. But not everyone agreed.

“Most people call it the canoe memorial,” Bernhard Thuersam said. “It looks like canoe paddles. It doesn’t really say much.”

Thuersam is not alone in his assessment. Many locals were against the monument in principle. The comments section in a local news story about the monument’s unveiling was littered with gripes: “ANYTHING to keep the hostility alive, no matter what the cost. Really really stupid.” But it wasn’t just those who were against the monument who objected to its placement and design. “The design is horrible,” said one local. “People driving by have absolutely no clue what the memorial is about. Couldn’t we have spent that money on something more noticeable?”

A main concern was how the monument would be perceived by car traffic, since it’s located away from the foot-traffic of downtown, next to a high-speed, six-lane road.

“Contrast the Confederate Soldier Monument on Third Street,” said one local. “You can be two-hundred yards away and know that it has to do something with honoring a military man. I believe that a traditional bronze monument showing Blacks rebuilding Wilmington, or something along the nature of a Phoenix rising from the ashes would have had far more eye appeal and conveyed the message far better, even to people driving past at forty-five.”

Philip Gerard acknowledged how difficult it is to secure land and funding for monuments, but said he wished the marker had been placed in a more visible place. “That should have been downtown, on Market Street, at the site of the old slave market.”

“I don’t know that if people are driving through know what it is,” said LeRae Umfleet. “I don’t know that it’s marked well enough, and I think that there needs to be more at the corner of 4^th and Harnett [where the shooting in 1898 started and where there are no historical markers].” Umfleet added the need for monuments “all over town” to commemorate the massacre, but acknowledged “markers are expensive.”

“People who have money like to mark their family’s history because they’re proud of their family,” she said. “So some of the monuments and things that are in the Market Street area, they were paid for people who collected money to put a monument up. And people aren’t going to collect money among people who can barely feed their families to put up monuments to such tragic history.”

But Melton A. McLaurin saw the monument as secondary. “1898 is what ushered in legalized segregation and disenfranchisement in North Carolina,” said McLaurin. “I think it’s important that the monument be put it up—that that aspect of the history be recognized publicly. But I think even more important was the fact for the first time, as a result of the things that were done by The 1898 Foundation, the events of 1898 were brought into the public discourse of the community.”

While McLaurin is correct that The Foundation brought the events of 1898 into the public discourse around the centennial, I question whether it remains in the public consciousness. As I was working on this essay, I asked one of the classes I was teaching at UNC Wilmington how many of the students had heard of the violence of 1898. Of the eighteen students present that day, two raised their hands. Granted, surveying a group of college students is not a scientific approach to measuring the community’s knowledge of the events. But during my three years in Wilmington, I’ve been very surprised at the lack of awareness about the massacre, especially after the efforts of The 1898 Foundation and the release of LeRae Umfleet’s report. Many native North Carolinian colleagues of mine who had to take North Carolina history in school had never even heard of it.

Umfleet said this general lack of awareness was because the 1898 massacre “had been squished into the corners of history books, or sometimes completely obliterated from the state history lessons people got. Even people who went into college and had NC history classes would not get much about 1898, because the story had been hidden so well.”

***

On a warm Saturday afternoon in April, I went to the 1898 Memorial and sat on a bench for four hours to get an idea of how many people actually stopped to see the monument. This was a day when the sidewalks of downtown were crowded with tourists with cameras and sunglasses slung over their necks, teenagers doing weekend shopping, and locals walking dogs and smoking cigarettes. But during the entire afternoon I spent at the 1898 Memorial, not a single person came by to view it. I sat on a bench waiting and looking at the oars, six stately symbols completely hidden from public understanding.

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The great Southern novelist and story writer William Gay died at his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, on February 23rd of this year, at the age of 70. An intensely private man who valued his reclusion and had no interest in the sometimes shameless self-promotion required by authors, Gay spoke at great length and on numerous occasions with William Giraldi in 2008 in preparation for Giraldi’s essay “A World Almost Rotten: The Fiction of William Gay,” the only in-depth critical analysis of Gay’s novels and stories. We offer Giraldi’s essay for the legion of Gay’s heartbroken fans, and for those lucky ones who are about to discover for the first time this important voice in American fiction.

***

In William Gay’s scorched world Flannery O’Connor is present less like a looming ghoul than an elderly aunt who lives in his house and will not die. And yet despite O’Connor’s strong presence (and the unavoidable presence of the Yahweh of Southern literature, the god from whom no male writer in the South can ever hope to flee) Gay’s work is wholly its own, pulsing with both tradition and novelty. His books have been crafted from darkness: The Long Home (1999), Provinces of Night (2000), Twilight (2006), and the story collection I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down (2002). Gay is, along with Barry Hannah, Cormac McCarthy, and Harry Crews, one of the four horsemen of the Southern apocalypse.

There was not a single pocket in Tennessee in which Gay could hide from Faulkner’s commanding influence. For an aspiring writer in working-class Lewis County, Faulkner existed in the very air. He was a kind of Delphic oracle for new scribes: without him nothing even remotely literary came to pass. Gay read Faulkner in the thirty-five-cent Signet editions he bought at the local drugstore in Hohenwald, Tennessee. He had been buying notebooks and pens since childhood, but now, late in high school, charged by O’Connor’s and Faulkner’s doomed visions of the South, he began to formulate his own fiction, began to heed the insistent voices calling from within. His parents contemplated the boy as something of an anomaly; although Gay was the first in the family to finish high school, his mother and father weren’t sure that writing was a prudent choice of occupation. Gay’s father toiled as a sharecropper and at whatever blue collar drudgery came along. His two younger brothers fell in line; they and their father had enough Southern machismo to fire a rocket. They hunted and fished; Gay, on the other hand, “wasn’t much interested in killing things.” About his mother, Gay offers one word only: “Loyalty.”

A vigilant teacher in high school noticed that the boy was reading Zane Gray westerns in his extra time, and thinking Zane Gray too inferior for the boy’s thriving intellect, the teacher passed him a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. Gay considers this gift the turning point of his life: Wolfe’s novel ignited him to his core; it proffered him the insight that this can be done, that a writing life for him was not a drunken pipe dream. Alongside J.T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel is the quintessential American novel of experience, of growing, of how a home fashions a psyche for good or for ill. It allotted Gay the confidence to tell the stories of his own experience and the certain knowledge that those experiences were valuable even though they lacked privilege and swagger. Wolfe lit the green lantern at the end of the dock; O’Connor and Faulkner provided him the vessel to get there.

Here is the horror story, a masterpiece of brutality and loss worthy of O’Connor: In an upscale region in Tennessee, a wealthy Pakistani couple employs tradesmen to complete work on their mansion. The paperhanger—he has no name; the force within him eludes definition—feels belittled by the wife. The couple’s tiny daughter pesters him; she plays with his hair while he labors on his knees. His calm in the face of this annoyance is unnatural, otherworldly. Then the tiny girl goes missing in the house; authorities arrive to mount a search; the paperhanger and others have their vehicles checked, and then they aid in the search. She is not found. Months pass. The Pakistani couple separates under the strain. The grief-sunk wife keeps returning to the unfinished mansion. She meets the paperhanger there one afternoon. That evening they lie in his bed after alcohol and urgent intercourse; the wife sleeps. And then the paperhanger goes from the bedroom only to return a moment later with the frozen body of the tiny girl, wrapped in plastic.  He arranges the corpse next to her mother, and then himself disappears into the ancient evening.

Gay’s “The Paperhanger” temps you to classify it, explain it, wonder at its majesty and terror—the story is “The Tell-Tale Heart” written by the bastard offspring of Wilkie Collins and Charles Manson, in a prose part Hebrew Bible, part Hemingway—and then defies such feeble attempts at comprehension, at reduction. The story breathes, enigmatically, as if just born; the odors of blood, beer, and birth fluid waft up from the page. Gay’s story offers almost no information about these characters: not where they come from, not their fevered dreams, not what they yearn for at first light. In his short fiction, Hemingway—an early, necessary influence on Gay—famously withholds motives and histories. Gay learned from Hemingway never to clarify what the reader is capable of clarifying himself; verbosity maims, insults the dignity of narrative. In “The Paperhanger” we know only how the characters react in the midst of an unexpected mystery, how their language reveals their warped psyches, and with that alone Gay enables us to know them for life, to taste their sweat.

The paperhanger is simultaneously ominous sprite and veritable everyman. Once her mother drifted from the room, the little girl jabbed out her tongue at him and the paperhanger’s hand shot from his side like “a serpent” and snapped the child’s neck. Fragile as a Christmas bulb, she was tiny enough to fit inside his toolbox. What psychological explanation does Gay give for the paperhanger’s crime?  None—not boyhood trauma or possession by devils—because he knows that such explanations are trite, exhausted, imaginary, that human beings commit acts of abrupt barbarity that no therapist, no writer, can ever adequately explain. When the paperhanger appears with the frozen body in his arms, the moment is outrageous, satanic, inevitable. As the wife sleeps, the paperhanger whispers: “Sometimes . . . you do things you can’t undo. You breaks things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. . . . There are things only a miracle can set to rights.” Does he regret the murder in those lines, the devastation he delivered to a family? Regret is possible only when one has not accepted one’s nature or the cruelty of the wilderness from which we emerged naked and panting like beasts. The paperhanger is too much himself, too comfortable with Hobbesian analyses of human destiny, or what Hume aptly called “the natural depravity of mankind,” to wonder how he ought be a more benevolent man.

He departs in the wife’s car, “tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore,” and thinking about “not just the possibility but the inevitability of miracles.” He will beget more carnage, to be sure. The miracle he ponders: the rabid injustice of this business called living, God’s abandonment of his creation, lunatics set loose. It seems a miracle that a place designed by a loving deity could be thoroughly polluted by such monsters. The man knows he’s an abomination; he’s made his peace with that fact. The second miracle: how Gay can massage your morality into feeling miniature sparks of sympathy for this child killer, a lonesome and forsaken recluse who suspects that his own birth was a cosmic error.

“The Paperhanger” turns V.S. Pritchett’s definition of the short story, “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing,” into something that confronts you head-on, always. O’Connor accomplishes the same magic throughout A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the story collection Gay read as an adolescent; he bought the Signet paperback and knew—immediately, instinctually—that they were the best American stories ever written. He marveled over her packed sentences, her perfect endings. Gay studied O’Connor the way an evangelical studies Genesis, and from her brilliance he learned how short fiction is shaped, how a character can come alive in just a few lines, and, more important, how to tell a story that matters.

***

When the novel The Long Home arrived in the world a decade ago, William Gay was fifty-six years old and right away compared to both Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. Where did those years go between the teenager who read Wolfe and the middle-aged man who published his first novel? They went to the Navy, to Vietnam, and then after the war to stints in Chicago and Greenwich Village (Gay bumped into Janis Joplin at a pub). Back in Tennessee the years went to marriage, to children, to a mortgage, and to the construction work that paid for it all. But his time also went to reading and writing, to accumulating experience that no campus could provide, to honing his craft into a diamond tip. The chasm of those decades was widened by the fact that Gay didn’t know writers, hadn’t made academic connections, wasn’t given feedback. But when The Long Home finally appeared it felt like a masterwork and not a first novel because it was the product of forty-odd years of practice. At a time when twenty-two-year-olds scribble sensational memoirs badly disguised as serious novels, it humbles one to think of William Gay in Hohenwald, Tennessee, patiently tapping the keys of his typewriter for four decades.

The Long Home takes its name from Ecclesiastes—“Because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets”—and commences with a boom: in the undulating green environs of 1940s Tennessee, the earth has burst open with the muscle of an atom bomb, the result of either a seismic disturbance or the dawning of Judgment Day. This groaning gorge sits center stage as the four principal characters—Nathan Winer, Amber Rose, William Tell Oliver, and Dallas Hardin—circle it in a contest of reckoning. Hardin murdered Winer’s father in a dispute over illegal whiskey and then dropped his body into the gorge. Winer was only a child at the time; he doesn’t know what dirty fate befell his father. Dallas Hardin earns his fortune bootlegging and presides over the countryside like an ex-Baptist Mafioso. Old man Oliver takes the teenage Winer into his tutelage, and by the time Hardin and Winer are done scrapping over Amber Rose, there is blood.

Like Milton’s dazzling Satan, Dallas Hardin makes off with all the applause. Gay’s reader becomes a pubescent lass from a good family who falls for the foulmouthed bad boy with a switchblade. In his villainy and hunger for destruction, Dallas Hardin is first cousin to the title character of Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout, another masterpiece about a Southern psychopath with a fondness for bullets and blades. Trout goes through the damaged world in reticence, creepy and devoid of all charm; one imagines him stinking of urine and gasoline. Hardin, meanwhile, traverses his won territory with suave assurance, always in control, always self-righteous. He speaks like a backwards Jesus and probably reeks of fifty-dollar cologne. His name indicates his worldview: hard-headed, hard in the heart—only the hard survive. Furthermore, he is hard for Amber Rose, the teenage girl he helped raise after he stole her and her mother from the dying man whose property he confiscated and now occupies.

***

Where is the law? In Gay’s world, the law lies mostly impotent and shriveled on the other side of town. It can be cajoled without much effort or else ignored altogether. In Hardin’s case, he has paid the scoundrels in uniform to turn their backs on his criminality. If the law does come knocking, as it does in Gay’s story “Sugarbaby,” the knock seems a callous affront to an individual’s right to freedom. In that story, Finis Beasley blasted his wife’s little dog from the back porch with a large caliber handgun because its “yip yip yip” made him batty. His wife deserted him, sued for divorce, and Beasley ignored the letters from lawyers and the summonses to appear in court. The law arrives to apprehend him, and when it does, Beasley simply cannot muster the incentive to go quietly. He tells his son-in-law at one point, “I’ve always minded my own business. . . .Kept my own counsel. I’ve always believed if a man minded his own business everybody would leave him alone.” Beasley’s actions are less a case of gun-toting Southern insurrection than a fed-up exhaustion in the face of authorities mightier than the individual. The aggravation of so many inconveniences piles up to the point that Beasley feels disgusted by his own powerlessness. This disgust for his own pathetic, diminutive place in the cosmos fuels his violence. He would have chosen peace if he had been given the opportunity to choose, if he had been left alone. Dallas Hardin, however, stomps through The Long Home choosing sadism and savagery because he knows no other method of being.             

In Gay’s able hands the archetypal characters of The Long Home spring to life as if for the first time: the young man on a quest; the gray sage who guides him; the comic sidekick who aids him; the gorgeous damsel who inspires him; and the villain who tries to thwart him. Their language is so authentic it seems not written at all: you listen to their dialogue as they sit in the same room with you. It’s speech that smells: the Coca Cola and cool beer belches, the early morning conversations held through the aroma of black coffee drunk from jars. Midway through the novel, Hardin and Winer stand out in the afternoon sun on Hardin’s property. Hardin had hired Winer to do carpentry on a honkytonk he wants built, and on this day the boy notices that Hardin is clutching his father’s knife. Hardin took it from Winer’s father the night he murdered him; when the boy asks how Hardin came by the knife, he claims he found it in the cedar grove.

“Your pa lit out, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know what happened to him. I never did believe he lit out and I don’t believe it now.”

“Well, folks is funny. I don’t care how close you think you know somebody, you don’t know what wheels is turnin in their head. Course you don’t remember but times was hard for folks back then. Times was tightern a banjo string. Lots of folks was on the road. He might’ve just throwed up his hands and said fuck it and lit out.”

“No.”

“Well. I ain’t tryin to tell you what to think about your own daddy. But seems to me me and you’s a lot alike.”

Hardin tells the boy that his own father abandoned him as well, which may or may not be the truth: Hardin, like Milton’s Satan, is the great deceiver. Winer then offers to pay for the knife.

“Hell, take it. You said it belonged to your pa.”

“Well, you’ve had it all these years. Decide what you want for it and hold it out of my pay.”

“Hell, no. If it means something to ye, take it on. Seems to me it’s a damn poor substitute for a pa but such as it is you’re welcome to it.”

You will not locate written speech more authentic than that: every syllable in its place, the cadence as smooth and firm as the skin on a drum. The lines also suggest the ambivalence of Dallas Hardin’s character: the killer, rogue, and corrupter of Amber Rose who nevertheless attempts to give Winer honest employment, world-wary advice, and a free knife. One roots for Hardin’s comeuppance while at the same time wishing for his repentance. This is testament to Gay’s tremendous skill as a craftsman: his South contains no cartoon drawings, no simplistic Zoroastrian division of darkness and light. In Gay’s world, as in ours, the wicked are laced with good and the good are always part devil.

The Long Home owes its intricacy of assembly to The Sound and the Fury—the book Gay received from his high school teacher when he finished with Look Homeward, Angel—and yet the novel never feels as convoluted as Faulkner’s because Gay has a Dickensian aptitude for densely woven patterns of plot and character that cohere without seam or effort. The dense, verdant prose style, sweet and slow like sap—a vibrant language of poetic intensity—achieves newness in every paragraph.

Then lightning came staccato and strobic, a sudden hush of dryfies and frogs, the walls of the attic imprinted with inkblack images of the trees beyond the window, an instantaneous and profound transition into wall-less night as if the lightning had incinerated the walls or had scorched the delicate tracery of leaf and vine onto the wallpaper. Then gone in abrupt negation to a world of total dark so that the room and its austere furnishings seemed sucked down into some maelstrom and consigned to utter nothingness, to the antithesis of being, then cool wind was at the trees, the calm eddying away like roiled water.

If Gay shares with McCarthy a rich vernacular packed with flare, he also commands sentences composed of simple independent clauses strung together with the conjunction “and,” sentences that would feel at home in any of the Nick Adams stories. Hemingway’s reliance on concrete nouns is a lesson in the accuracy of the five senses, but it is Faulkner’s and O’Connor’s mytho-religious storytelling sensibility that infuses The Long Home from start to finish.

***

During one of our numerous phone conversations, Gay clarified what first struck him about Faulkner: “He took ordinary people and gave them mythic dimensions. Wolfe’s people are loftier, more aware of themselves. But Faulkner’s people are in the middle of it all, buffeted and battered by life.” In The Long Home, the narrator remarks that the men and women who frequent Hardin’s honkytonk—soldiers, drifters, wastrels with something to hide—are turned grand by their circumstances: “The songs and the lights and the quickened pulse of their lives made them larger than life so that they saw themselves as figures of myth and tragedy.” Later, when Oliver tells Winer the violent history of their region, the boy “wondered what the truth was, secretly doubted there was any truth left beneath the shifting weight of myth and folklore.” But of course Gay knows that myth and folklore are truth, or at least one way of arriving at truth: the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. Winer’s wondering about the plausibility of truth does not amount to a trendy relativism since the boy is “buffeted and battered” and thoroughly confused. In the preface to the revised edition of Brother to Dragons (1979), Robert Penn Warren writes: “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” Warren captures Gay’s mission in The Long Home precisely: the intersection of myth and history and how the truth makes itself known through living.

Cormac McCarthy’s wasteland mingles history and poetry to produce a bloody modern mythology that always approaches the Old Testament in its potency. Gay has an encyclopedic knowledge of McCarthy, as he does of Faulkner, Wolfe, and O’Connor: he can recall scenes and sentences as easily as he can the names of his children. In the early 1970s, before relocating to New Mexico (and long before the globe knew of his genius), McCarthy lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. Staggered by those early novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1978)—Gay fanned through a phonebook one afternoon and discovered that McCarthy’s number was there waiting for him to dial it. McCarthy had no interest in expounding on his own work, but as soon as Gay mentioned Flannery O’Connor, McCarthy perked up and was delighted to talk. They three together shared in their work a violent vision of a postlapsarian South. They spoke by phone for a year and McCarthy corresponded with Gay about the younger writer’s stories; it was the only feedback available for an isolated upstart.

Gay maintains that in the 1970s the world of literature seemed to him controlled by ivory towers strewn from Boston to Manhattan. Barry Hannah was the first Southern scribe of Gay’s generation to be taken seriously. The publishing Mecca’s ostensible disinterest in new Southern voices—a mystery as profound as quantum mechanics considering that the Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn, is a Southern story—coupled with Gay’s remoteness from anything even resembling a coterie of writers, made for dim prospects. He forged on just the same, teaching himself the craft, reading and revising, sending stories out to magazines and journals when he felt ready (one publication returned his handwritten manuscript with a note insisting on typed material only). Then, in the 1990s, two books incited a reevaluation of Gay’s region and material: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992) and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997). The tremendous success of those novels shifted Gay’s luck: “Things got easier for me after that.”

In composing The Long Home, Gay flushed McCarthy’s stylistic dazzle from his system: “That language and those metaphors were all backed up in me. I just let it loose.” By the time Gay sat down to compose Provinces of Night, the orgasmic splendor of language via McCarthy had spent itself (although the title comes from McCarthy’s Child of God: “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them”). Gay lighted on a soberer style, yet one recognizably from the same hand that penned The Long Home. The novel divulges the lives of three generations of Bloodworth men from Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. The district in which they live has been slated for inundation in a dam-building project, and those imminent floodwaters hover over the narrative like God’s promise of annihilation. When E.F. Bloodworth returns home after thirty years on the road playing banjo and hiding from his crime of killing a deputy, long-dead sentiments and scores will be resurrected. He is another of Gay’s clever, irascible old timers: from Oliver in The Long Home to Meecham in the story “I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down” to Scribner in the story “Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues.” No one matches Gay’s expertise for unforgettable old men.

Of E.F.’s three sons, only Brady remains in Ackerman’s Field; he cares for his demented mother and practices voodoo against deserving enemies. Warren, alcoholic and lecherous, resides over the state line in Alabama. Boyd has left town for Detroit to trail his faithless wife and her lover. As in The Long Home, the twin heroes of this novel are the old man and the teenage boy, E.F.’s grandson Fleming—Boyd’s sovereign son—an aspiring story writer and one of Gay’s most compassionate creations. Provinces of Night includes no archetypal evildoer like Dallas Hardin, but the vixen-heroine is present in the form of Raven Lee Halfacre, a cagey wit at sixteen years old. Her heat snags Fleming in a net of longing; she smells of possibility, of liberation. The relationships Fleming shares with Raven, his grandfather E.F., and his close friend Junior Albright—an endearing jester who illuminates every room he walks into—allow this novel a pouring forth of affection. The hostility of Gay’s universe has not diminished—there is a storm of blood when Boyd finally uncovers his wife and her lover in Detroit, and E.F. too comes to an untidy end—but in Provinces of Night Gay has tempered the brutality with tenderness. Here he has surpassed O’Connor; you will not come upon many moments of tenderness in her blazing Georgia. Her sanctimonious one-armed conmen, atheistic one-legged damsels, and half-naked children who crawl from the forest filthy and starved for destruction like fairy-devils: for them tenderness is but a rumor, the unicorn of her God-forsaken netherworld.

And then there’s the comedy in this novel. Of all of Gay’s people, Fleming comes closest to approaching the character of Nick Adams—his civility, moral code, grace under pressure, desire to write, and distressed union with his father—but Fleming differs from Nick (and from so many of the denizens of the worlds of O’Connor and McCarthy) in his appreciation of humor. Kingsley Amis once remarked that “the rewards of being sane are not many, but knowing what’s funny is one of them,” and Fleming is nothing if not sane, especially when compared to his volatile parents and his witchdoctor of an uncle, Brady. At one point Fleming’s uncle Warren jars him awake in the middle of the night to chauffeur him and his sex-scented drunk accountant over the state line because Warren himself is too intoxicated to know north from south. Fleming says:

“I don’t have a driver’s license.”

“I’m drivin on a revolted, a revoked driver’s license myself and if they catch me it’s my ass. I’ll pay your fine if you get caught. You’re not drunk are you?”

“No.”

“That’s a start then. You furnish the sobriety and I’ll furnish the car and the money and we might just get organized here.”

“What about the accountant?”

“Well, yeah, I’m furnishin her too.”

The drunk accountant wants a hamburger, Warren can’t remember where he aims to go, and Fleming doesn’t make a congenial match with an automobile. They find themselves stalled in the scrub.

“Now you’re catchin on,” Warren said. “This flat black thing, I think that’s what we’re supposed to be drivin on. Those woods and shit, I believe I’d just try to stay out of them as much as I could.”

“We turned over in the woods three or four times,” the woman said in an awed voice.

Fleming slid his hands under his thighs to halt their shaking. “We never turned over,” he said.

“The hell we didn’t,” she said. “You blackhearted little liar. You tried to kill us. We turned over three or four times in the bushes and I seen every bit of it through the glass. I’m wet all over myself and I ain’t ridin with you crazy sons of bitches one foot more.”

Twelve pages of riotous humor, with Fleming exasperated by the silliness of the circumstances, this car scene reveals Gay’s almost Cervantean facility for the coalescence of tragedy and comedy.

To those who know only The Long Home and “The Paperhanger,” Gay’s humor in Provinces of Night might seem uncharacteristic, but comedic play has been his staple all along. Most of the stories in I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down are distinctive precisely because Gay can bend types, can marry heartbreak to hilarity in a single paragraph. Gay claims to have been influenced by the humor of Harry Crews, but Crews’s comedy is almost entirely satirical, as in the Night-of-the-Living-Dead finale to his novel Celebration, or his mockery of muscle-heads in Body. Satire has the heavy but playful hand of fabrication, while Gay’s humor always touches softly, always stems from characters behaving believably in unexpected quandaries. In the title story of Gay’s collection, Meecham has fled from an old age community and returns home to discover that his son has rented his house to an insolent redneck named Choat who will not budge. Meecham handles this predicament as only an obstinate, iconoclastic eighty-year-old can: he irritates Choat to no end. (The film version of this story stars Hal Holbrook as Meecham.) In “Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair,” the sixteen-year-old Quincy Nell makes it her life’s ambition to acquire for a husband Bonedaddy Bowers, a Tennessee Casanova who has a difficult time domesticating. When she finally relents and allows Bonedaddy what he’s been scratching after, “came then hot honeysuckle nights of eros.” Bonedaddy gives Quincy Nell a stuffed panda, but then takes another girl to a dance: Quincy Nell “beheaded the panda with a single-edge razor and set the truncate corpse on the bureau, poor piebald panda with its jaunty air of yard-sale innocence.” By story’s end, Bonedaddy Bowers will wish he had never toyed with the virginal allure of Quincy Nell Qualls.

In The Long Home women are merely wagers in a gory contest for masculine dominance, but in Provinces of Night and most of the stories, the women are shrewd operators who see men as the bumbling brutes they are. Fleming’s grandmother tells him, “If sense was gunpowder ever one of you men put together wouldn’t have enough to load a round of birdshot.” Raven Lee informs Fleming, “You men are always breaking things you don’t know how to fix.” In “Crossroad Blues,” when a grotesque little man teleported from O’Connor Country tells the main character that “a woman’ll warp your mind worse than whiskey,” he says it in admiration, as if he were contemplating gamma rays from a supernova. Gay’s story “The Lightpainter” begins: “Jenny’s mother once shot her husband in the thigh with a small-caliber pistol.” The demonstrable logic in Gay’s world is simple: if a man behaves himself and treats a woman with courtesy and compassion, that man will not have his will crushed on the righteous anvil of femininity. Raven Lee Halfacre arrives as Fleming’s deliverance, not his demise; and Fleming deserves this deliverance because his kindness has earned it.

Fleming Bloodworth’s fight is against his testosteroned family, not a female. In Provinces of Night, the central struggle announces itself in the family name: what, exactly, is blood worth? What does one owe to family members, and for how long? In Twilight, the protagonist’s sister offers him this on family: “Once you’re in one, you’re in it for life. You can’t turn away from blood.” Gay’s great theme throughout his work is not men against women and the agones of that competition, but a Homeric man-against-man and the life or death outcome of that battle. His story “Charting the Territories of the Red” (published in The Southern Review in 2001)—about an Achilles-like brawler who cannot let pass a slight about his wife—culminates on a riverbank in a mess of brain matter, blood soaked into the soil as into the sands of Ilium.

***

Twilight is the crown of Gay’s oeuvre, a taut sweat-inducing thriller so horrifying both John le Carré and Stephen King should rethink their enterprises and revise their blueprints. The storytelling sets a new standard for darkness and depravity. You will find no humor here; like Oedipus Rex, the novel is so unrelenting in its sinister vision that any hope of light or comedy gets sucked back into the story as if by a black hole. The year is 1951 and the two killers of the novel, Fenton Breece and Granville Sutter, are every bit as psychopathic as McCarthy’s Lester Ballard (Child of God) and Anton Chigurh (No Country For Old Men). Their diabolism and nihilistic designs sink so far beneath the everyday evil of men that they make Dallas Hardin look like Saint Peter; what’s more, they make God look like an inebriated lunatic who holds stock in carnage, “some baleful god remonstrating with a world he’d created that would not do his bidding.”

Fenton Breece—a corpulent, wealthy undertaker and necrophile who quotes Auden and listens to Mahler—surgically desecrates the bodies of the dead before interring them. He removes genitalia or positions men and women in sexual congress within the same casket, “arm in arm in eternal debauchery.” In some instances he does not inter them at all, but rather stores them for his carnal bliss, dressing them in lingerie and snapping photos of his copulation with them. When the siblings Kenneth and Corrie Tyler suspect Breece’s deeds—Breece violated their father’s body—they unearth several caskets in the cemetery and discover for themselves the heinous mutilation: they sit “cataloguing these forbidden exhibits. From a carnival freakshow wended here from the windy reaches of dementia praecox. He hadn’t known there were perversions this dark, souls this twisted.” Kenneth spies on the undertaker, manages to thieve a briefcase containing photos of him with dead women, and then Corrie attempts to blackmail Breece for fifteen grand.

Enter Granville Sutter, a merciless murderer who at one point in the novel uses a switchblade to slaughter an entire family: mother, father, daughter, sons, even the dog. Breece hires Sutter to persuade the Tylers to return his property, and when the siblings refuse, Sutter causes Corrie’s death in a truck crash and then pursues Kenneth Tyler through the wintered wilderness like an iniquitous hound. While Fenton Breece has his way with Corrie’s corpse, the cat-and-mouse competition between Tyler and Sutter reaches deep into a gelid wasteland inimical to life.

As in all of Gay’s fiction, the weather and the landscape become characters of their own, except that his Wordsworthian nexus to nature becomes the worship not of God’s presence in the natural world, but rather the worship of nature’s lethiferous command over human life. Gay’s nature swirls in the same Tennessee towns: Ackerman’s Field, Centre, Clifton, and a mostly uninhabited expanse of unkind, fabled forest called the Harrikin, the very ex-mining land into which Tyler and Sutter plunge headlong and hell-bent. Tyler

thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.

The Harrikin seems imagined into being by the Grimm brothers. Tyler comes upon a witch who stirs potions and an old man with a shotgun who sits vigil in his dilapidated shack. The boy’s desperation, hunger, and shivering soaked body are palpable on the page. He attempts to pass through the Harrikin to locate the high sheriff in Ackerman’s Field in hope of finding rescue from Sutter, but the landscape and its deranged tenants will not yield:

He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.

Gay might not appear at first glance to share O’Connor’s preoccupation with religion, but every novelist with Gay’s mythic, dramatic vision is religious in his own way. Gay’s language owes much to the Pentecostal South and the Christianized folklore of his region, allusions and metaphors that Gay—and his characters—could not help absorbing. By novel’s end, both Sutter and Breece will be smote by angry angels of the earth, but not before they have brought brimstone to this patch of Tennessee. Twilight is one of the most intrepid American novels ever written, absolutely audacious in its confrontation with hell on earth, as terrifying as medieval torture: “It is true this world holds mysteries you do not want to know. Visions that would steal the very light from your eyes and leave them sightless.”

Some of the important Southern writers who have come before Gay—Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy—seem timid in comparison to Gay and his nightmarish depictions. As a reader Gay never took to Taylor or Percy; the gentility of Southern aristocracy could not communicate with his experience, and the white collar writers of the New South were not gritty enough for what he knew of the human animal. The writer Tom Franklin, a dear friend to Gay, tells a story about how Gay was so poor when he was a youth that he had to mix water with crushed walnut shells in order to make ink. Gay admits that the family couldn’t afford a car when he was growing up, but he doesn’t boast of poverty. The writer with unflinching portrayals of human cruelty in his fiction is in life a mild and dignified man.  Franklin speaks of his “purity,” his indifference to celebrity and the hurly-burly of New York publishing. For such an astoundingly natural talent, Gay can sometimes sound surprised that he’s a writer and that he’s been able to earn a living from his work for the past decade.

Surprised or not, Gay continues to beget stories and novels that help splinter the early twentieth century fairytale of an Edenic South, that shear humankind down to the bone to lay bare the original sin and the sporadic warmth beating beneath our ribs, and for that you should thank whichever god you call your own.

***

This essay was originally published in The Southern Review in 2008.

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“The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.”

(Via Feministing)

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Going Away Shoes—Jill McCorkle’s first short story collection in eight years—is comprised of eleven stories, each of which introduces the reader to a woman who, in some way or another, feels trapped in her life or situation. These characters yearn for something better—or, at the very least, different—and range in circumstances from a wife who never stopped loving the boyfriend of her youth (“Driving to the Moon”) to a divorcee writing a brutally honest letter to her former marriage counselor (“PS”) to a lonely woman fantasizing that the stranger who left his truck parked in her yard might just be her soul mate (“Me and Bigfoot”).

Yet, despite their differences, all of these women seem to be having come-to-Jesus moments, giving their lives honest appraisals, perhaps for the first time, and trying to make sense of what has become of them. It is from that unflinching honesty and perception that the power of McCorkle’s fantastic collection derives. No shrinking violets here, and instead of the “quiet desperation” we so often see in literature (especially short fiction), McCorkle’s characters often have about them a very loud desperation.

Take for example the following passage from “Driving to the Moon,” in which the protagonist, now married with children, is contacted by the man she never stopped loving:

She looked down at her calendar as he talked. Her youngest son had varsity soccer tryouts and the oldest, a sophomore at Clemson, has planned to come home for the weekend. Her husband had to lecture out of town. The library where she worked in special collections was under construction and she had promised to work extra hours to get everything organized. In a movie, life would stop for such an event, but it doesn’t happen in reality. People bury spouses and go right back to work. Disasters happen and people pay their bills and go to the grocery store. In her mind she imagined the drive—just under three hours—she could get up early and make a day of it; she could rearrange a couple of things and be back in plenty of time to take the kids out to dinner and wash all the laundry her son would bring home from college.

Jill McCorkle

Here and elsewhere, readers get the sense that McCorkle’s heroes feel as if this might be their last good chance to act out, to effect some change in their lives, or correct some missed opportunity or mistake. And they’ll be damned if they’re going to let it slip on by.

In perhaps the most heartbreaking story in the book (“Intervention,” selected by Lorrie Moore for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2004), a guilt-stricken woman struggles to decide whether confronting her forgiving husband for his drinking would constitute one more betrayal. That conflict is captured perfectly in the very first paragraph:

The intervention is not Marilyn’s idea but it might as well be. She is the one who has talked too much. And she has agreed to go along with it, nodding and murmuring “all right” into the receiver while Sid dozes in front of the evening news. Things are so horrible all over the world that it makes them feel lucky just to be alive. Sid is sixty-five. He is retired. He is disappearing before her very eyes.

Like much of this collection, “Intervention” presents the reader with a woman whose back is against the wall. That she comes out fighting is what makes her—and many of McCorkle’s characters—so compelling. Even when they make bad choices, you can’t help but cheer for them.

These are certainly not comic stories—at least, not primarily—but, like Moore, McCorkle couldn’t not be funny, even if she wanted to. Writers who are able to make us laugh out loud are often viewed with unjust suspicion, as some readers seem to fear that humor is somehow “unliterary, ” that what makes us laugh cannot also be profound. That’s nonsense, of course, and the dark humor contained in these stories testifies to what Shakespeare knew well: that humor has the power to expose as much about our struggles and our pains as it does about our triumphs and our joys. Jill McCorkle has that rare ability to hit you from both directions at once, and Going Away Shoes is a fitting testament to her awesome talents.

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Lydia Peelle’s stories focus on scurrilous ne’er-do-wells who flail about in circumstances beyond their control.

It will be a shame if Lydia Peelle, whose first short story collection includes an O. Henry Award winner and two Pushcart Prize winners, gets pigeonholed as an “environmental” writer. Peelle is an impressive prose stylist who focuses on human beings as members of communities, and the stories in Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing show how impoverished our collective life becomes when greed, neglect, and carelessness characterize human behavior.

Peelle doles out words as if they were scarce commodities, producing elliptical tales in which the occasional metaphor lights up an entire landscape. The opening story, “Mule Killers,” nicely demonstrates her method. While many possible meanings of the title come to the reader’s mind, Peelle mentions only one: tractors. An unnamed narrator recounts (in the present tense) his father’s experience of the long-ago summer when he was eighteen and tractors replaced mules on the farms of Tennessee. Among the mules trucked away to the slaughterhouse is his favorite, Orphan Lad. The young man is both saddened by and resigned to Orphan Lad’s departure. “The mules’ job, it was finished.” Similarly, he comes to accept the necessity of giving up the girl he loves, though the reader can’t be sure whether he ever recovers from this disappointment. When he sees his father cry, “he feels like he has pulled the rug of manhood out from under the old man’s feet,” and he tries to convince himself that his father’s tears are for Orphan Lad. Only years later, when retelling the story, will he admit that his father was crying for him, and for the life he’d condemned himself to lead.

Lydia Peelle

All but one of these eight stories is set in the rural South. Peelle has a nice feeling for the lives of middle-to-lower class whites, such as the gruff, one-legged taxidermist who narrates “Phantom Pain;” Lucy, who in “Kidding Season” tries to make a go of a goat farm; Charlie, the New Orleans-bound petty thief who finds a temporary home in Lucy’s barn; and the motley trio of misfits who dig for buried treasure in “Shadow on a Weary Land.” Fine as Peelle’s dialog is, it’s often the small gesture that proves most revealing of character, as when the taxidermist “gives the clock a good long look” while one of the town’s big talkers yammers on about a rumored panther.

Peelle’s animals, from the aforementioned Orphan Lad to a billy goat chained to a tire that he uses both as a ladder and a bed, to a mutt who becomes a drunkard’s hapless companion, have a ton of personality. Even the shell of a turtle has the potential to shape and change human beings for the better; however, Peelle draws a distinction between love for animals and sentimentality, a weakness she condemns as an especially cruel form of neglect. In “Kidding Season,” death is a mercy denied by the weak Charlie to a goat born with malformed legs. In “Sweethearts of the Rodeo,” the most poignant and entertaining of these stories, wealthy ladies who leave their horses uncomfortably—and unsafely—tied in an aisle while they disappear with a hunky stable hand seem all the more despicable when they scream over a dead bird. The splendid heroines of “Sweethearts” are two young girls who savor their “last summer, the last one before boys,” on the backs of borrowed ponies. “We weren’t frightened of death,” says the narrator, a defiant battle cry that in some ways defines the collection.

Peelle loses me only when she becomes overtly elegiac—those times I hear the violins whining plaintively in the background. Others may find some stories a tad too quiet. But her genius is to make scurrilous ne’er-do-wells into likeable, sympathetic characters; her people tend to flail about, trapped in circumstances beyond their control. Inconclusive endings serve to heighten the sense that human error, including such phenomena as climate change and the loss of wild places, can spell doom for the lives Peelle chronicles. Hers is not a hopeful vision, but for those readers willing to dip into their chill waters, these bracing stories provide rich rewards.

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