Writers Who Deserve More Attention I: Tim McLaurin

I mean, besides all of them. :-)

I'd like to create a warehouse of links occasionally, referencing writers who may or may not be on your list of popular or well-enough-known writers, along with some small commentary. When I do these, they'll be subject to additions and corrections at various points as I find more information, and I'll let y'all know when I edit. Today's writer is Tim McLaurin, a North Carolina native with a few novels, two memoirs and one epic-length poem to his credit.

I discovered his work by following the blurb trail from Harry Crews to Larry Brown to McLaurin. The first book I found was the memoir Keeper of the Moon, probably his best-known book, in which he described his difficult childhood as well as his adult experience in recovery from the multiple myeloma which eventually killed him at age 48 in 2002. I'd read Crews' A Childhood first, so I knew more or less what I could expect from McLaurin. Poverty--hardscrabble poverty--and alcoholism, along with often-rapturous desciptions of the natural world, and considerable attention paid to the whys and wherefores of family interaction. The book remains in the enjoyable though quotidian realm until McLaurin begins to detail his battles with cancer. I wish everyone who ever sent me a cancer story would read this before sending it out again. It is a rock-hard revelation of a story, one you won't forget soon. I recommend, besides Keeper of the Moon, the following titles:

The Acorn Plan
The River Less Run
The Last Great Snake Show
Cured by Fire
Another Son of Man

Here's a small list of relevant links if you'd like to find out more about McLaurin:

• Death of an RPCV Writer: Remembering Tim McLaurin
• Remembering Tim
• What Constitutes the Life of a Man: "The darkness of the familiar" in Tim McLaurin's memoirs
• John F. Blair Publisher's Tim McLaurin page
• A Heartwarming Moment of Real Courage (please ignore that awful title)

Blind Lemon, by Jim Parks

"[African-American folklore] is like jazz; there's no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it."

--Ralph Ellison, Paris Review No. 8 Interview by Alfred Chester & Vilma Howard



Walking into the uncomfortable warmth of the building, the odor of warehoused, enfeebled, sick humanity struck the senses like a soft blow from a foul flannel rag. Spotless floors and walls, televisions blaring so that weak ears might hear them, someone struggling weakly to play an old hymn on a spinet from the Baptist book of devotional music, the aromas of overcooked vegetables and meats reducing down to mushy preparations all conspired to make one feel a little bit sick,oppressed.

The researcher, clothed in collegiate chinos and a plaid sport shirt, his steel rimmed spectacles glittering under the bright lights of the nursing home, wore a jaunty jazz man's Kangol cap at a rakish angle.

He tried and tried to get the old man back on the subject.

"No, sir, I mean to ask you about Jefferson, you know. Blind Lemon. Back in Dallas."

The ancient black man, confused, looking up and over his shoulder at his daughter and a nurse, couldn't hear him. He chafed under the wool of the tight Army tunic, running a forefinger around the tight collar with one hand, pointing to a row of campaign ribbons on his chest with the other.

The writer nodded at the ribbons and smiled, scratching an itch in his professorial beard gone gray, white in some spots.

"Is this motha' from the Army, or what? I thought they were interested in how we chase Pancho Villa through all that cactus in them Model T Fords, man."

The writer and the old man's daughter exchanged glances. He had already visited the family home in South Dallas where he and his wife had raised half a dozen kids while he worked on the railroad and in warehouses until he retired. After he had become enfeebled, he went into the rest home near where he had been born, a cotton town an hour's drive from Dallas.

"Daddy, listen. The man say he want to know about the time when Blind Lemon Jefferson stay at our house in South Dallas. You know, the guitar man from Wortham, from Groesbeck, from Marlin. You know, the blues man. He. . ." Her tone was insistent, though patient, a little loud for politeness.

The old man still didn't understand.

After a lifetime in the news business, the researcher, whose day job as a copy editor on the Dallas daily started as a beat reporter prying facts out of people grief-stricken, scared to death, injured, angry, crazed, knew hearing impairment when he saw it. The man was so hard of hearing he had no idea what was going on.

He had decided he was going to be decorated, once again, for his pre-World War One service in General Black Jack Pershing's skirmishing band of marauders that had pursued the rebel bandit Villa across the border into Ojinaga and beyond, into the barren desert country, after the Mexican chieftain had made raids on Douglas, Arizona, and Presidio, Texas, during the Mexican revolution of 1917.

What made that story interesting was that for the first time, the Army had used motorized transport, Model T's, to pursue the fleeing Mexican irregulars. It was the beginning of the end for the cavalry.

Though it was a fascinating subject, unfortunately it wasn't what he was interested in at the moment. He was working on a coffee table book, a definitive oral history of the famous Dallas neighborhood of jukes and dives, pawnshops and liquor stores, bootleggers's cafes and hotels known as "Deep Ellum."

Another spot for the inevitable birth of the blues, nurtured in the plantation towns and shipped to the hub cities.

It was so-called because Southern people often mispronounce Elm as "Ellum." The "Deep Ellum" neighborhood was anchored at its main point on both sides of railroad tracks with sidings for warehouses just East of downtown Dallas on Elm Street, the same street where almost fifty or so years later and fifteen or twenty blocks west of there an assassin with a high-powered rifle lay in wait for President Kennedy on Dealey Plaza, the Dallas County Courthouse square.

"Does he have a hearing aid? Perhaps if we put it in, he would hear us and catch on," the newspaperman turned historian interjected to the woman, who was, herself, in her seventies.

"Well, he have one, but it's broken. Besides, he only hear what he want to hear." She turned the corners of her mouth down and looked down on the top of her father's head in a severe frown.

The writer was starting to believe it.

He kept the tape recorder rolling. The detail of what he, the old boy with the ancient Army tunic, wanted to talk about was marvelous. There were all sorts of little asides about cantinas, what the people were like, how much beers cost, how much tequila and pulque would set a soldier back, how the old man and another private soldier named Ace Jackson spent most of their time fixing flats caused by cactus thorns and keeping the radiators of all those Model T's cool, then catching up to the skirmish line on the double.

He let a jolly forty-five minutes pass as he listened to all this.

"Was it hot, sir? After all, Presidio is almost always the hottest place in the state during the summer, and. . ."

The little old buffalo soldier's eyes lit up. He'd finally heard something.

"Hot! Shee-it, man. It was scalding, boy. I was too hot to worry about anything, man.

"It was a little old bridge up there that they had blown up, went across a little gully, and, man, when we got up there they really let us have it. They shot all up in there with some kind of machine guns, man. We had to wait 'em out. . ."

"Yes, sir, I see," the writer shouted, leaning in close. "What I am interested in was the time you met Blind Lemon Jefferson, the blues man, and he stayed at your house. How long did Blind Lemon Jefferson stay at your house?"

Suddenly, the old man reared back in his chair, his chest expanding, making the brass buttons of his old Army tunic strain, his cataracted, blue-filmed eyes suddenly blazing behind the trifocal lenses of his glasses.

This interview was not about his war with Pancho Villa, after all. It was about how he had invited a newly-arrived traveling man with a guitar to stay awhile in his home.

"Blind Lemon Jefferson! He a git-tar man! That fool stay at my house, man!"

Yes, sir, the writer shouted at him. Where had Jefferson come from?

"He been everywhere, man. Beale Street in Memphis, Sweet Auburn in Atlanta, Sugar Hill everywhere, The Beat in Marlin, The Sunnyside in Houston, all down in Loo-zee-ana and Mississip'a. Man, he been everywhere picking that git-tar and playing them blues."

How did he meet him?

He sat back and pondered.

"I guess up on the corner where he was playing. I don't hardly remember no more. It's been a long time ago."

He grinned back over his shoulder at his daughter and the nurse again.

Did Blind Lemon play on the corner?

"Seem like they all did. They play and folks would dance. Put down cardboard they got from the freight warehouses over on the tracks and dance, spin around on they heads and they backs and come up dancing. Yeah."

Was that in Deep Ellum or in South Dallas?

"Both places. Everywhere. Didn't be no rules against it. They be doin' it everywhere, man. They be inviting the git-tar man on inside the cafe to have a little somethin' to drink, a soda pop or somethin'."

He slapped his knee and laughed.

"Had plenty to drink in them cafes."

Well, was it his policy to open his home to boarders, or did he just decide that he liked Blind Lemon and decided to. . .

"Man, you akses way too many questions, boy! Here I thought you were from the Army and you were going to do something about my medal and everything and you be talking about all this here trifling shit like this. This here don't be about nothin'..."

The daughter gave the writer a pointed look, said, "I think Daddy is tired now. Maybe another time."

He folded up the microphone, put his notebook in his pocket, took one last picture and shook hands all around, backing away from the interview feeling confused and sad.

"It's been a pleasure, sir."

"Yeah, man, come back when you can stay a little longer."

He snorted.

"Daddy!" His daughter attempted to shush him as if he was a rude child.

Driving back to Dallas, cutting down through the smooth asphalt between the miles of stout cotton plants and geometrically precise rows of cultivation, he suddenly felt morose, mourning he knew not what.

Was it another missed opportunity to learn something about the train-riding blind man that brought his style of blues to Dallas, had been in Clarksville in the Delta, traveled the South, only to die in mysterious circumstances in Chicago? He was a cipher, but an important cipher, one about which little was known except that he was from the East Texas cotton town of Wortham in Freestone county. It was as little to know as what was known about Robert Johnson.

A blind man with "an uncanny ability to get around without much help from others," the biographers often said in their foreshortened, abbreviated narratives. In fact, many people thought he may have had partial sight, since photographs of him show that he wore clear, thick glasses and not the dark glasses completely blind men usually wear.

"He a git-tar man!"

He fairly shouted it at the windshield, knowing it would become one of his most cherished stories, something to tell people about his life, his work.

He was already framing the section of the book he would make out of the interview. How he loved his craft.

When he reached the city, the tedium of the black land giving way to motels and factories, warehouses and railroad yards, he crossed Trinity River bottoms and detoured into the potholed streets of South Dallas, stopped at a liquor store and bought a short dog of white port and a lemon, squeezed it in the wine, shook it up, poured a little bit on the ground for the dead, their spirits hovering all around him.

Throwing back his head and chugging down the sweet, syrupy stuff, he noticed a wino rolling up on him.

"Save me a spider on that, daddy?"

The writer handed him the bottle, winked, said, "Sure, dude. Knock yourself out."

Starting his old car and throwing it into gear, punching one of his home made tapes into the stereo and turning it up, he threw back his head and shouted, "He a git-tar man!"


Jim Parks is a Texan, a newsman, a truck driver, commercial fisherman, deckhand and a dreamer. Keep him away from the firewater and don't mess with his food or his woman.

Quick Informational Post--Request for Submissions

If your creative work owes anything to or resembles the works of the following list of folks, please consider sending me a story or poem or essay to feature on Fried Chicken and Coffee.

Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Paula K. Gover, Lisa Koger, Chris Offutt, Silas House, Chris Holbrook, Lee Smith, Ron Rash, Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, Donald Ray Pollock, Russell Banks, Tom Franklin, Cormac McCarthy, Andre Dubus, William Gay, Charles Frazier, Tom Cobb, Breece Pancake, Pete Fromm, Nelson Algren, Dorianne Laux, Mary Lee Settle, Mary Hood, Daniel Woodrell, Dagoberto Gilb, James Lee Burke, Isabel Zuber, Willy Vlautin, James Crumley, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, Jayne Ann Phillips, Charlie Smith, Andrew Hudgins, Richard Hugo, James Dickey, Chuck Kinder, Gurney Norman, James Still, Wendell Berry, Mark Richard, Pinckney Benedict, Tim McLaurin, Brad Watson, Steve Yarbrough, Rick Bass, Richard Currey, Bobbie Ann Mason. . .

I'm always interested in reading writers I don't know, too, so if you have suggestions, please shout out in the comments.

Later on this week we'll have another piece by the Legendary Jim Parks. Stay tuned.

P.S. Did any of you know that Wednesday is White Trash Wednesday for some bloggers? Google up some stuff, if you like. I learn something new every day.

Noodling and River Monsters

Burkhard Bilger's Noodling for Flatheads is about noodling, obviously, and some other largely southern pastimes. I'm going to bet, though, that he never caught or saw anything near the likes of this bad boy. I have had great fun and edification from Animal Planet over the years, me and my kids, but never more than the recent River Monsters.

My brother's friend Ronnie spent a week or so with me once acting the part of big brother while mine was gone, sometime in the late 70s, I'm guessing, so I was eight or nine or so, and we spent a long early fall day pulling deadfalls out of Seeley Creek and hand-searching through great sodden heaps of leaves stuck in the slow-moving water, negotiating the bob-wire fences a few over-industrious (one might charitably call them pricks) land-owners had spread all across the water and into the water, honestly, where they rusted, making you lift them up and swim-crawl under. Not great fun, but fun, including the barbs I took in the hand that got me the first of many tetanus shots. I can never remember the date of the damned things, so I get them every five years or so. Anyway, we found fence-posts and tire rims in the water, several tires, too. A couple traps (not set, thankfully), a chain, some fishing line. No fish.

I've always wanted to noodle since then, though, even before I knew what it was. I was first to stick my hands up under the tree roots that jammed into the stream, the first to fuck around in the occasional clay beds, making penises both gross and abnormal. I even named them: Cowprick, Horseprick, Dogdick are the names I remember.

We finished with the creek pretty early then took on the farmpond in the field in front of our place, where I used to house my pet ducks. I mean, what was in that water, after all? This was long after the ducks had been smacked down and flattened in the road, but the car hood they'd sheltered under was still there. Ronnie and I lifted it up and unearthed a nest of sixty or seventy snakes who had taken up residence in the relative cool. I'm shuddering even now.

I'll tell you a a secret--isn't that what blogs are for?--I've hated snakes ever since. But somebody needs to get my pasty white ass in a river soon. I want a catfish.

Russell Banks and Contextualized Naturalism

I find this article, linked from Conversational Reading, fascinating. While discussing Russell Banks' book Affliction, Daniel Green posits some reasons why Banks, often read as a realist or naturalist in his later work, is actually continuing along the path on which he began, as an experimental or largely postmodern author who now uses the tools of realism toward the same general ends.

Here are some short excerpts from the Green essay:

The novel is about Wade Whitehouse, not about its own status as fiction (although its status as fiction can appropriately be considered), and our response to Wade can be as complicated as our response to actual human beings. Indeed, an important measure of the success of Affliction would have to be precisely the degree to which we do finish the novel feeling some combination of compassion and horror toward Wade, regarding him as a human being in all of his multifarious and often contradictory traits and behaviors. Any consideration of form, style, or narrative technique would for most readers be a way of extending our perception of this character, not of reflecting on the artifice of fiction-making.

And this:

If Affliction calls more attention to its own artful construction than Sister Carrie or McTeague, it is also finally more convincing as a representation of both character and setting, as well as more credible as a narrative depicting true-to-life events than either of these novels. However compelling they are in their unrelenting adherence to their own narrative logic, neither of them can really described as telling stories that are altogether plausible as realistic reflections of ordinary life. Both could accurately be called melodramas, even if the melodrama mostly succeeds in supporting some pretty substantial thematic weight, and both have fairly obvious stylistic limitations of a kind that only intensifies the melodramatic effects, finally calling attention to the storytelling process even more persistently than does Rolfe Whitehouse’s much less rhetorically embellished style. The invoked worlds of these novels are vividly rendered, but they exist to further the portrayal of characters subject to the influences of “environment” more than they serve as depictions of a setting meant to be aesthetically realized in and for itself in its mundane particulars.

I have much more to say on this in the future, as one of my preoccupations is discovering a way to write about my preferred subject matter in my own writing and reading habits--rural lit, grit lit, Appalachian, and other subjects often discussed as 'regional' writing--while considering techniques from the 20th century, the postmodern or avant, or whatever you like to call it. I'm not well-read in theory despite my degrees, so I likely won't be writing about the kinds of things scholars do, but rather considering how realism works on its terms, and trying to configure what I can salvage from this century's lit (modernism on, let's say) into creative work that encompasses both the way I experience the world personally--why else write?--and the elements I can add that will help my work do justice to the complexity of the contemporary world and human experience in the contemporary world.

I should say too that my interest in rural subject matter came fron Banks' Continental Drift, another of his fine novels that I read in my junior year of college. It was only after that I came to Andre Dubus and Larry Brown and a thousand others that formed my opinions and biases and gave me leave to write about something I knew.

So, more later.

Ebony and Irony

White Trash Blues: Class Privilege vs. White Privilege


Jennifer Kesler has some good points in this post from the blog Blind Privilege (see below for her comments indented after mine), and the comment stream is worth reading as well. I don't necessarily believe everything she believes, but a lot of it rang true for me. I grew up knowing black people from TV, but nowhere else. When I was eleven or so, my great-aunt died and I found out I had cousins who were of mixed race. That was the first I'd heard of it: no one had ever mentioned it before. So my mother and I (my father worked, of course) rode from Elmira NY to Albany NY by bus for the funeral, and even now I remember it not being much fun. It was all stress all the time when we got there, as family secrets got blown up and out of proportion and I skated around my just-told-about cousins' race as I knew I ought to, but my grandfather didn't. That's all I'll say about that.

Then my cousin David asked if he could take me around the city. My mother hesitated--she had been the one keeping the secret from me, after all--and then said yes. I'd like to say I wasn't nervous, but I was. I remember struggling with what I knew was the right thing to do--I wasn't a Boy Scout for nothing--but stopped worrying when I found out David and I read the same authors of what were then called 'men's fiction:' Mack Bolan, Eric Van Lustbader, some others. We also shared the same passion for martial arts movies. We got into his car and drove around, where I was introduced to and talked with his friends, and he bought me pop and a candy bar. We came back. End of story.

The next black person I met was in high school, several years later.

***

One other relevant bit from my life. I noticed no class distinctions when I was younger. I knew we didn't have much money, but I was almost proud of that, not envious of other kids who seemed to have more. We made it through life, the way other people around us did. My dad worked construction six or seven months every year for 60+ hours a week, then relaxed for the winter, able to live, albeit not terribly well, on unemployment compensation during the winter. We had a big-ass garden, my brother and father kept us in venison during the season and the winter, and often Dad would help butcher cows in exchange for some of the meat. During this trip my mother and I took to Albany, though, we were in a tough stretch. Dad didn't get called back to work for two years or so, and everything seemed tight. He and my mother picked apples, he picked up mechanic's work when he could, he even ended up doing these odd jobs for neighbors, jobs that usually fell to me or my brother. I remember distinctly, when prodded to join the conversation, that I said to my newly-met cousin Roy: "Do you know my entire outfit cost a dollar at the Salvation Army?" Roy laughed uncertainly. My grandparents, already drunk, laughed. My mother reddened up, and after a bit, I figured out I had said something I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have mentioned it because it was clear as we sat in their big house in the city drinking from fancy china cups, that the way we lived was different.

***

This is the last bit of personal stuff. This past year my 20-year high school reunion came up. With a newborn and an ill wife, I knew I wouldn't make it, but via Facebook and other means I reconnected with some old classmates, one of whom I spoke with on the phone, and after the usual exchanges--kids job family--I mentioned the subject matter of my writing--rural, Appalachian, somewhat depressing--and he listened, fairly interested, I guess, until I mentioned my just-post-college discovery that some of the scholarship money I used to get through my undergrad career was money designated for "poor kids from the area." "I didn't know my family were part of a rural poor demographic like that," I said. He said,"that's because nobody had any money where we grew up." I cogitated on that for days after I got off the phone, and that's where my fascination begins. There's no end in sight.

"If you blog about white privilege, you’re probably sick to death of people playing the “white trash” card in your comments. Their argument usually goes something like this:

• “Being white didn’t give me all these privileges you’re talking about.”
• “I know plenty of [minority] people who are better off than I am.”
• And the advanced version, which I’m guilty of using myself: “It’s really more about class than it’s about race.”

I am “poor white trash”. I can relate to all of the statements above. I grew up looking the part of Average White Girl, but middle class white people always pegged me as “different”. This left me vulnerable to losing opportunities and even jobs to white people who “fit in” better. Also, after my family made its great escape from White Trash Hell into Middle Class Purgatory, I learned to my surprise that there were black kids in the world who’d grown up with more money than I ever had. And so on, and so forth.

Here’s where the confusion comes in. Yes, I have a legitimate grievance against the system. Yes, I’ve lost out on things because I didn’t have the $20 to invest or know the magic social password that would have marked me “normal” (read: “middle class, preferably white”). And yes, it hurts when you don’t fit in with your own race because of your class, and you don’t fit in with your class because of your race. It’s hard to see privilege around that stuff, but the examples are out there.

Wealth gets you a ticket, but it doesn’t guarantee you a seat

One of the black kids I went to school with whose family was richer than mine? We discovered we’d given identical answers on a test, and she’d gotten some of them marked wrong while I got 100%. When we examined her other papers, we realized the teacher had been doing this for some time: “giving” the black girl a lesser grade. And one of the Jewish girls I knew whose family was richer than mine? When she was absent for a Jewish holiday and missed a test, one of her teachers decided to teach her a lesson by refusing to let her make up that test anytime but on a Saturday - the Jewish sabbath. The teacher offered truly pathetic excuses why after school, during lunch and during the girl’s study period wouldn’t work. Sunday wouldn’t work because it was the teacher’s Christian sabbath! The girl’s mother had to call the principal and threaten to bring the ACLU into it before she got a proper time slot to retake the test.

I’ve never been pulled over for “looking like you’re out of your neighborhood” (unless you count the time I was lost in a snotty part of Beverly Hills in an American car, gasp!). I’m not nearly as likely to get pulled over for traffic violations as black or Latino people, even if they grew up with more money than I did. Taking things a step further, I’ve never felt pressured to join a gang just to survive. I’ve never worried I’m going to get shot in my own neighborhood (and I’ve lived in some neighborhoods the white middle class considers “bad”)."

That white skin would get you a seat, if only you had a ticket

My approach is to look at all the types of privilege that affect an individual. Take me, for example. I have white privilege and heterosexual privilege and able-bodied privilege working for me; I have class privilege and male privilege working against me. In the case of poor whites, the class privilege often takes more from them than the white privilege gives them (i.e., the college admissions board prefer my skin color, but if I can’t somehow pay tuition, I’m not getting in). In my personal experience, white privilege may be a total bust, and I have the right to feel that way: I do not have the right to muddy a discussion of white privilege with all my anti-privileges. But before I learned to separate the types of privilege, I’m afraid I probably did that once or twice. Not in the “minorities have it so easy” tone that marks one type of troll; I just couldn’t figure out which part of this stuff I wasn’t getting."

Redneck Gottdamn Rampage!

I played this game with all my spare time back in the mid-90s when computer games were so much more fun than they are now. Its graphics are primitive, the plot is nonexistent. It's a first-person shooter. I hate those kind of games, but this one holds a special place in my heart, and to hear that someone patched it to work in XP and Vista just means I'm going to lose even more time with it. It ain't pretty, it's godawfully non-pc, especially if you download the cuss pack, but so much fun. I should hate this game, but I can't. And now, you can play it too. Don't say you weren't warned, and don't say I never gave you anything.

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/redneck_rampage_collection