page 4
Another aspect of Wolff’s descriptive economy
is imagery that works on more than one level. At one point in the
story Toby’s (latest) stepfather is berating the boy for his mocking disrespect,
calling him a “hotshot” and “liar,” this while careening drunkenly along
a mountain road. Scared, Toby has his hands against the dashboard,
bracing himself. His stepfather says, “‘You’re in for a change, mister.
You got that? You’re in for a whole nother ball game.’” The next sentence
ends the chapter: “I braced myself for the next curve,” the next curve
being both the physical one in the road and the new phase of stepfather-and-
son relationship (90-91). The explicit physical image further illuminates
the corresponding human entanglement.
******
Not enough people know about Melissa Fay Greene’s
award-winning work: Praying for Sheetrock, 1991. (Her second
book, The Temple Bombing, 1996, is also fine.) You could teach
a course on creative nonfiction from this book; it illustrates much of
the style I strive for. First, where journalism or conventional nonfiction
demands a straightforward, unadorned voice, as a signal and guarantor of
authenticity, Greene keeps the implicit guarantee yet brings lyricism to
the story. The prologue opens:
Two trucks collided on the crisscrossed highways in
the small hours of the morning when the mist was thick. The protesting
squeal of metal against metal and smashing glass silenced whatever small
noises were afoot in the dark country at that hour, the little noises of
munching and grunting that arose from the great salt marsh nearby. . .
. the blacktops of the rural state routes were slick; and the truck headlights
merely illuminated the fog from within as if sheets of satin were draped
across the road. . . . After that blast of sound and its fallout of hollow
chrome pieces dropping onto the road and rolling away, the quietness of
the rural county flowed back in, and the muddy sucking and rustling noises
arose again from the marsh. . . . [the] Volunteer Fire Department truck
arrived first, unfurling a long red scarf of sound on the country roads
behind it. (1)
Greene’s poetic voice and imagery are more, however, than merely aesthetically
pleasing; they serve as economical delivery of story material. Here
she sets up themes that will continue throughout the story: outside entities
arrive and have their effect in the county, yet nature will continue its
quiet and inevitable work in the darkness beyond the main roads.
And, concerning the distinctly local character of events: although the
story features mostly small-town and even backwoods doings, these are also,
paradoxically, epic events. (Alone on page xiii, just before the
prologue: “McIntosh County is pretty country and it’s got some nice
people, but it’s the most different place I’ve ever been to in my life.
—Harry Coursey, GBI Special Agent, Savannah.”)
At the risk of oversimplification—almost anything
you say about the book risks that—the story centers on two men: a “stammering,
uneducated, local black man, Thurnell Alston, a disabled boilermaker,”
who, in 1972, would galvanize his McIntosh County, south Georgia, black
community to fight for civil rights, against all odds; and—the personification
of all odds—the county’s High Sheriff, Tom Poppell, who reigned for thirty-one
years, who, “‘If he hadn’t died, Tom’d still be sheriff,’ many people
said in the 1990s. And others remarked, ‘Yeah, and he died unindicted’”
(3). Alston is an unlikely hero, and come to find out, he’s also
flawed; and Poppell is not purely villainous:
With daylight Sheriff Poppell knew, and the firefighters
knew, and the deputies knew, and the people in the cabins in the surrounding
woods knew—and if the truck drivers had realized their trucks had crashed
in McIntosh County, Georgia (431 miles of swamp, marsh, and forest: population
7,000) they would have known—that it was nearing time for a little redistribution
of wealth. It was one of the things for which Tom Poppell was famous
across the South. It was one of the things that invariably put the
sheriff in an excellent mood. (3)
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