The Hard to Catch Mercy

William Baldwin

Description

From lowcountry writer William Baldwin comes a new edition of his 1993 Lillian Smith Award-winning novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy. Including a new introduction by the author, this Southern Revivals edition makes available once more a story that touches on the issues of religion, race, and coming-of-age in the post-Civil War South, when the lines between these issues were not always clear. Set in fictional Cedar Point, a small southern community in the early 1900s, The Hard to Catch Mercy is told through the eyes of a young boy, Willie T., who is forced to confront the changing world around him. Including a cast of incredibly outlandish characters, Baldwin's novel is a wild, darkly comic tale rich with trick mules, Christian voodoo, fire, brimstone, first love, death, and the end of the world as Willie T. knows it.

Sujets

• Coming of Age
• The Other Hand
• Disgust
• Totaled
• Complication (horology)
• Jerky
• Scrip
• Wrinkle (skin)
• Blockade runner
• Cruelty
• Mourning
• Hanging
• Bilge
• Adultery
• Theft
• Idiot
• Sadness
• Gothic
• Famine
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611175226
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE HARD TO CATCH MERCY
SOUTHERN REVIVAL SERIES
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Series Editor
The Hard to Catch Mercy
A Novel
William Baldwin With a New Introduction by the Author

The University of South Carolina Press
Published in Cooperation with the Institute for Southern Studies of the University of South Carolina
2004 William Baldwin
New material 2015 University of South Carolina
First paperback edition published by The History Press, 2004
New edition published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-521-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-61117-522-6 (ebook)
Cover design by Herbie Hollar
Cover painting: Transference by Lee A. Monts
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Introduction
Ruth and Naomi
The First Days
Mercy
Mr. Friendly s Christmas
The Hat Shop
Mr. Friendly s Easter
The Prodigal Son
The Biscuit Thief
The Prodigal Daughter
The Grapes of Wrath
The Red Dragon
The Sin of David
Liza s Wedding
Liza s Honeymoon
Finis
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
Southern Revivals, supported by the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies s Robert E. McNair Fund, brings to print important works of literature by contemporary southern writers. All selections in the series have enjoyed critical and commercial success. By returning these works to general circulation, we hope to deepen readers understandings of, and appreciation for, not only specific authors but also the flourishing southern literary landscape. Not too long ago, it was a fairly straightforward task to distinguish literature by southerners, as most of their works focused on easily recognizable southern themes, perspectives, and settings. Those days are long gone. Literature by southerners is now quite literally all over the map, extending its reach from the coast of South Carolina to heart of West Africa, from the bayous of Louisiana to the rain forests of Brazil, from the mountains of Eastern Tennessee to the deserts of the Southwest. As our list of resurrected books grows, Southern Revivals will bring readers to many of these places, taking them on journeys into regions near and far away, journeys which attest to the astonishing diversity of contemporary southern culture.
William Baldwin s first novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy , however, keeps us close to home, down in the lowcountry of South Carolina. Originally published in 1993, The Hard to Catch Mercy was widely and favorably reviewed and soon thereafter won the 1993 Lillian Smith Book Award, given to a book best exemplifying a vision of social and racial justice in the South. Baldwin was born and raised in McClellanville, South Carolina, near the coast, an area much like that in which The Hard to Catch Mercy is set. After struggling through Clemson University, as he describes in his introduction to this edition, Baldwin worked a variety of jobs, including stints as teacher, shrimper, and oysterman, before taking up writing and the study of lowcountry history and culture. Baldwin has written three other novels- The Fennell Family Papers, A Gentleman in Charleston and the Manner of His Death, and Charles Town -in addition to a number of nonfiction books, some co-authored, celebrating the richness and diversity of lowcountry culture and history.
If Baldwin is a downhome boy who loves the downhome, he is also piercingly aware of the dark undercurrents of its history, as The Hard to Catch Mercy makes abundantly clear. Set in 1916 in the small coastal town of Cedar Point, South Carolina, the novel focuses in on a year of immense change and transition, for both the town and the narrator, Willie T. Allson. Willie is a young man recalling a series of events that took place a decade before when he was fourteen, events that propel him forward into a more profound knowledge of the inner recesses of himself, his family, and his community. Setting these episodes in motion is the arrival of two of Willie s cousins, Uncle Jimmy and his brother, who goes simply by Brother. Both cousins open Willie to alternative ways of seeing things. Brother is dreamy and turned inward, more at home in the realm of the spirit than in that of the everyday. Otherworldly visions and voices visit him, and he is fascinated with the intricacies of time, repairing timepieces so that they operate by constantly shifting speeds, even running backwards. Brother reconstructs watches and clocks, in other words, to register time s duration as experienced in the human consciousness, in the ebbs and flows of thoughts, memories, and dreams.
Quite different is Jimmy s totally worldly outlook. From the moment he arrives in Cedar Point, Jimmy trumpets a vision of commerce and progress. He s ruthlessly pragmatic, talking out of both sides of his mouth, depending on to whom he s speaking, and he has no truck with the comforting legends by which the community and Allson family live. Before long, thanks to Jimmy, almost all that Willie has understood about his family s past has been reconfigured.
In the fateful period of the novel, Willie, his family, and the town face a number of challenges and threats, from within and without, which ultimately shatter their world. Amidst the tumult, Willie navigates between the mysticism of Brother, that of Maum Anna, the black woman who for as long as anyone can remember has served and protected the Allson family, and the pragmatism of Jimmy and that of the Allson family, despite what the family legends say of their paternalistic benevolence. Willie s coming of age, a tale of adolescent angst and adventure, is at the same time the story of his community s passage from a sheltered traditionalism to a more fluid and unstable modernity, a passage bringing both opportunity and loss. That Willie composed his tale, as we learn from the novel s epigraph, a decade or so later while living in California, points to his personal passage that mirrors the community s: in leaving home and moving to the West, the land of golden opportunity (or so the national legend goes), Willie realizes all that he has lost by leaving Cedar Point. This memoir, he informs the reader, concerns what happened to me in a place so far away it might as well be in the dark side of the moon. I was just learning about life back then, he adds, suggesting that however far he has walked into a future of endless possibility by moving to California, the path toward wisdom also involves a journey back, imaginatively if not literally, to the South and Cedar Point.
INTRODUCTION
During most of the sixties and half of the seventies, I would wake up contemplating suicide and go to bed drunk. I could have placed Alabama on a map but not Selma. I could have picked out Vietnam but not Cambodia or Thailand. I knew that the Beatles existed, but I couldn t have given you their first names.
When I graduated from high school in 1962 I was a strange little person. Dysfunctional is the word today. But back then it was strange. I had to just guess what was real. Like Brother in my novel, I saw things and heard voices, and I was attending Clemson University. At the end of the first semester they tried to kick me out. That was the same week they let the first black man in, Harvey Gantt, who I recall was received fairly civilly. I remember him commenting on the fact he could count on South Carolinians being polite. But they weren t particularly polite to me. My advisor laughed in my face and said I had absolutely no future in a college, could never graduate, and should join the Navy.
I stayed on at Clemson out of contrariness, and five years later I was finishing up a master s degree in English and teaching in an all-black high school. I wasn t just the only white teacher: I was the first white teacher, and the first white person to even come through the door of that school as far as I know. It was a culture shock for everybody. Some of the seniors could only sign their names, but I enjoyed teaching those children, and I think they enjoyed my being there. Still I wasn t in that school out of any political convictions or part of any national mandate. I was just there because I d drifted there. And two years later I was picking oysters with an all-black oyster crew, and I was there because my wife and I had no money for food. That was 1968 and these black men were my friends-in a way. A reverse paternalism. They looked out for me in the creek and taught me to scrape up a living. Contrary to the familiar national statistics, they had families and certainly worked hard-four in the morning until nine at night, five days a week-and much of that time in freezing mud and water. Of the dozen or so on that crew, almost all are dead now. I believe only three got shot or stabbed. Despite what news accounts would suggest, the rest were killed in accidents-car wrecks they didn t cause or drowning. They died because they led hard lives and were mortal, and I suppose pieces of all of them ended up in the novel s character David Allson.
Two months ago I watched the Public Broadcasting System documentary Eyes on the Prize . It was interesting to see Rosa Parks fighting for a seat on the bus because in the late 1950 s my grandmother s cook, a tiny black woman named Anna, walked into the white Presbyterian church one Sunday morning and sat through an entire service. For that place and time, her act was equally heroic or-at least for the whites-equally outrageous. I m sure that in 1958 there were some in the congregation who still doubted Negroes had souls, but nobody was going to say no to her because