The Yazoo Blues

Page 4 American Book Review the Yazoo Blues C. D. Albin The notion of the “good ol’ boy” as Southern icon is a tired, often tiring, idea. Like any stereotype, it evokes easy visual clichés—soiled feed caps, rusty pickups, crumpled beer cans—that prove remarkably opaque, obscuring real revelation of actual human beings. John Pritchard’s debut work of fiction, the novella Junior Ray (2005), achieved a certain cultish appeal precisely because its narrator and title character, Junior Ray Loveblood, would not abide being considered anything but actual. “Some people might say there ain’t much to me,” he growls in the opening lines of Junior Ray, “but that’s a gotdamn lie. There’s just as much to me as it is to any other sumbich I know.” Loveblood’s words, both in the novella’s opening and throughout, invite multiple readings of his character. Is he laughable, a buffoon who unintentionally prompts the stereotype he abhors? Is he bitter, a rural Southerner who hates feeling invisible to the larger, increasingly urban culture? Is he sympathetic, a put upon Everyman occasionally capable of crude eloquence?Appreciative readers of Junior Ray likely identified these traits and more in Loveblood’s character, and Barnes and Noble listed the book among its Top Ten Debut Novels for 2005. Pritchard’s follow-up, The Yazoo Blues, is heftier than Junior Ray by a hundred pages, and Loveblood’s comic, digressive, unrelentingly profane narration is again showcased, but something of the previous book’s verve is missing, as if Loveblood has now begun to savor the sound of his own voice, substituting a popular storyteller’s sense of achievement for the edgier, more midnight notes that distinguished Junior Ray. To be sure, the rough-hewn rhetoric is still present, and Loveblood’s treatment of race, sex, and religion is often so coarse that the novel’s fictional “facilitator,” McKinney Lake (who transcribes Loveblood ’s monologue and sometimes offers editorial comment), feels compelled to note in her preface, “The point is, you ought not to throw somebody away just because once in a while they may seem like a monster. What kind of world would that be? We’d be without friends and have to avoid mirrors.” Still, the Loveblood of this book is mildly mellowed, his former obsession with shooting someone—namely, Leland Shaw, the addled war hero of Junior Ray— now largely replaced by a fascination with an episode from the Civil War known as theYazoo Pass Expedition , a failed 1863 Union attempt to navigate large gunships through the narrow Yazoo Pass toward Vicksburg. The notion of the “good ol’ boy” as Southern icon is a tired, often tiring, idea. One of the more richly comic elements of The Yazoo Blues is Loveblood’s conviction that he is, by nature, if not by education and training, a historian. Since he discovered his personal gift for history well after retiring from the Mhoon County Sheriff’s Department, his research, which consists almost entirely of bull sessions with friends and examination of the “z-rockses” supplied by them, leaves him ample time to work as a part-time security guard at a local casino and to frequent his favorite Memphis strip bar. When not engaged in either activity, he thinks about history, which for him means, almost exclusively, the Yazoo Pass Expedition. As a child, Loveblood was transplanted to the Mississippi Delta from the state’s hill region, and his years as a Mhoon County deputy acquainted him with the region’s physical and social geography. Similarly, his discovery of the Union debacle at Yazoo Pass has sparked in him an intense, if highly imaginative, interest in the local past. Unconsciously paraphrasing William Faulkner, he declares of history that “It ain’t what WAS, it’s what AM,” and he frankly admits, “I wanted to know what was going on then where I am now.” That curiosity launches Loveblood into a creative recounting of the travails of naval Lieutenant Commander Watson Smith, travails that are complicated—in Loveblood’s telling—by the commander’s infatuation with a lovely Confederate spy, Anguilla Benoit, who daily doses his tea with peyote and carries on a...