Tobacco Road

Blood Clay is a little (it weighs in at just around two hundred pages), great American novel in story, character, and writing.

Ours is a country of immigration and migration, and one constant within that instability is a person's search for companionship in her new home, at a community level and a more intimate one, to be part of "the even numbers of the regular world." In this novel, Valerie Nieman's third—she also has a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and an NEA fellowship to her name—Tracey Gaines relocates to another state, leaving behind a marriage, a job, and her family. Almost immediately, a major local tragedy heightens Tracey's newness and her quest for acceptance within Saul County and with the individual she's closest to, a fellow teacher at A. O. Miller Alternative School, Dave Fordham. Dave, in turn, is cursed with "his loneliness, an outsider in his own home place."

Even the details in Blood Clay exude a particularly American atmosphere: Tracey is a northerner who moves deep into rural North Carolina tobacco country. When geography-based issues aren't the simmering—or explosive—heat beneath a relationship in this book, race, class, and gender are. The sanctity of individuality and personal property? Yes—that's one of the big matters in the investigation into the violent death of one of the school's young students. Justice, the media, gossip—"the rumors fly so fast, they grow wings and maybe horns and tails"—and that peculiar thirst for blood in a competitive society, "the moment of potential, the blood under the skin ready for spilling"? Most definitely those are all here.

But Nieman's original intention surely wasn't to whittle Americana—successful writers whittle individuals out of unique descriptive phrases. Tracey faces a variety of emotional pain in this story, and she tellingly (and rather understandably) finds solace more than once in a little bit of physical pain: her knee accidentally hitting the desk when she's called into her principal's office, "the pain a momentary refuge from the word, wounds," and her intentional bending of "her toes hard in her shoes until the pain held her sorrow back." But she is also a strong woman, and the reader relates to all of her actions.

Dave, the other main character, talks about literature and maintains his family's heirlooms, including those he's collecting, like the bright-pink paper umbrella he saves from his and Tracey's first date: "He remembered how it spun around the rim of her drink." But he's also a tough guy, raised working in the tobacco fields, and he's a mix of strong and vulnerable, such as in his admission of what one might diagnose as late-onset racism after a gang attack the one time he left the South that left him permanently disabled.

And of course, Nieman does not forget the nonhuman characters in her novel. One of Tracey's cats closes the book with a haunting ending, and the setting's main crop almost becomes human sometimes: "purple and lime-colored garden flowers, nodding on tall stalks, nothing more than fine-boned tobacco." That opportunity for a delicate blend is not lost on Nieman either. One of the minor characters appears to Tracey as though "grown out of this soil"; he stands "feet planted, arms akimbo and his face turned to follow the path of his son"—and, a reader may suspect, sun.

In North Carolina, the clay earth is red, and the literal and metaphorical blood of its people is spilled every day, in little and big ways. Nieman's Blood Clay is simple in its common story and hard-packed with strong words particular to this story.