New Southern Fiction By Percival Everett, Wiley Cash and Andrew Siegrist

105-year-old local “root doctor” Mama Z has documented almost every lynching in America since 1913 and criticizes the prolific academic author of “a two-volume work on the biological and philosophical origins of racist violence in the United States”. United States ”for its ability to“ produce 307 pages on such a subject without any indignation ”. However, the professor is outraged when he reads through Mama Z’s files on lynchings and copies the names of the victims. “The crime, the practice, the religion,” writes Everett, “became more and more damaging when he realized that the resemblance of their deaths had resulted in these men and women being obliterated and fused together like one piece, like one body . They were all a number and not a number, many and one, a symptom, a sign. “

This amalgamation will take a supernatural form as the murders continue, the enforcers of the “retributive justice” move together, make “a collective noise” and sing a syllable: “Stand up”.

WE PRESENTED IT WAS RAIN
By Andrew Siegrist
193 p. Hub City Press. Paper, $ 16.95.

Siegrist’s debut collection, winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Prize, is a muted affair. Sad fathers of prodigal sons and missing daughters populate these silent stories in a book that is united by a gentle plaintive tone, heavy symbolism, and awe of Tennessee.

The mothers in this book are often aloof or dead, and Siegrist treats these fragile, abandoned men and boys tenderly. In Whittled Bone, a mother sleeps or stares out the window while her husband copes with her daughter’s disappearance by collecting and sorting out the dead wasps, cobwebs, and beef bones that she recorded in her dream journal before she ran away. The motherless siblings of “Satellites” have to decide whether to help their father, who wants to kill himself on the day that NASA’s UARS satellite burns out and falls from the sky. Another sad son learns magic tricks from his father, who “swallows fire on street corners for money” and imagines the even greater illusion of bringing his mother back to life.

Politics is almost non-existent in these worlds, but there is a social context to be found in the skillful details: the nesting of cotton mouth snakes, caterpillars collected in ball jugs, a father examining the childhood scar on his son’s forehead who died from an overdose. There is a strange feeling of almost antediluvian times in this atmospheric collection and fascinating references to a life influenced more by myth than history. A grieving young father tells the story of a girl with waist-length eyelashes who raised sacred things by planting pages of the Bible in the earth. Another father remembers the story of a woman who worked miracles by sending candles downriver towards the sea.

Coffins and cool boxes fill with water as the characters pray for the rain that always comes. Perhaps Siegrist’s south is approaching the time of the torrential dream, when the floods of the past and the floods of the future are the same river because, as he writes, “every drop of water on earth has been here since the beginning of time”.