A Twist on Tradition

By Michele Orecklin

It is nearly impossible for any Southern writer to avoid the specter of William Faulkner. The world he created in Yoknapatawpha County, perhaps the best-known plot of literary real estate, exerts its influence over the aspirations of the region's writers and the expectations of readers and critics. It could therefore be construed as an act of either bravado or foolishness that Randall Kenan, who lives in Memphis and was raised in North Carolina, has also constructed a fictional Southern locale, a swampy speck called Tims Creek, N.C. "I could have run," says Kenan, 37, of the inevitable comparisons, "but I'd be spending a lot of energy in vain. It's like the Bible in that sense. Faulkner's language is just a part of you."

Kenan does not, however, shy away from reinterpreting the sacred texts. While Faulkner explored the remnants of a failed white aristocracy, Kenan is concerned mainly with Tims Creek's black population, descendants of the former slaves who founded the town. This network of working-class families, introduced in his novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and the short-story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), recurs in the novel he is currently writing, Fire and the Baptism, due early next year. It is a community clinging to the traditions of the past while grappling with the pressures of the modern-day South. In A Visitation of Spirits, Kenan writes how a town once bound by the practice of harvesting tobacco by hand withers with mechanization.

Not surprisingly, Tims Creek is much like Chinquapin, N.C., the impoverished outpost where Kenan grew up "going to hog killings one minute and watching Star Trek the next." He was sent there at six weeks old by his parents, who were unmarried and residing in New York, to be reared by his great-aunt. His upbringing became the collective endeavor of a group of elderly relatives with abiding faith in both religion and folklore who spent endless hours telling fantastical stories--"tales of ghost dogs and people rising from the dead." The residue of these stories has found its way into Kenan's fiction. In the short story Clarence and the Dead, the young title character demonstrates an unnerving gift of clairvoyance: "He told Sarah Phillips to stop fretting, that her husband forgave her for the time she tried to stab him with that hunting knife; he told Cleavon Simpson his mama despised him for tricking her to sign all of her property over to him...he told people things a four-year-old boy ain't had no business knowing the language for, let alone the circumstances around them. All from people dead, five, six, ten, twenty and more years." In Tims Creek, spirits, zombies and mystics are as real as tobacco fields and televisions.

"One of the things I have always taken issue with in Southern literature is that it is almost all rooted in social realism," says Kenan. "I grew up around people who took the Bible literally, and still do." So in college, when Kenan first read such South American authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he abandoned his plans to be a physicist and turned to writing. "When I encountered writers who wrote about spirits like they would changing a carburetor, I realized you can come at this form from an entirely different vantage point."

The approach, though, does not result in fairy tales. Fire and the Baptism, while including ghosts and spirits, follows the lives of two kidnapping victims, one black, one white. In A Visitation of Spirits, the teenage Horace Cross attempts to transform himself into a bird to escape the ostracism he will face if his homosexuality is exposed in his religious community. Instead he unleashes an army of demons that haunt him as he is haunted by what he sees as his sin. It is with Horace that Kenan claims the most affinity, and his plight seems a supernatural rendering of Kenan's experience of coming to terms with his own homosexuality in a culture where it was "never talked about but always a shadow."

Kenan welcomes the passing of certain aspects of that rigid culture. "The monolith of the black church, for example, has some outdated ways of thinking that can hold a people back," he says. At the same time, he laments the demise of those elements that have proved so nurturing, particularly Chinquapin's understanding of family. "Because of slavery, the idea of nuclear family didn't exist among black Americans," says Kenan. "So people depended on a network of family, but now many of those networks are breaking down." Kenan found his nostalgia echoed across the country as he researched his most recent book, the nonfictional Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century (1999), for which he interviewed more than 200 people. In places like Alaska and Utah, he found those who never knew the South firsthand yet had a yearning for it. "What's true of African-American identity is true for Southern identity," says Kenan. "A lot of it is fragile and in danger, and a lot of it is so much a part of us that we don't even see it."