Though this collection of vignettes was published in 1995, it could have been written any time since 1950. Bailey White, humorist and Southerner, writes about the old-fashioned South, where ancient aunts live in crumbling houses, treasuring letters from Robert E. Lee’s wife. Her outlook is kind-hearted and tolerant of foibles, qualities one acquires when dealing with eccentrics.
Few of the pieces run more than 5 pages, and though her writing is primarily about the South, she also visits a one-room schoolhouse in Vermont. Mostly she’s writing not with nostalgia, but with open-eyed admiration, for how things used to be. She has an eye for absurdity, and it must be fun to live in her skin, with her opportunities to participate in it. For example:
“We were here in Virginia, Lilly and me and our old aunt Eleanor… because of eight Chippendale chairs. There had been twelve originally, made in 1750 for an ancestor of ours in Jamestown. Over the years four had been lost, and the rest had drifted around in the family and ended up in the possession of various scattered cousins. Mandon, our richest cousin, had made millions in the cable TV business and… had tracked us all down and organized this gathering of the chairs and their owners…. Mandon was a perfect host [but] his guests, in spite of the blood tie, were not congenial, and once begun, the conversation skewed off in odd directions.”
White’s all about skewing off in odd directions. Consider the subjects of her pieces: an old hippie who runs a fruit tree nursery in coastal Alabama; a retired Russian colonel who visits White’s first graders in Georgia; Mr. Grange, who operates a roadside produce stand and dreams of having visitors from Idaho; the woman who runs a fish camp in rural Florida; Nockerd Sockett, a restaurant co-worker who seems destined for greatness; an ancient folk artist whose works are being overtaken by decay and vines.
This anthology is a slice of life – a life we miss when we encounter the familiar parts. The stories are short and funny, and White’s light touch is droll and factual. Go spend some summer afternoons with her wandering her South.