Southern Fried Child In Home Seeker'S Paradise

by Jimmie Meese Moomaw

Southern Fried Child In Home Seeker's Paradise is about the experiences of a sometimes lonely, but ever independent only child growing up in Mississippi in the 40s and 50s. On one level, Southern Fried Child is a charming account of the unusual experiences of an unusual child. On another level, Moomaw's stories reflect profound and valuable insight into the stratified social, political and denominational milieu of a small southern town after World War II and before Brown v. Board of Education. Written in the first person narrative voice of a precocious child, Southern Fried Child is story telling at its best. The stories range in emotional tone from "slap dab" funny to heart wrenchingly poignant. It's as if Jimmie is sitting beside you telling you her about the dog who loved her too much, a game she played called "the embalming room door" her first cuss word, the phobia she developed after seeing her Daddy terrified of a dead mouse, and the contrast between her immersion in the Baptismal pool behind the pulpit at the First Baptist Church and the "talkers in tongues" who marched around the walls of Jericho at her Uncle Wamon's "holy roller" church. Moomaw writes, "you might be tempted to believe that the Gothic characters you see in the movies with the bad, bad southern accents are the products of the alcohol induced dementia of failed novelists turned B-movie screenwriters, but the South I grew up in was peopled with characters like Lola in "An Epitaph for Lola and Fonnie" They walked into and out of my Daddy's little country grocery store and service station every day of the week. People like them were the stuff of Truman and Tennessee and Willie and Eudora's fiction. They were the stuff of my every day life and reality"

252 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 2010

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Southern Fried Child is a series of anecdotes about Jimmie's growing up years in Brookhaven Mississippi in the 1940's. We hear how the Baptist girl going to a Catholic school fell in love with the nun who taught her first grade, and piano. We hear how Jimmie realized that the elaborate angel wings her father made for her performance in the Christmas play were his way of saying "I love you". Fishing is Jimmie's favorite sport and she learned it from her father--and we get to join them. Who wouldn't love a story about Elvis Presley Junior Smith? Most of us have a "what I did to my hair" story, and Jimmy's is as funny as any of them. Did you ever wonder what happened in the back rooms of a funeral home? Jimmy saw a real (almost) ghost there once.

Sometimes when people start telling stories about the colorful people in town it is easy for the reader to become embarrassed for those about whom the stories are written. It may be funny that you walked through town with your skirt tucked into your pantyhose, but do you really want that in print for folks to read for years on end? For the most part, Jimmie avoids this. While she mentions that her parents were alcoholics, she doesn't tell stories of their drunken behavior, and were it not for mentions of their alcoholism, you'd probably consider them ideal parents after reading this book. She tells of Lola's aberrant behavior, but lets us know that she really cared for and about Lola.

While my high school and college years were spent in Mississippi, I'm not from there, and we lived on the Coast (which anyone from Mississippi will tell you is different from the rest of the state) so I never really developed a southern accent (except to the ears of my Wisconsin relatives) and what little I did have has mellowed since I've been in New Orleans (no southern accents here) so when reading it myself, I didn't get the full effect of the book like I did when Jimmie read it out loud; however, I could picture Jimmie on the front porch in a rocking chair telling those stories to her grandkids in her lovely southern drawl.

Since the book is a series of anecdotes rather than a running narrative, it is an easy book to pick up and read for a few minutes and then leave. If you like stories of ordinary lives seen through extraordinary eyes and written about in beautiful prose, I think you'll enjoy Southern Fried Child In Home Seeker'S Paradise as much or more than I did. Grade: A-

[Charlie Hewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! I live in Brookhaven, the setting for the Book.

[Cissy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you loves stories about the south, especially those told from first hand experience - this is a real gem!! Jimmie's heartfelt, beautiful, colorful and sometimes almost mystical tales of her childhood made me want to jump right back into my own blissful days of the 1950's. People of our generation say, "Those days are gone forever." Well...not as long as Jimmie Meese Moomaw will keep writing and reminding us. Sometimes, it's good to remember the past.