Southern Drawl
Author masterfully reveals battle scars of characters’ ‘wounded’ lives

By Stacy Jones- Special columnist
Published Sunday, August 20, 2006

Birmingham author Jimmy Carl Harris is the best kind of writer. Harris, a retired Marine and university professor, does not avoid the dark underbelly of reality. With all the restraint of a clockmaker setting a timepiece in motion, he introduces readers to characters that live and breathe on the page.

Harris’s first book, a collection of short fiction titled, “Walking Wounded,” pulses to life with his characteristic “strong women, weak preachers, and brave Marines,” as he describes them on his website at jimmycarlharris.com. “Whenever I can,” he says, “I bring them all together, mostly in the South. My South is, in part, the small town and rural South.”

The opening story of the collection, “The Communists of My Youth,” is told from the point of view of a Marine whose leg is shot off by a “sapper” in Vietnamese Con Thien. Having grown up in the shadow of anti-Communist sentiment, the narrator becomes a pawn for a retired Army general, who parades around the West in an “anti-Red” dog-and-pony style campaign, with the narrator and two other wounded veterans, in order to sway popular sentiment. Following the narrator’s return to Alabama, he settles into a used 10-wide and starts drawing his back pay, so that he can “figure out life,” a disguised retreat from the things that have confused or scared him. He doesn’t maintain this supposed sanctuary for long, however. Not long after, he establishes a relationship with a neighbor -- a man wounded in an earlier war -- who challenges everything he thought he knew thus far.

“Hot and Sunny on the Fourth,” one of the shorter stories, is one of the most subtle and best of the whole collection. Harris masterfully reigns in this story and lets the main character do the work, as she should. Hot, a shortened version of the nickname “Hot Stuff,” from the character’s younger days, wakes up one morning with great resolve to do something, although Harris allows the suspense to build and does not immediately reveal her purpose to the reader. But, along the way, Harris weaves in enough of her past to make the ending not only credible, but inevitable: from Hot’s failed effort in Nashville to become a singer, to her return home to Alabama as an unmarried, pregnant woman who suffered the glances and glares of “red-faced men” and “hard-eyed women.” In the end, when her son, now since grown, comes home from Vietnam in a pine box, she attempts to do what any other loving mother should do: give her son the parade the town would never give him.

In “Rolling Salvation,” Harris offers a lens into a character’s life not unlike other characters in the book: one who is marked by the terror of abuse. In this story, a reader cannot help but feel for Mahalie, whose “dreams of a low, sleek Studebaker had been replaced with nightmares featuring black eyes and split lips” from her husband Ottis, himself a victim of poverty and circumstance. When a rolling storekeeper rolls into fictional rural Nall County, where Mahalie lives, she is understandably intrigued by the novelty. After misreading the storekeeper’s patronization for something more, Mahalie makes one of the most poignant gestures in the book: she takes two dimes the storekeeper “gently pressed into her upturned palm,” her change for buying canned peaches, and decides “to keep them forever.” She sews them “into a tiny pouch made from a slightly stained handkerchief and tucked the pouch into a private place.” After the storekeeper returns, only to share even more exotic wares with her, he reveals that he is leaving town. Mahalie then sees him as a vehicle away from the stagnation of her life, but by the end of the story, she realizes that her dream of salvation will not come to fruition.

In “Fatback,” we meet Selma Meacham, another character who knows what it means to live without love, and to live, rightly so, in fear of her violent husband Hulon, a moonshiner. In this story, Harris demonstrates in one sentence his great genius for helping us to understand these characters’ wounded pasts. After Selma encounters an itinerant snooping around her smokehouse where Hulon also stores his quart jars of moonshine, she approaches him with skepticism, figuring him to be a tramp. Harris writes, “A life that graced Selma with scant reward of her own produced in her little inclination toward charity or tolerance of misdemeanor.”

In several of these stories, especially the latter “Malfunction Junction” and “Dark Dancing,” Harris does not shy away from showing readers multi-dimensional characters capable of inflicting horrible violence on other human beings. Yet, in the tradition of other great writers from the South, such as Flannery O’Connor, he does so without condescending, offering his characters a chance for grace, or redemption, whether or not they choose to accept it. Harris parts unflinchingly the curtain of a window to reveal dark recesses that may seem repugnant but are as real as the battle scars that mark these characters’ lives.

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Jimmy Carl Harris will be reading and signing copies of “Walking Wounded” at Downtown Books, located at 515 Franklin Street in Corinth, from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006. For further details, contact Stuart at 662-284-2665 or stuartg@dimco.net.

(Stacy Jones, a Southerner, is a master of fine arts student in fiction writing at The University of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns, which appear on Saturdays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.)