Calloustown; "Ma'm We're in South Carolina. Who Knows their Standards".

         
       My title quote is from a scout for Varina Davis, Jeff's wife in the new grand historic nonfiction Varina by Charles Frazier, his first since Cold Mountain.            

  Like myself George Singleton is a graduate of Furman University, raised Baptist though I held out longer than he did, and medium sized town South Carolina. I'm from Gaffney, he's from Greenwood. We missed each other by a year at Furman but both of us knew Dan Norfleet of Pascagoula Mississippi and some of his many girlfriends.

      I first read Singleton, in fact got ecstatic with the title of his first collection of short stories Half Mammals of Dixie. When I heard the title I was thinkin here is a fellow from Upstate SC who is gonna get my experience in Gaffney, gonna nail it sight unseen.

   And if fact he does. Something of a thinking man's Lewis Grizzard  on the scale between Lewis and Roy Blount edging to Blount. He did go to Furman, like I said.

    In Half Mammals there is a story Duke Power about a fellow over near Dacusville whose's cousins try to sabotage satellite tv and get all their tv for free cause they have already mastered the art of climbing big Duke towers and getting free electricity.

    When you can get free electricity in Pickens County, TV is a piece of cake.

   Singleton perfects all this in one of his latest efforts, Calloustown. Calloustown could be Gaffney, Union, Pomaria, Eastover, you pick it, Low Country or UpCountry in South Carolina.

    He metastasizes all my favorite stories from Gaffney all the boys who beat the poop out of the entire state from 60 --67, even one on a freakish track star homeschooled who gets the attention of the Oregon Ducks. What I'm saying is you could easily sub in Wayne Whiteside, Whiteford Smith, Moto, Waterhead, Big Daddy Lipscomb, you nickname em for any of these stories.

   On my blog I may eventually with George As muse tell some of them but you don't have time nor the Chronicle Space. Faulkner calls it Kill All your Darlings. Look it up.

     But I will tell the story from the Furman pastors school a few years ago by a fellow from Pomaria once married to a Miss Delaware. He said one summer he worked with these fellows Nubby and Olin. Their deal before security cameras  at Kmart was they would pick out a cooler, load it up, put it back on the shelf, go in the next day in a walker and get a stockboy to get the cooler for them and take it through check out for the price of a cooler. They never touched the merchandise on day of purchase.

   They also thought fornication was taking a dump but they had their shopping down pat.

    Point is we know Singleton isn't makin this stuff up even though he's got himself guggenheimed as a fiction writer.

     
        Then there is Miss South Carolina

      And 2013 Miss South Carolina, Brooke Mosteller  a Furman grad, daughter of an ordained Baptist minister herself,  Rev Mosteller who married the Campsen Beauty from the lowstate says about trailer parks on national TV to get the pageant going, this is how we roll in SC. You can google it up on Utube.  Utube Says Brooke got herself in hot water.

   Her Mother was often on the Phil  Maher show during the 90s to stand up for traditional values the SC Baptist way of life.

   George in Calloustown has a refrain about how he  finds most Christians disconcerting and Baptists in particular. Still he teaches em best he can in abundance these days at the Methodist Wofford in Spartanburg home of Trey Gowdy, where Billy Graham was a member of the local Baptist church till he passed earlier this year.

     Here is how Singleton  fomented himself according to a profile a few years ago in a Proud Furman Magazine.   

iOne of my professors,
Gil Allen, said that I ‘had
the disease.’ And I did.”
Despite all of the manuscripts
that were tossed in
the trash, Singleton says the
efforts were valuable for the
“minor characters I would take
from one story—or one sentence,
or one scene—and start
over and over again until I had
something better.”
Such laborious salvaging has
added up to six collections of
short stories, two novels, and
an instructional book on  on fiction

      Here is an excerpt from his story Unraveling

7th grade history.  I remembered something about slavery and a nuclear bombthat accidentally fell through the bom door hatch of a B-47 above Mars Bluff on March 11, 1958- and although the uranium and plutonium core wasn't attached--it created a mushroom clud deeper than most of the freshwater   lakes in the area. I remembered that Senator Strom Thurmond ran for President as a Dixiecrat and opposed desegregation, thugh he fathered a bi-racial daughter. I remembered that a man named Senator Brooks beat up Senator Charles Sumner with a cane back before the Civil War. There was some kind of mention of a slew of astronomical events
 predating the end of the Pleistocene epoch.hitting right around Calloustown, things called Carolina Bays, that because of the holes in the ground, oddly looked similar to the holes hitting Mars Bluff. The teacher made a big point to say something bi-daily about a man named Ruple went off to embalming college, got a job in one of the more prone to die early cities and left her in Calloustown alone.

    You can google his short story Columbus Day about Spartanburg's Westgate Mall in the Oxford American Magazine. Hibbett's sporting goods will never be the same for you.
 

     
  Romans 8:26 on the Holy Spirit and  inutterable Groans  when words fail.. This closing I'm gonna float in the spirit of Flannery OConnor who knew Southern Freaks, and offscouring long time before George and his grit lit buddies. I mentioned his refrain about Christians in general and Baptists in particular.

    See my blog on my question to Billy Bob Thornton in Florence Alabama in 2007. It is in that frame of mind. Singleton is a secular southern writer so I'm not preaching just thinking. When I heard him read some of his story What Could of Been a few months ago at a Writer's conference in NE Bama about five miles from The Rock Church in Section, one of the most famous snake Handlin churches in the network, my first thought was this sounds a  lot like Annie Dillard's Ticket for a Prayer Wheel. It is a profane allegory of sorts to the Book of Revelations on Last Things. For all his mischief and genius, in his inutterable groans about Onanism and UFOs, freak 200 meter dashers and the History of the State of South Carolina I think Singleton has a big heart and the greatest of affection for all of us in the Cracker Carolina version of humanity roughly between 46 and 2014.

     Dum Spiro, Spero !!



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