Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
A quick reminder: October didn’t start so well. It started with a government shutdown, of course, but there were two other stories that concerned me even more, both of them about banning words, sometimes individual words but more often entire books. Just because this news was reported on National Public Radio doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It’s real, amigos y amigas. Scary too. And Halloween is coming up, so it seems like a fitting time to talk about it a little.
The first news was this: “The Department of Energy has told employees to avoid using certain words, including ‘climate change,’ ‘green’ and ‘sustainable,’ according to an internal email sent to staff and obtained by NPR.”
And the other news was this: “PEN America released its list of the most-banned books of the 2024-2025 school year on Wednesday [October 1]—and warned that the number of books challenged or banned in public school districts across the country has risen exponentially in the past two years… 6,870 bans during the past academic year [and] 10,046 bans imposed during the 2023-24 school year.”
This, from the land of the free. This, from the home of the brave. We’re going to be watching marathons of horror movies soon (not me; I’m one of the few who can’t stand zombies, slashers, grossness, and so on), but saying “climate change” is too scary for the Department of Energy? Saying “sustainable development” is a jump-scare? And what kind of government is so afraid of books?
Ray Bradbury knew. Almost everyone else knows too.
To me, the weirdest part of this banning frenzy is we’ve got a history full of incredible American writers, of absolute-masterpiece-genius American literature, especially from Modern American writers, writers like Frost, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Connor, Cummings, Williams, Glaspell, O’Neill, Miller, Ellison, Steinbeck, and more, and don’t forget Eudora Welty. Oh, man, did this woman write some great, wide-ranging, and always inventive short stories. Plus, she had a camera eye for details and characterization (she was a photographer first), and a myna bird ear and voice for dialogue, and a savvy way of taking old source material and spinning it into something new. She did it so craftily that readers might not notice the ghost outline of the old thing she built a better thing on top of, but the outline is there. I’m talking about stories like “Petrified Man” and “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden.”
“Petrified Man” is practically a stage play. It’s set in a beauty parlor in small-town Mississippi. Mostly it’s just two women talking, Leota (the stylist) and Mrs. Fletcher (her customer). Yes, there’s a third-person narrator, but that point-of-view is only cursory, not much different than stage directions, and the rest is all dialogue. It’s even divided into two acts with a small break of white space between them like an intermission. However, it’s better as a short story because if it were on a stage we wouldn’t be surprised by the presence of another character. Leota and Mrs. Fletcher begin by ignoring him, so we don’t know he’s there, and when we learn that he is, it casts the women’s meanness and gossip in a new light because they’ve been chattering on about abortion, incest, sex in a car’s back seat within 30 minutes of meeting, freak shows, and stillborn conjoined twins on display in a jar—all in front of a three-year-old boy.
Awful as that is, though, Welty saves the worst thing said—deadpan, thoughtless, and horrible—for the second act. Believe me, you’ll know it when you see it. There’s no ignoring anymore how much these women in this beauty parlor resemble Medusa and her Gorgon sisters no matter how much they try to change themselves on the outside. They aren’t actual Gorgons, of course—this is Realism, not mythology or horror—but whoa…
Also, if you know the myth, you know that looking at Medusa turns everyone to stone, and there are figuratively petrified husbands and a fake “Petrified Man” in this story; he’s part of the freak show. And if you know the myth, then you also know that the trick to cutting off the she-demon’s head is to back up close while looking at her blurry reflection in a metal shield, and what’s the setting of this story full of? Mirrors. However, with Welty, our mythic hero is a three-year-old anti-hero, and his sword is just a perfect, insightful, revealing, cutting remark. Then blackout, and the curtain falls.
Welty’s “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” seems fitting for Halloween too since it’s about a kind of haunting. But before you read it, re-read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, then see if you don’t agree with me that Welty is reinventing that old guilt-laden poem as a work of Southern regional fiction, with Steve as the Ancient Mariner and a bartender named Max as the detained wedding guest. It’s just that she’s ditched the supernatural stuff, and her ending is completely different. There’s no expiation and relief in Welty’s story, just Steve’s stupid futility. Steve of the No-Plan. Steve of the No-Acknowledgement-of-Guilt.
No plan or guilt about what, exactly?
Well, that years ago Steve worked as a carnival barker, drawing in crowds to see the geek show starring someone who’d been kidnapped and forced into this role, a tiny Black man named Little Lee Roy. The owners of the traveling circus renamed him Keela, dressed him in a long wig and feathered headdress, forced him to eat live chickens, and made him growl and scare away the paying gawkers by banging the bars of his cage with an iron bar. Steve tells Max all about it, and Max thinks he knows who Steve is talking about, so he closes up his bar and brings Steve to see Little Lee Roy. But Steve just keeps on talking to Max, layering on more jabber, referring to Keela/Lee Roy as “it” about 25 times during his endless rationalization—how he didn’t know “it” wasn’t really a monster, and if only he’d known, then he wouldn’t have… then he would’ve done… Max tells Steve that he does know now and asks Steve what he wants to do about it. But Steve has no idea, maybe give him some money or something, only he hasn’t got any. So instead he does some psychological transference and punches Max in the face. And if this story isn’t still timely these days—on a national scale—then I don’t know what is.
It’s a story more artful and haunting than any yard full of Halloween decorations, and surely it’s a reinvention of Coleridge’s poem, but I’m not suggesting that Little Lee Roy is like the albatross, not at all. Welty’s story humanizes Lee Roy by starting and ending with him. We see him as a whole person to begin with, before his day is interrupted and he sits on the porch to watch and listen to Steve talk Max’s ear off. And we see him as a whole person again once Steve and Max are gone. He isn’t just a pawn on a victim-story chessboard. He’s a real person (well, yes, he’s a character; but his characterization, while minimally detailed and told to “Hush up” by his kids at dinner, is human and humane). And one more thing about the ending: Just before the break, when Max and Steve exit the scene, Welty, being a Modernist, differs from Coleridge, a Romantic, in this way too: she doesn’t declare that her detained wedding guest (Max) goes away “a sadder and a wiser man” after hearing the Mariner’s (Steve’s) tale about violating nature. Coleridge did, Welty doesn’t. Still, her implication is that White people like Max (or Welty’s readers) can’t be disengaged. Racism against Black people and American Indians and gender discrimination against women are all Wrong with a capital W. And tuning out—like Max admits he typically does—by listening to a jukebox (or anything else) is not enough.
Nor is banning what you’d rather not think about. Nor is make-believing a prettier history. Nor is pretending that a prohibition on words like “green” and “sustainable” will turn coal smoke into vitamins and trick citizens into forgetting that the wind and sun can give us energy. Hell, the Dutch knew the wind could do that centuries ago when they also thought tulip bulbs were bitcoins and diseases could be sucked from us by leeches. One out of three isn’t bad, though. Even one right thing is a start…
Like reading Eudora Welty is a start. And then more great, green, changing, sustaining, brilliant American literature after that.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by Adina Voicu, courtesy Pixabay.
