When Love Is Lost at the Jim Dandy
Southern Gothic meets metafiction in a new novel by Minton Sparks
by Pablo Tanguay
In a flashback scene near the beginning of Minton Sparks' White Lightning, 26-year-old Penny Sue Pritchett remarks that she's "homesick for somewhere I've never been." She's explaining why she married Darrell Sykes, a man who "would have made a good plow horse" but nonetheless once had it in him to speak to Penny Sue's heart: "He dipped his finger in the lake and drew a cross on my forehead like he was baptizing me," she remembers. As the water runs down her face, he tells her: "This place loves you too, Penny Sue. ... Sometimes places that we love, love us too."
That scene occurs years before the actual start of White Lightning. By the time the book does get underway, all things lyrical for Darrell and Penny Sue have long since vanished. The wannabe country music star has, in fact, left his wife for Betsy Burnett—"that underfed Irish setter-looking gal behind the counter of the Jim Dandy"— to shack up with her and her three kids "in a two-bedroom over off the interstate." Penny Sue, for her part, has recently completed parole for a DUI conviction and is struggling to hang on to her job as a hairdresser. She's at work, perming the tender-headed Doris Jenkins, when she gets the call that starts the action of the novel. Grabbing her car keys and coat, Penny Sue tells her client, "You're gonna have to rinse it and comb it out yourself, Doris. My grandmother's dying."
Minton Sparks (the stage name of Nashvillian Jill Webb-Hill) is a performance artist/poet/storyteller whose stage shows and three CDs have earned her a national following. Her previous book, Desperate Ransom: Setting Her Family Free, combined poems, prose and photos to produce a genre-defying collection that explored, among other things, the space between who we are and who we want to be. In White Lightning, her debut novel, she continues that exploration, offering up a vision of metamorphosis—and, ultimately, redemption—predicated on a no-holds barred grapple with the truth.
After her beloved grandmother dies, Penny Sue receives a box of her diaries: "Secret treasures sit in that diary, Penny Sue," Jebo once told her. "When I die, read all four and don't skip a word." For Penny Sue, secret treasures do indeed sit in the diaries, not the least of which is learning that Jebo turns out to have been something of a poet, chronicling much of the family's hidden, often shameful history in verse. The diaries—and especially the poems in them—become a portal not only into Jebo's thoughts and the history of the family, but also into Penny Sue herself. Reading, she exclaims, "I'm right here! I am caught inside every one of these, Jebo. Did you know me better than I know myself?"
The problem is that the final diary is missing. Presumably, it's in the hands of the person who's sending Penny Sue ransom notes made from cut-out, large-print Reader's Digest words. The first note reads: "Dear Penny Sue, What's number 4 worth to you? If you want the diary back—do as I say! Record poems onto cassette. Do it or never see number 4 again."
White Lightning, that fast, turns from a memoir-like exploration of secrets and shame into a kind of farcical mystery, the point of which seems to be to explain how the author herself came to inhabit the Sparks persona. The shift is unsettling, especially as the rest of the book takes itself and its themes quite seriously. For sure, White Lightning means to be funny, as Sparks the performer is funny, darkly funny; and it means to tread into the gothic, as Southern lit so often does. Penny Sue, for example, spends days locked in the house with the diaries, carrying them "out in front of me like a diving rod," all the while hearing music that isn't there: "For a moment I wondered if I'd left the bedside radio playing in Jebo's room, but it was just the sound track coming on in my head again." The transformation taking place inside Penny Sue will either wreck or free her, which is serious business. But it gets undercut by the silliness of those ransom notes.
What's much more intriguing than the mystery notes is the way Sparks once again blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. This is a longtime theme for the author, who is herself a kind of fictional creation. (Besides being a longtime stage name, Minton Sparks is now an authorial pseudonym, as well.) In Desperate Ransom, photos of the author's actual family accompany the fiction, and one section of the accompanying DVD features an interview with Sparks herself promoting what would turn out to be White Lightning. In it, she seems to conflate her real grandmother with the character of Jebo, and herself with Penny Sue. Sitting in a rocker, garbed in the dress she wears onstage, Sparks says, "My grandmother had just died, and while she was alive she didn't seem like somebody who was grabbing life as much as she should have. And then in her death, when these poems surface, you realize she sort of wakes up the narrator of the book with the life she infused into the work."
White Lightning, then, like all of Sparks' work, asks us not only to wrestle with the truth, but also to wrestle with the very notion of "the truth."
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