Chalktown

The South is known for its incredible women writers - and now, with the publication of Mother of Pearl and Chalktown, Melinda Haynes can be added to that list. Melinda Haynes shouts from the top of a Southern pine with a voice that can, by God, break glass. I've never read anything like Chalktown in my life! I was completely willing to follow Hez and Yallababy to the end of the earth. I can't fathom where in the world Melinda came up with that plot! Chalktown is mysterious, bewildering and surprising. It is also gorgeously written and lavished with the tangled oddities that make the South the South.

Melinda Haynes' new book, Chalktown, fulfills the promise I thought I saw in her first book, the Oprah selection Mother of Pearl: This woman will write a notable literary work. Taking nothing away from Mother of Pearl, which introduced us to Ms. Haynes' ability to lay words before us that freshened our perceptions, Chalktown moves into the realm of allegory with its allusive action, its revelations of what is really important about living, and its unsentimental portrayal of human frailty. If one expects "the usual" from this book, one will be disappointed. The neat solutions and straw figure characters of most current fiction are not here. Chalktown is no quick read, for one finds oneself stopping to allow oneself the satisfying practice of divergent thinking. The characters and plotlines are not closed loops; the reader finds multiple routes to interpretation and sighs over the surfeit of Ms. Haynes language as well.

Melinda Haynes is a talented writer! In "Chalktown" she has managed to exceed the skills she demonstrated in her first novel, "Mother of Pearl." The author successfully describes a motley crew of characters with their problems, idiosyncrasies, faults, failings, strengths and charms.Haynes vividly describes grinding poverty, lack of education and racism. Hez, for example, is largely uneducated. His preference is to skip as many school days as is allowable by the educational system. Yet, for his apparent lack of smarts and social skills, he has heroic qualities. A neglectful family, that can hardly be called a family at all, makes his caring and protectiveness of Yellababy his impaired brother, all the more difficult. Fairy, the ostensible family head, spends more time with his former wife than with his present wife and children. Wife and mother, Susan-Blair, has struggled with alcohol and her main means of survival seems to be her failed entrepreneurial efforts with a consignment business. The family's one daughter is an on-again, off-again runaway who is headed for trouble because of her clandestine relationship with a mysterious county worker.The characters are well drawn with all main characters having vivid personalities, quirks or charms. Each chapter is short and seems to tease and urge the reader on to find out why "Chalktown" is so odd. Why do folk only correspond via chalk and chalkboard? Why are they so bound together even though some obviously harbor feelings of suspicion and hatred toward one another? AND, who (really) dunnit? Even the ending is a surprise. A fine read!

I got Chalktown on Holy Saturday afternoon. I started reading it on the hour drive for Easter Vigil with my mother. I read aloud to my wife as we drove; the pacing nicely suited to my voice, though totally out of sync with the potholes. I reached the spot where Marion realizes that a body can't ever leave a place just as the light got too bad to read on. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in the near dark waiting for the lighting of the Pascal Candle and seeing things in St. John's that haven't been there in up to 50 years. The stations that were once painted plaster instead of the current brass rectangles, and the floor grate where this altar boy had to kneel while we paused for readings, and people gone and dead. Marion's discovery engraved itself on my lower bifocals; I had never left that church where I was first communioned the spring before Mike K** was run down and I made my first funeral, where I was confirmed, and somehow, with my 86-year-old mother, I am still there in the improbable year of 2001. Reading, for me , involves as much creativity as writing, and I have been extremely creative with Chalktown, but it has taxed my imagination to keep up with Haynes. I took two shortcuts I hope I shall be forgiven for. The preacher and Susan-Blair became the Robert Mitchum and Shelly Winters characters from the movie Night of the Hunter. "Suffer little children to come unto me," keeps popping though my head, and I keep seeing her George County in terms of the harsh black and white cinematography of that movie, even though the words are a Jackson Pollock profusion of chromatics. (Maybe that is the wrong painter, Aaron's face made me think of the face in Munch's Scream). I also had this uncomfortable feeling that she was holding a mirror in front of me. Especially when she mentioned that the guy I keep trying not to identify with had named his bus the Blue Goose, one of my old CB handles. And I was 16 in 1961 and Cathy's real name was Becky. I rode her time machine into a world I find almost as hard to understand as reality. And as with Mother of Pearl, I find myself wanting to ask a thousand questions. Since she isn't here, I have to answer them for myself. I like my answers, but someday I want to ask the author. I hope the media professionals who pass imprimaturs on a book are supportive, but just reading from the way the publisher tried to pigeonhole Haynes on the dust jacket, I wonder. I know, I once compared her to Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. But that was because I wanted to set a measure of the artist as a new face. That art is now a given with Mother of Pearl. Wonder if critics will understand that, or in a failure of imagination put her in someone else's garden. Damn!!! All the above was written with 100 pages to go. Like commenting on Don Giovanni or Romeo and Juliet without the last act. With that ending, they ought to be comparing her to O. Henry. Before I got there the book had me crying and laughing, and liv

In 1961, Chalktown, Mississippi is a tiny village consisting of mostly a dirt road lined by the shanty homes of sharecroppers. Families communicate with their neighbors mostly through chalkboards that hang off the front porches of their houses.Just down a spell from Chalktown lives the dysfunctional and impoverish Sheehand family, whose patriarch deserted them several years ago. Abusive mother Susan loosely raises her three children. However, in reality, the nearest thing to positive nurturing is sixteen-year-old teenager Hezekiah, who tries to help his rash sister Arena and his mentally incompetent brother Yellababy.However, Hez seeks adventure perhaps to hide from his dismal existence. With Yellababy tied to his back, he journeys to the local metropolis of Chalktown, planning to uncover the mysteries of the community as a means of escaping his gloomy present and his ugly past with seemingly nothing but a drab helpless future to come. However, with the hopefulness of the young, he will still seek a brighter future.CHALKTOWN is a period piece that brings to life the late fifties and early sixties in rural Mississippi. However, the story line is that and more as it is a coming of age tale as Hez finds the eternal optimism of youth that one person can change the future for the better. With this novel and MOTHER OF PEARL, Melinda Haynes is stepping closer to earning the Faulkner mantle of consistent superb writer of the Southern novel. Harriet Klausner