Melinda Haynes

Don’t be surprised if someday very soon you hear the names Flannery O’Connor and Melinda Haynes used in the same sentence. There’s a good chance William Faulkner will be there as well, dancing on the tip of the tongue.

Haynes, whose debut novel Mother of Pearl was chosen by Oprah for her book club, may not yet have the longevity of those esteemed Southern writers, but she’s certainly got a pen that’s been dipped in the same gothic-grotesque ink.

Her sophomore story, Chalktown, is a show more ripe narrative where the words grow thick as kudzu. If the plot is sometimes as impenetrable as that Southern vine, well then, that’s forgivable because the language is as delightful as a glass of mint julep that you sip while sitting on your porch in the middle of a hot afternoon, beads of condensation sweating down the side of the glass.

Haynes’ fiction-diction is the sort where if you’re not the kind of person to read novels aloud, then by book’s end you will be. Sentences, phrases, entire paragraphs demand that you stop silent-reading, put your finger on the page and declare aloud to the nearest person—even if it’s a complete stranger—“Listen to this.â€? Yes, it’s that good. Even Mr. Faulkner, were he here today, would perk up and nod approval.

The plot follows sixteen-year-old Hezekiah, a poor white boy living in rural Mississippi, as he sets out one day in 1961 to walk to nearby Chalktown. That particular small spot in the road, populated by a handful of scarred and angry people, has taken on an air of mystery ever since the residents stopped talking to each other six years earlier. Now they communicate only by writing messages on chalkboards in their front yards.

Hezekiah isn’t running to Chalktown as much as he is running from his fractured home and its white-trash crazies:
Susan-Blair—his manic-depressive mother, “a formidable woman unraveling at the seams,â€? who believes Jesus watches her from a watermark on the ceiling;
Fairy—his deadbeat father who lives in a bus by the river and whose life is so small “he could climb inside it and disappear;â€?
and Arena—his older sister whose sluttish ways are about to bring tragedy into their lives.
It’s a dead-end life and Hezekiah determines to leave it behind, at least for a day. And so, he straps the other member of his family—his mentally-disabled five-year-old brother Yellababy—to his back and starts walking down “a dirt road going nowhere; a road so still even the dust was speechless.â€?

Watching him go is his neighbor Marion, a colored man who has the gift of “acting stupid while actually being world-class smart.â€? Indeed, Marion is the smartest character in the book, a fact proved by the fact that he mutters at Hezekiah’s retreating back, “Nobody ever really leaves this place. They just fool themselves into thinkin’ they do.â€?

Before Hez reaches Chalktown, however, Haynes takes a sharp detour, leaping ahead to the sparsely-populated town and introducing us to its characters, the kind of outcasts and misfits O’Connor would be proud to claim. I should say, “leaping ahead and back,â€? as the story returns to 1955 when a grisly series of events drove Chalktown into speechlessness. This sudden shift is one of the novel’s problems—perhaps its only problem—as we abruptly lose the sixteen-year-old Hez and only rejoin his journey 100 pages later. Dang, just when we were getting to know him and the pathetic little Yellababy, too…

Even though Haynes wrestles the English language into delicious, doughy knots, the disjointed narrative is disconcerting. Like a broken bone, the two halves never quite knit together and remain bound by the merest ligament, the thin connective tissue of theme and vision: the hard-luck lives of people in desperate need of grace and repair.

But if you’re able to excuse the jarring nature of Chalktown, you’re in for a Southern-fried treat. I mean, who wouldn’t admire sentences like these describing Susan-Blair’s home: “The house itself, if one could even call it a house, was an abomination to the senses. Made up of the strewn guts of other busted-up houses, it sat in a slut-like pose, multi-colored in hues no painter would be likely to claim.â€?

Or, this neat paragraph, a snapshot of small-town residents whiling away the day on a Main Street bench:
“Four of them were sitting there: Johnson, the cuckolded husband of the Eastern Star lady who’d sold those poundcakes; Jim, the one currently doing the cuckolding; J.P. McCreel, whose son had lost his life while between the legs of a female; and Julia Beauchamp, who had never had the stomach for entanglements, but sat wishing for the memory of one to occupy her mind.â€?
Good gracious! There’s an entire novel lurking in the underbelly of that one sentence.

This is Haynes’ gift, the marvelous ability to ferret out the best parts of the English language and to arrange them neatly on the printed page. This is how the dirt-poor speak, this is the music of poverty. Haynes knows her characters and has captured their cadence in ways that might even turn the Old Masters of Southern Lit green around the eyes. show less

Supposedly similar to other southern writers, like Olive Ann Burns, I didn't find this book as engaging. Set in Mississippi, the story revolves around 28yo negro Even, 15yo Valuable the white daughter of the town whore, and new to town, Joody Two Sun, an odd "seer" camping outside of town.

Near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in the summer of 1956, a bottle breaks over the head of the elderly, scholarly Canaan Mosely.

Even Grade, an orphan, searches his heart over Joody Two Sun, his mysterious lover with nine fingers, who wears sticks in her hair to mark her years, who knows and sees things other humans can not.

Just Plain Grace Johnson tends to the frail and drooling Mary Green, who was frozen by a stroke the day her son, Joleb, was born. Valuable Korner and her best friend, show more Jackson, are talking in the community graveyard atop a hill.

And out on the train tracks, Burris Green is looking for the face of God in the light of an oncoming train...

All of this information can be gleamed within the first chapters, leading me to believe that the characters of Melinda Haynes' novel, "Mother of Pearl," are easily the strongest part of this thick book. At 445 pages, it took me around a week to finish it; while it's lengthy, Haynes' writing style is also simplistic. I never felt lost, although I do think sometimes she drags the plot and characters down with an excess of description. I prefer clean, cut-and-dry brevity, allowing my own powerful imagination to fill in the gaps, rather than having the writer lead me to visual conclusions.

However, I will say that the characters are inspiring. After reading this book, I can't seem to get them out of my head; lanky Joody, tortured Joleb. If there's one thing Haynes did masterfully in this book, it was construct those characters, give them depth and feeling. She guides the reader through snapshots of the characters' lives in each chapter of this book, and about a third of the way through it all starts to get really entertaining. Whenever I had to put the book down, I found myself wanting to return to it, worried about the characters and what might happen next.

The plot has its twists and turns, but overall this book is more about revealing the nature and history of the characters, and sending a message of the interconnectedness of all lives (especially in a small town), rather than sweeping the reader along a trail of events.

I would reccomend this book to anyone who enjoys novels about the complicated and beautiful situations life in a small Southern town may bring -- including love and friendship that transcend race, age, sexuality and time. The only other thing I can say about this novel is that reading fiction is a deeply personal experience, and there isn't one message alone to be gleamed from this story or its characters.

If you decide to pick up "Mother of Pearl," I hope the experience is a beautiful one for you. show less

I enjoyed this story much more than I was expecting. I was expecting (and frankly not looking forward to) one more story about growing up poor in the South (your typical Oprah fare). What I found instead were memorable characters, believable emotions, and clever prose. After reading a biography of the author, I'm even more impressed.