Foreword
Is there anything which has not been written, or remains unsaid, about the American South? The answer must be "of course there is"-for daily there must be, somewhere, another American novelist who turns to the typewriter to add yet another several thousand words on this fascinating section of America which is probably better known to millions of readers the world over, through the fiction medium, than any other part of our widespread land.
What are the forces which combine in the southeastern U.S.A. to produce this devouring curiosity about a way of life that is perhaps more colorful, more indefinable, stranger than anything ever written about it?
The rapacious quality so pronounced in certain southern "gentlefolk" has been chronicled by writers such as Lillian Hellman in "The Little Foxes" down to more recent best-sellers like the Beyen's "Hurry Sundown".
The peculiarly decadent aspect of a region which chose to live in the past for nearly a century was seized upon and exemplified by the work of Tennessee Williams, and the best of William Faulkner's great literary heritage to the world are his novels of the Mississippians he knew and understood so well. Nor is it an accident that one of the most famous novels of all time, Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind" dealt with the South.
Let the reader again, then, visit the southern town with its courthouse square and Confederate monument, while the author of this important novel peels away the layers of humanity in Quiggville, Tennessee.
There are the gentry, those old families who strive to preserve the status quo of a life which has been kind to them and which they regard as their natural, inalienable right. There are the poor whites-the small farmers, the sawmill workers, the moonshiners-whose lot it has always been to scramble for a living, drink hard, love hard and to tell their story in the heart tugging ballads of "country" music.
There is a new class-post-depression and post-war-which is fighting to move into the few old mansions which may be left and into the new brick "ranch types". It is composed of the modern-day Carpetbaggers, northerners who come south to tap the economic boom, and of poor whites who strive for upward mobility which will place them alongside old families in wealth and material possessions, at least. Whether they can ever buy into the closed circle of southern society remains to be seen.
And at the bottom of the heap, those dreamers of the American dream who were the victims of that dream-the disenfranchised southern blacks, whose miseries created the unique American art form, the "blues". At last comes for them the long-overdue reckoning, as the blacks begin to move into their rightful place in the sun.
Yet in such isolated pockets of backwardness as Quiggville, Tennessee, everything seems to happen later than it does anywhere else. Bigotry and greed are still rampant and the facade of the untouchability of "southern womanhood" is only that, a crumbling facade which conceals immorality and depravity of shocking proportions.
How long can a young, honest and ambitious couple live in a town like this before coming into collision with the reactionary forces of decadence and evil? And if they choose to stay and fight, what are their chances against the local establishment?
With a realism that is often starkly brutal, the author delineates the story of Ray and Sally Denham and their struggle to carve for themselves a place in this town where they have chosen to settle.