What I'm Working On
It's WEIRD.
They always tell you to write what you know. Maybe luckily, or not, I’m intimately acquainted with a place where tapwater tastes like moss. BBQ barns fly Confederate flags there; the postal service is spotty, and our senior senator’s a notable pool shark. He used to eat dinner at one of my bestie’s houses, where he found the hump in their table immediately. The former senior senator used to eat dinner there too, before he croaked. He was a Dixiecrat. Our first apartment was at the corner where a drunk driver killed his daughter, and that’s how we gave people directions to our house. “We’re the first house up from the corner where Nancy Thurmond got hit,” we’d say.
“Oh, there,” friends would reply, though Nancy Thurmond died in the arms of the South Carolina Lieutenant Governor—who happened to be passing by—years and years before.
You’d write about it, too, if only because that one downtown gas station kept a tiger. Though it was before my time, Happy the Tiger eventually became the first animal at Riverbanks Zoo, and my kids spent their formative years climbing over his statue.
There’s an inherent strangeness to the South.
Flannery O’Conner’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a classic for a reason, but it’s a linchpin to understanding Southern literature, and not for the reasons you think. Central to any understanding of the South is the lingering morass of history, our institutional racism, corruption, cronyism, and Lost Cause-ism. We can recite it like a nursery rhyme. But there’s a detail in that story that shows the effect all of them have when taken in total.
The tired family stops for lunch at one of those ubiquitous roadside BBQ barns. They have checked tablecloths, buffet-style service, and kitschy signs like “If You Can’t Stand The Heat, Get Out Of The Kitchen” and “God Don’t Make No Junk.” The kids eat outside. They watch the monkey in the trees, and the owner tells them about a recently escaped gang of murderers.
Did you catch it? There’s a fucking monkey in the tree. The monkey belongs to the owner. He’s a resident of the BBQ Barn. The monkey’s presence is not rationalized, and the narrative continues. You want to tell about the South? There it is: the monkey at the BBQ barn. It’s that shimmer of lunacy. When you live under the yoke of insanity for long, it becomes part of the scenery. The governor goes missing. Alex Murdaugh fakes his own suicide. Lady Chablis powders her face in her own cocaine and steps onstage.
If you find yourself paralyzed between laughter, rage, and weeping, the proper response is, “Bless your heart.”
So I have to write about it.
My current work, Ninety-Eight Sabers, is a cross between Skinwalker Ranch, The Royal Tenenbaums, and the white side of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. It has something of Flannery O’Conner’s darkness, in the sense that she found South’s true and brittle heart, which has absurdity at the heart of its tragedy. In a land that runs historical plantations as theme parks, how do you deal with your unquiet ghosts?
There’s nothing more Southern Gothic than a literal time portal. The past isn’t really past. It’s not even past.
I found an important idea, the mirrored men, from my fourteen-year-old. In our accent, even I couldn’t quite understand what he was saying—it comes out something like “mird men” unless we’re really enunciating—and I had to have him write it down for me (if you’re having trouble imagining how this pronunciation trick works, imagine Jenna in Thirty Rock saying “the rural juror”). I combined that concept with the Greek concept of the Three Sisters, took a running leap, and started writing.
Ninety-Eight Sabers’ title comes from a incident in the novel, which actually happened. In a place which shall remain nameless, the state archives was junking a hundred Confederate sabers. A researcher wanted to save them, so he took every single one home. His whole house was slung with rusty Confederate sabers. I held that picture so clearly:
“They hung above the lintels, on the walls, atop the mantles, and lent the place a strangely martial air. We’ll be ready when the revolution comes, Sullivan used to think. He’d never questioned which one.”
I’m related to a few researchers, but I’m not related to this one. None of my relatives works with physical artifacts, and no Broadbent home is stacked with sabers. Anyway, my relatives would kill me if I put them in a book.
Want to know what kind of insanity I’m dealing with?
Here are some links to get you started.
Reverend EX Slave, Who Set the Confederate Flag on Fire, Dead at 57
New Update on Murdaugh Family (one of my favorite Scary Mommy essays of all time; excuse the proofreader mistake. It was syndicated by Yahoo)
Alex Sanders on Saving Congaree: “We Had the Cannon Balls.”
Bonus clip: My favorite press conference. Mark Sanford admits his affair, cops to trip to Argentina. Watch for the face of the girl behind him, who was wandering the Statehouse at the time, then lingered in the background and grinned.
