I bought Pam’s book off of the author table in the Marran Gallery at Lesley University the week I graduated. She had been my thesis advisor and the semester had gone well, so I was excited to read some of her work. This was the only book of hers they had, so I picked it up.
It’s a travel book about southern storytellers. In each chapter, Pam talks about a particular storyteller and frames them geographically, temporally, and in the course of her journey, including a story by them. Its outermost framing is four road trips that took place over the course of the summer of 1999, so the book has the feeling of a road journal. Each chapter is different, some having a formal story set in a different typeface intermingled with or slighty set off from Pam’s text in a separate font. This allows her the ability to interject observations or comments in the flow of the story, and have them easily identified. There’s one fascinating chapter where she juxtaposes three different versions of the same story against each other, two in identifying fonts, one described in Pam’s text. It’s a fascinating exploration of the folk process.
That’s only one chapter in the book: every experience with a storyteller is different, and every chapter of this book takes its own shape. There’s gorgeous writing — both in Pam’s descriptions and in the stories she collects. David Holt’s story “Ross and Anna” is horrific, heartbreaking, and gorgeously told. There are several trickster stories, including a faithful telling of The Tar Baby from the Brer Rabbit stories, and a Jack story (of Jack & the Beanstalk fame) as told by Orville Hicks. Orville’s Uncle Ray gets an entire section of the book, deservedly. Another favorite of mine is Annie McDaniel’s “My First Encounter With a Flush Commode”, a recalling of a childhood memory which tells us about the south’s journey into modernity, and how recently things we now take for granted and consider necessities were new and alien. There’s history in these stories that goes back hundreds of years (at least two stories are about Kings) and there are ghosts lurking around almost every corner, both within the stories and around them.
The book pairs up nicely in my mind with Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music”, mining the same territory, though the time frame is different. Instead of inhabiting what Greil Marcus describes as the “Old, Weird America” of the pre-electrification south, Pam collected these stories in the penumbral pre-shadow of 9/11. As such, the book has historical value as a journey through a part of the world that has undergone changes since. For instance, the Pre-Katrina levee at the south end of the Mississippi River stands as a backdrop in one chapter. I think Sitting Up With the Dead is a great book. I don’t feel qualified to capitalize those words, but in my mind, they ought to be. It drips cultural significance, and I can’t think of another like it.
It’s also a wondrously good read.
Goth quotient: 72
Rating: 11 stars.
Broadcast From the Brain Radio 