Catfish Alley

by Lynne Bryant

  Q. Like Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, you're a white woman writing about black characters in the South. How did you approach that particular challenge?

  A. Writing fiction, for me, is a process of observation paired with imagination. Although I know that I can never completely understand another person's psyche, black or white, I work very hard to be as accurate as possible. This is especially true when I'm writing in a point of view out of the realm of my experience — from a man's or an elderly person's point of view, for example.

  Being a nurse has particularly prepared me for the empathic process. Nurses place ourselves in our patients' experiences so that we can better care for them. Cultivating the habits of observation and empathy as a nurse for thirty years has served me well as a writer. So, when it came to writing a black person's point of view, I used those skills, along with a lifetime of memories of growing up in Mississippi. I hope I've been able to get it right, at least some of the time — that's very important to me. Writing in multiple points of view — black and white, male and female, young and old — is always a risk, but I believe it was worth taking that risk to tell this story.

  Q. The fictional town of Clarksville is loosely based on your own hometown of Columbus, Mississippi. How do you think the people of Columbus will respond to Catfish Alley?

  A. That's difficult to predict. Although Columbus has some unique qualities, in terms of its history and antebellum structures, I feel the characters in my novel and the relationships between blacks and whites that I depict could be found in many other Southern towns. My characters represent a cross section of types of people. Since I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life in Columbus, that small community had a huge influence on me. The African-

  American Heritage Tour in Columbus wasn't started until long after I had moved away — I think around 2004. The historic places on the tour and the black citizens whose names are included in the historical record were the inspiration for my story. My novel is not intended to portray their factual histories, but to tell a story of events as they might have been.

  Q. You've said that when you moved away from the South, you finally became aware of how unique your life there was compared to the way people lived in the rest of the country What are some of the strengths your Southern upbringing gave you?

  A. An appreciation of good cooking and cool weather! No, seriously, I have especially come to value the sense of place I experienced in childhood but resisted for a long time as an adult. I also appreciate the hard physical work that we did for the delicious food we ate. The experience of growing our own food from seed to harvest enormously enriched my childhood and early adulthood. I'll probably become one of those old women like Ouiser, Shirley MacLaine's character in Steel Magnolias — wearing an ugly sun hat and growing tomatoes and, I hope, writing more books! There was also a sense of connectedness about my Southern life. My people weren't on the social register, but since my mama was one of fifteen and five of my siblings lived in town at one point or another, I couldn't help but know everybody. That can be comforting as well as stifling. I experienced both while living there.

  Q. What role has reading played in your life? Are any novels particularly meaningful to you?

  A. I've always been a big reader, and I read a wide variety of books. I spent a lot of time alone as a child, so books were a constant companion. Some of the Southern classics — William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter — gave me a feel for strong Southern writing and for writing about the ordinary, especially about times past. For current women's fiction, I like Fannie Flagg and Dorothea Benton Frank for their humor and the way they depict family and relationships. I love Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, because of the way she captures the essence of the South in one or two words and makes me feel like I'm in the scene. For the lyrical quality of his writing, and for understanding the white Southern male, you can't beat Pat Conroy. When I'm in the mood for a thriller set in the South, I really enjoy Greg lies. And finally, Edward P. Jones's The Known World and Lalita Tademy's Cane River were influential in my evolving understanding of the black experience.

  Q. Grace's delicious desserts help win over Roxanne, but also threaten to ruin her waistline. What's your relationship with Southern cooking, and would you share your recipes for cathead biscuits and muscadine jelly?

  A. Southern cooking for me, like nothing else, says home. We always ate really well, even though there was nothing gourmet about it! When our whole family got together there were usually at least three or four vegetables on the table — purple hull peas, creamed corn, fried okra, sliced tomatoes — and, of course, hot buttered corn bread. Desserts might be fried apple pies, banana pudding, or some kind of cobbler. My mama is one of those Southern women who shows her love through her cooking. I've often found myself doing the same thing.

  Funny you should ask for those particular recipes. One of my first blog posts was about muscadine jelly, followed by my biscuit recipe. The blog about muscadine jelly received a response from my sister, who informed me that our mama did not put muscadine jelly in the canner — I had gotten jelly making mixed up with green bean canning! So, needless to say, I corrected that quickly. The biscuit recipe is one that I've been using for more than thirty years. The special thing about cathead biscuits is not so much the ingredients as the technique used in making them (although some people would debate that — as there is a debate about the best way to make just about everything in the South). First of all, they're large (the size of a cat's head), and second, they're usually pinched and shaped with your hands, rather than cut with a biscuit cutter.

  Cathead Biscuits

  2 cups all-purpose flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 teaspoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup shortening 2/3 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter

  Additional tablespoon of melted butter

  Preheat the oven to 450°. I use a whisk to stir together the dry ingredients. Cut the shortening in with a pastry cutter until the mixture looks crumbly. Make a hole in the center of the mixture and pour the milk in all at once. Stir it just a little bit — the secret to flaky biscuits is not to work the dough too much. When the dough sticks together, turn it out onto a floured surface and work it with your hands gently just 3 or 4 times.

  For cathead biscuits, place 1 tablespoon of butter in a 10-inch iron skillet and put the skillet in the oven to heat and melt the butter. When the skillet is hot and the butter melted, pinch the dough into 4 large pieces (each about the size of a cat's head). Pat each piece into a biscuit shape and place in the buttered skillet. Let the edges of the biscuits touch. Brush the tops of the biscuits with melted butter and bake them for about 15 minutes or until the tops start to brown. If you want smaller biscuits, simply pinch off smaller pieces of dough (you may need less baking time for smaller biscuits). A baking sheet can be used if you don't have an iron skillet.

  You can substitute buttermilk for the sweet milk, but you'll need to add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to the dry ingredients and you'll use 3/4 cup of buttermilk.

  Q. What are you writing now?

  A. I'm working on a story set in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville. It's the story of a young woman who flees Mississippi right after high school, trying to leave behind a tragic event that arises out of racial segregation. She returns to Greenville ten years later to grapple with some unsolved mysteries of her life and, in doing so, ends up getting immersed in her grandmother's history. It's part love story and part mystery, and it includes a lot about that Southern sense of place. Like Catfish Alley, the story moves back and forth in time between now and the past.

  Q. You teach nursing full-time and have a family too. How did you manage to carve out the time necessary to research and write Catfish Alley?

  A. It was challenging, but I have an extremely supportive family. One of the lessons I've had to learn is the discipline of writing. I get up early to write, u
sually around five a.m. during the school year. I find that if I can get in at least two to three good writing hours, I feel a sense of accomplishment for the rest of the day. I've also learned that having a specific goal and a self-imposed deadline makes a huge difference in my motivation. Middle age is all about management. Managing my full-time job and full-time writing while trying to exercise, spend time in my garden, read, and save some time for my family requires an incredible juggling act. I usually feel like one of those performers spinning several plates at once! But the privilege of writing novels is so worth it!

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What was your response to Catfish Alley? What did you like best about it?

  2. In Clarksville, Mississippi, in 2002, blacks and whites still live largely separate lives, and racial prejudice maintains a powerful hold. Does this surprise you? To what degree does segregation between blacks and whites exist where you live?

  3. Catfish Alley is in many respects a story of female friendship. Discuss the many relationships among the women characters — between Roxanne and Grace, Grace and Adelle and Mattie, Roxanne and Rita, Roxanne and the other white women in town, etc. What makes the strong relationships strong, and the weak ones weak? What allows Roxanne to overcome racial barriers and form sincere friendships with the black women in the book?

  4. At the beginning of the book, no one in Clarksville wants to talk about the past. Discuss the impulse to bury painful past events and the risks and benefits of examining them with a fresh and honest eye from the perspective of many years later. Does your town acknowledge and honor its full history or only part of it?

  5. Discuss how the sins of the fathers are inherited by the sons (and daughters). How does Del Tanner inherit Ray's sins? How do Jimalee and J. R. Purvis suffer from choices made by their father? How is Roxanne's need to hide her origins the result of Mrs. Stanley's attitudes toward class? Do you see similar patterns of behavior in people you know?

  6. What do you think of Roxanne's attempt to befriend Ola Mae after so many years of not making any effort to get to know her? Have you ever had an ongoing relationship with a woman who provided a paid service for you — a cleaning lady, hairdresser, or child-care giver? Did the nature of the relationship — one woman buying the services of the other — create a barrier between you? Did differences of race, class, and background also create barriers? To what degree were you able to overcome them?

  7. Blacks in Clarksville in the 1920s and '30s lived with the expectation that local law enforcement would offer them little protection against violent crime and even less justice once a crime was committed. Try to imagine what living all your life in such circumstances would feel like. How do you think you would respond?

  8. The women who run the antebellum home tour wonder how they can involve black women, since having them dress as plantation daughters in hoopskirts or as slaves in homespun seem equally discomforting. How might the women alter their perspective to see other possibilities?

  9. Grace, Adelle, and Junior all suffer terrible tragedies at the hands of white people, yet they continue to pursue their personal dreams, refusing to allow grief and loss to make them bitter, resentful or angry. In what ways do they suffer, and how are their lives altered, despite their efforts? Were you surprised to learn that Adelle nursed Ray Tanner in his final days? What do you think of her confession about Ray's death?

  10. What do you think will happen, or what do you want to happen, between Billy Webster and Daniel Mason?

  11. By the end of the novel, Roxanne and Del have gained a whole new perspective about the black community in Clarksville. As the African-American tour becomes a fixture in town and interracial friendships become more visible, how might blacks and whites continue to interact in new ways? What specific changes can you imagine?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lynne Bryant grew up in Columbus, Mississippi, and has lived for many years in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she teaches nursing at the University of Colorado. Catfish Alley is her first novel. Visit her at lynnebryant.com.