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A review by ridgewaygirl
Edisto by Padgett Powell
4.0
Edisto Island sits among the other sea islands along the coast of South Carolina, midway between Charleston and Savannah. Both those cities have islands nearer; Tybee for Savannah and John’s and Pawley’s for Charleston. The out-of-staters and affluent go to Myrtle Beach Hilton Head, where there are golf courses, resorts and t-shirt emporiums. This leaves Edisto for families from the Upstate to congregate for their annual beach vacations, in a place where the fancy end of Edisto Beach holds a modest marina, a nine-hole golf course open to the public and a scattering of condos. The rest of the town is composed of beach houses of varying sorts, from the modest and run-down variety to newer three story constructions of wide balconies and cathedral ceilings. There’s a bookstore that features both free wifi and a cat and the local Piggly-Wiggly became a Bi-Lo just last year, although the changes appear to be slight and entirely cosmetic. People buy their vegetables and key lime pies on the drive across the island to the beach, at farm stands down dirt roads or from pick-ups parked along the roadside.
Padgett Powell's novel is set in Edisto before the beach houses were built, when the island had not yet begun it’s transition from a sparsely populated African-American enclave that began as a refuge for escaped slaves, when people made modest livings fishing, farming and weaving grass baskets for the market in Charleston. Twelve-year-old Simons Manigault is being raised out there by his educated and heavy-drinking mother, going to the local school and is an expert in fitting into environments where he is clearly an outsider.
So he goes in the house and reads W.P.A. stories on the walls where the roaches have eaten away the flour but not the ink of the newspapers, and he naps, wakes, and emerges into the old, bored heat of this named but never discovered small place of the South and hears the tin roof tic, tic in that heat.
Simons is a wonderful narrator. He’s clever and observant, but also very much a boy about to enter puberty. Lots of what he sees and experiences he doesn’t fully understand, but he explains as best he can. This is not a book with a lot of action (although things do happen), but one that captures the atmosphere and feel of a world that has been gone for some time, of juke joints and old women fishing, of boxing matches and drunken faculty parties, and of a boy learning about his world and figuring his place in it.
The Father wipes the silver chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs. But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously — that’s to say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and eat the body of Our Savior — reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s in somber reverence to the moment and then press down and suck a slug of wine that should have fed six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag.
Padgett Powell's novel is set in Edisto before the beach houses were built, when the island had not yet begun it’s transition from a sparsely populated African-American enclave that began as a refuge for escaped slaves, when people made modest livings fishing, farming and weaving grass baskets for the market in Charleston. Twelve-year-old Simons Manigault is being raised out there by his educated and heavy-drinking mother, going to the local school and is an expert in fitting into environments where he is clearly an outsider.
So he goes in the house and reads W.P.A. stories on the walls where the roaches have eaten away the flour but not the ink of the newspapers, and he naps, wakes, and emerges into the old, bored heat of this named but never discovered small place of the South and hears the tin roof tic, tic in that heat.
Simons is a wonderful narrator. He’s clever and observant, but also very much a boy about to enter puberty. Lots of what he sees and experiences he doesn’t fully understand, but he explains as best he can. This is not a book with a lot of action (although things do happen), but one that captures the atmosphere and feel of a world that has been gone for some time, of juke joints and old women fishing, of boxing matches and drunken faculty parties, and of a boy learning about his world and figuring his place in it.
The Father wipes the silver chalice with a beautiful linen rag large as a small tablecloth, turns the cup two inches each time to keep you from having to drink where the last worshipper lipped it, as if that takes care of the germs. But I don’t care, I always reach out very piously — that’s to say, in slow motion, the way you move for some reason to take and eat the body of Our Savior — reach out and lay my hand over the Father’s in somber reverence to the moment and then press down and suck a slug of wine that should have fed six communers. I have to, because the bread of His body is stuck to the roof of my mouth like a rubber tire patch, and if I can’t wash it loose by swishing His blood around, I’m going to have to dig it off with a finger, in slow motion, and possibly gag.