Connections
Published in 1993, Mark Childress’s novel Crazy in Alabama follows a respected American tradition of Southern grotesque literature and Gothic noir film making. Like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Crazy in Alabama centers around poor white children in the rural South who observe racial tensions while getting into misadventures. The novel’s other storyline follows the pattern of many films from the 1980s including Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise and Jonathan Demme’s To Die For, in which poor and uneducated women from the South murder their husbands and take to the road, gun in hand, in order to pursue freedom and often fame. Finally, Childress’s novel draws its main theme of death and the maddening desire to resurrect the things we love from a much older Gothic literary tradition found in films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and in literature such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Also this tendency appears in the poems and short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, all of which deal with characters that obsess over death and are often visited by people that have already passed on.
Though Childress’s novel was eventually adapted into a feature film in 1998 with the same title, its portrayal in the media seemed to suffer rather than flourish as a result of the film’s critical reception. Starring Melanie Griffith and directed by Antonio Banderas, the movie exudes a PG campiness that undermines the novel’s gritty presentation with the guise of a goofy comedy. Subsequently, the novel was stricken from the public consciousness as a serious work of literature and relegated to the place of a pop icon in southern writing. Such an interpretation of the novel is unfair, for Childress deals with powerful issues in Crazy in Alabama that summon the likeness and talent of giants like William Faulkner and Flannery O’ Connor. By dealing with issues like race relations and poverty through the use of the grotesque, Childress joins Faulkner and O’ Connor in a rich tradition of Gothic Southern literature.
Unlike the two previously mentioned authors, Childress intended for his novel to be a product of mass consumption. The way he structures the novel indicates as much. Since he organizes the book in brief chapters that alternate between parallel story lines, he obviously shows concern for the reader’s boredom factor and takes great pains to keep his audience entertained. Further evidence of this fact is exhibited in his straightforward and chronological delivery of the storyline. Crazy in Alabama‘s status as a piece of pop literature also hinges on its concise and short sentence structures, which result in a rapid-fire delivery that depends upon a great deal of dialogue to keep the story moving.
Explications
Like Childress, the narrator of his text is a professional writer with a background as a child who grew up poor in the rural south during the Civil Rights era. This similarity indicates that Childress wants his novel to reflect certain realities in his own life, as outlandish as its subject matter may be. The story is told through the voice of Peter Joseph, who recalls his past as Peejoe, a precocious young boy that lived with his grandmother in Pigeon Creek, Alabama in 1965. When Peejoe’s Aunt Lucille brings her eight children to live with them and announces that she killed her husband, Peejoe is sent to live with his Uncle Dove, a mortician in the town of Industry. As Peejoe and his brother adjust to their new surroundings, the novel also follows Lucille who is traveling across the country to audition for a role on The Beverly Hillbillies, all the while carrying her husband’s severed head in a lettuce keeper. This part of the story is also told presumably from the perspective of adult Peter Joseph, who, while looking back at his own experiences, also creates his own fictionalized retelling of his aunt’s experiences. While his own story of Industry and how racial tensions tear the town apart reflect a grim reality, while Lucille’s story contains strong elements of Hollywood fantasy like car chases, shootings, and explicit sex. The fantastic elements of her story seem to stem from the wild side of Peter Joseph’s adult male imagination.
The major characters in the novel all represent fragments of the American experience, specifically the Southern American experience, including Peejoe, whose one blind eye represents how most Americans see and yet choose not to see the truth in problems of race relations in the country. Lucille, on the other hand stands for media saturation in the country and how it provokes the delusion that ultimate happiness can be attained through fame and wealth. Peejoe’s Uncle Dove is emblematic of indecision in the white community over whether to tolerate and support blacks or passively allow racists to stifle their influence. Sheriff John Doggett in Industry stands as a southern Bull Conner, who tries to oppress blacks in any way he can. Nehemiah Thomas is a black mortician that reacts to racial injustice by grandstanding and rallying the people under one cause. Though his actions are admirable, Childress demonstrates how they often were conducted for the purpose of elevating one’s stature in a community. Peejoe’s grandma is a lovable and dutiful woman that, because of her innocent and uneducated perspective, perpetuates hate and myths about the black community when she tells Peejoe that they are different from whites and they carry different diseases. Another important character is Norman, Lucille’s limo driver in Vegas and Hollywood, who shows the other side of Lucille’s coin in that he stands for the perspective of the American working male who is brainwashed by Hollywood’s beauty culture to pursue happiness by obsessing over the beauty of a young woman.
Sociological Concerns
The true power of Childress’s novel lies not in its superb presentation, however, but in the sociological issues that it tackles. Firstly, the novel deals with racial issues and conflicts between blacks and whites primarily in its setting. Since the novel takes place in 1965, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, racial tensions are bound to occur in a town like Industry. These tensions come to a head when Several black teenagers are murdered, one in particular during a swimming pool sit-in, by Sheriff John Doggett. These deaths provoke the black community of Industry to stage a takeover of the pool which is interrupted by a troupe of white supremacists that break up their protest with violent force. The “war” between the races escalates when Dr. Martin Luther King arrives to show his support to the community and Reverend Nehemiah Thomas is murdered at his funeral home by white supremacists.
The division between blacks and whites in the novel is symbolized by the two separate funeral homes that are run respectively by Uncle Dove and Nehemiah Thomas, one for whites only and one for blacks only. A second important symbol of racial tensions in Industry involves Peejoe having his picture taken by Life magazine in the middle of a race riot. He is holding a crying black girl in the photo as they huddle, frightened, in the dark. This scene symbolizes how racial tension and the violence that comes from it affects future generations of blacks and whites, leaving them confused and unaware of how much they truly need each other.
The question of gender roles is brought under scrutiny in the novel when Lucille Vinson abandons her traditional role of a housewife and destroys it by taking on masculine traits of violence and sexual promiscuity to pursue freedom from control by the male sex. When she wills her husband and travels to Hollywood, emasculating several men along the way, Lucille demonstrates how one can succeed by dumping traditional female gender roles and assuming traits of the opposite sex. However, at the same time, Childress shows how the influence of Lucille’s female gender role continues to influence her even as she tries to shed it in order to gain happiness. In order to survive, Lucille must appeal to male sexuality and use female sexuality as a persuasive tool to get what she wants. At the end of the novel, when Lucille sleeps with a judge to get off scott-free for murder, Childress seems to be saying that it is often easier to embrace one’s gender role than it is to defy it, and people respond more readily to the former way of living. Also, Lucille’s inability to let go of her husband’s head represents her inability to shirk her gender-appointed duties as a servant of the male.
Finally, Childress addresses class issues in the novel as well, demonstrating these concerns in two dimensions. Firstly, Childress demonstrates struggles between poor and wealthy classes in Peejoe’s move from Pigeon Creek to Industry. When he and his brother leave grandma’s shack to live in Uncle Dove’s spacious and well-furnished home, the boys remark how cold and phony everything appears. When they are served Pop-Tarts and TV dinners, they remember how much love went into their grandma’s cooking. When they are shown the dusty bare attic, they say they’d prefer to live up there than in the posh first floor of the house. In all of this, Childress seems to be saying that increased wealth brings a sense of ingenuousness with it.
Class conflict also presents itself in Lucille’s change from poverty to wealth on her journey to Hollywood. Though money, at first, buys her freedom and luxury, she grows to depend upon it and think about it constantly. She consequently begins to treat people of lower classes with disrespect. This feeling is ultimately symbolized when Lucille climbs over the side of the San Francisco bridge to fetch her hatbox full of money. Childress suggests is through this example, that wealth leads to a preoccupation with wealth that often causes people to neglect the needs of other people in order to satisfy one’s needs for material accumulation.
All of these sociological concerns that are voiced in Crazy in Alabama, as well as the skill in which these concerns are presented merit the novel’s inclusion in the American literary canon. One would have to be crazy to disagree.
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