“Cottonlandia”
Author: Watt Key
Publisher: Penfish Press, 2021
Pages: 428
Price: $24.99
City Boy Moves South and Learns to Love the Land
The career of Watt Key got off to a stupendous start. His first novel, “Alabama Moon,” 2006, won several prizes, was translated into eight languages, was made into a feature film starring John Goodman and was listed by “Time Magazine” as one of the best young-adult books of all time. Since 2006, Key has published several novels, the most successful of which may be “Among Swamp People,” and writes horror fiction as Albert Key.
“Alabama Moon’s” protagonist is ten-year-old Moon Blake, raised outside Livingston by a survivalist father with PTSD. After the death of his father, and a spell in a home for orphaned, usually homeless, boys in Tuscaloosa, Moon lives a nearly feral life in the Talladega National Forest.
The protagonist of this new novel, “Cottonlandia,” could not possibly be more different from Moon Blake.
This young fellow, Winchester Canterbury, about 15, is a child of great privilege, being raised in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. He’s a student at Columbia Prep. His best friend, Jules, whose father is the president of the biggest bank in Manhattan, goes on two “adventure trips” a year. Win himself has to settle for spring break at the Hamptons and skiing in Aspen.
At the beginning of Christmas vacation his parents announce that Win, alone, is to visit his paternal grandmother in Walnut Bend, Mississippi, in the Delta, on the family cotton plantation, Cottonlandia.
Win balks, but to no avail. His father is adamant and no reason is given.
Soon after he arrives he learns that he is to live there, not just for four days, but perhaps forever. His grandmother is ill, perhaps dying, and very cranky.
The big house is warmed, just barely, by space heaters, there is only one plug-in telephone, no television, no internet. He knows no one. He hates the food. For a teen, this is a kind of living hell.
He is the archetypal fish out of water. The Mississippi Delta is not Central Park, Toto. It isn’t even Kansas.
For a while he is off-balance, a sullen, spoiled, unattractive bundle of misery. We sympathize at first and then start to see him as a little brat.
But the decent local folk are patient and of course, he adjusts.
We watch as, out of boredom and necessity, Win learns to work with his hands.
He helps clean and repair machinery, learns to do preventive maintenance and take pride in work well done.
As spring comes he learns how fields are prepared, fertilized, how cotton is seeded. He labors at spraying weeds and keeping the fields irrigated.
In time he develops a feel for the weather, the season and, finally, as in many a good Southern novel, an affection for the land itself.
He makes a good friend, Buster, a really rural lad, who shows him how to blow up pesky beaver lodges with dynamite and then sell the beavers, and takes him out to shoot turtles, which he then eats. Life for Buster is closer to the bone than for Win, whose plantation is thousands of acres, worth millions.
Win also meets a lovely neighbor girl who sees through his brattiness to his essential decency and helps him adjust.
In general, Win grows up and he needs to do it quickly. He learns that he’s not going back to Manhattan, his family is broke, his parents are separated, his mother has had a nervous breakdown, and his father, rather a selfish fellow himself, is in serious legal trouble with the feds, having cheated on his taxes as well as his wife. Prison is a real possibility.
Besides Win’s personal development, there are also complex issues of land ownership, leases, and land use which must be resolved, and they mostly are, in this straightforward story, nicely told.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
