There is a trope in Southern literature: the Southerner in the north. A bright-eyed young fellow, Eugene Gant in Thomas Wolfe’s novels or Willie Morris in the memoir “North Towards Home,” goes to Yankee land, usually New York City, and is astounded. There are fewer versions of the northerner who comes south and the metaphor is fish out of water or fish plunged into unpleasant, dangerous, perhaps boiling water. Gary Minder’s highly readable debut novel is one of these.
The opening scenes are in Chicago, 1933, early in the Great Depression. Asa Paxton, about 12 years old, and his family are in desperate shape. Dad has lost his job and they are living with Uncle Clem. Asa describes Clem: “… his vocabulary [was] filthy,” “Yet, unlike his mouth, his character and spirit were as clean and smooth as a well-travelled steel rail.”
Clem is offered a job by a tycoon, J. R. Robinson, a fair-minded, not-greedy millionaire who owns, among much else, some railroads. He hires Clem to put together a gang of 6 or 7 men, who will move around repairing broken rail lines wherever they occur and build new short spur lines wherever needed. Robinson will also provide a house for Asa’s family in fictional Blue Rock, Alabama, west of Florence, on the Tennessee River on the border with Mississippi.
Dad’s reply is not just no: It’s hell no. Dad does not want to live among “those southern degenerates and their [damn] Jim Crow. They have no right to call themselves Christians.”
Nevertheless, they go. Asa’s dad will manage the switching yard there and, in the house and barn, put up the gang when they are working nearby.
The hiring of the gang is well done, a play on “The Dirty Dozen” or “Ocean’s Eleven.” Clem comes to Blue Rock, makes contact with the Black community leader, called Preacher, and together they hire Sam, Mack, a pair of half-Creek Indian twins, Etienne, an itinerant white Cajun, and Tiny, who is huge.
Minder creates here a really interesting situation. Everyone must pretend that the workers are being cruelly exploited, paid slave wages and abused, in order to keep the white men from attacking out of jealousy that Blacks have jobs at all. This charade is carried out successfully for quite some time. Meanwhile young Asa, with his wrong accent and wrong attitude, has to adapt to the Jim Crow, Daughters of the Confederacy culture.
It is stressful but, as time passes, he makes a couple of misfit friends, learns to hunt and fish, and at a greased-pig wrestling contest he meets the girl of his dreams, of anyone’s dreams, bright, beautiful Rosie, who is utterly out of harmony with her racist, pretentious family and culture and absolutely in harmony with Asa. Their relationship is mutually nurturing and surprisingly torrid. The education of Asa Paxton is complete.
