From the 1830s until the Civil War, this part of the country—including Georgia, parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas—was known as the Old Southwest. It was the frontier, with the first white settlers and a wild and woolly culture. Several writers captured that rowdy culture in stories, especially Joseph Glover Baldwin’s “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi” and Johnson Jones Hooper’s “The Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs and his Tallapoosa Volunteers.”
Yankees readers ate up these tall tales with an eager spoon. These were stories of fraudulent land deals, crooked poker games, lascivious preachers, political scandal. Con men of every stripe abounded. Caution was required. It was good, the saying went, to be shifty in a new country. (These tales laid the foundation for the humorous writings of Twain and the hunting stories of Faulkner, like “The Bear,” for among the stories of violence and fraud, there were tall tales, gross exaggerations of prowess in hunting and fishing.)
Mississippian John Pritchard’s new novel, “Hunters,” is in this tradition, but in Pritchard, the frontier is not new and raw; it is endangered. His narrator, Bass Grabbler, is crying in anger at the disappearance of, arguably, the last of the old frontier, the Mississippi Delta, with only small patches that have not yet heard the ax or saw.
Grabbler insists The Delta must be saved; it has its own distinct history, culture, even language. The Delta “is not like anywhere else in the world. And it sure is not like the rest of Mississippi.” Pritchard, through Grabbler, airs his grievances concerning the undesirable changes happening in the Delta.
His number one gripe is that small farmers are being driven out by big agricultural corporations taking over the land. He describes them as “semi-royal, super-sized.” They call themselves “planters” but the “penny-loafer-wearing” men he makes fun of never get their hands dirty, play golf and wear funny clothes, don’t really hunt, and mostly hang out at the air conditioned “hunting club.” Also, “a person right now cannot have his or her own little business, on account of a giant outfit like that huge-a-gamoonndus ‘store’—one I am not going to name!—floats into town and opens its doors…[and] quick as a kiss at the football game, … puts all kinds of other stores … out of business!”
Into this extended plea, Grabbler has woven a hunting story. One day some of the faux hunters sitting in their gigantic car see Sasquach crossing the road. The monster stops and stares at them. These corporate types are not going into the deep woods after the monster, but some good ole boys arm themselves to the teeth and lie in wait for Bigfoot. And they do not mean to “catch” him. Grabbler explains, here in the Delta, “I mean, it’s like, if you can’t kill something, what’s the point? You’ve got no use for it.”
