Gerald Duff

It is very hard to get colloquial dialogue right and Mr. Duff doesn't do it. I found the plot and the dialogue too overwrought and I stopped reading at about 35%.

I received a review copy of "Memphis Ribs" by Gerald Duff (Brash) through NetGalley.com. This is one of the older books that Brash is republishing in electronic and paper format. It was original published by Salvo Press in 1999 under the same name. I am not certain that some of the negative reviewers on Amazon realize when this book was written. Their comments on anachronisms may not be accurate.… (mehr)

Playing Custer: a novel
Gerald Duff
Texas Christian University Press
Paperback, 978-0875656069, 256 pgs., $22.95
May 18, 2015

The West does not need to explore its myths much further; it has already relied on them too long. - WALLACE STEGNER (page vi)

Playing Custer is the newest historical fiction title from award-winning author and native Texan, Gerald Duff. Employing multiple narratives from 1876 and 2001, Duff brings us the voices of the United State 7th Cavalry and the Sioux and Cheyenne, from what is popularly known as Custer’s Last Stand, and the contemporary voices of the historical reenactors who converge on the Greasy Grass, also known as The Little Bighorn, each June. Duff builds a complex picture of many kinds of transformation, one puzzle piece at a time.

Waymon Needler, a home economics teacher, and Mirabeau Lamar Sylestine, a member of the Alabama-Coushatta and a computer software specialist, both from East Texas, have made the drive to Montana together for several years. We go with them on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the battle. Needler and Sylestine have small parts in the program until a series of unfortunate events finds them called upon to play Custer and Crazy Horse, respectively.

Duff’s characters are diverse, representative, and well-drawn. General George Armstrong Custer is here, as well as other officers and enlisted men from Ireland, Germany, and Italy, to name a few. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are here, too, as well as the Crow and Ree scouts who worked for the US Army. The backstories provided the historical characters are detailed and interesting. Duff has done a particularly beautiful job channeling the women of this story, though they are few, namely Libby Custer and Monahsetah of the Cheyenne. Monahsetah is the personification of dignity and courage without becoming the stereotype of the Noble Savage.

"If you’re an Indian dealing with the man, don’t try to get intellectual, now, or truculent, and whatever you do, don’t launch into a logical argument about some point of disagreement. White folks don’t want to hear that kind of garbage from an Indian. But say something that smacks of the mystical or uses the concept of the heart as representative of a knowledge not subject to intellectual inquiry, and baby, you’re no longer an Indian whining about rights and dispossession, you’re a Native American in touch with the immeasurable."

Duff moves smoothly between speech patterns, rhythms, and vocabulary of the present and the past, of divergent ethnicities and origins, and social stations. From 1876:

“I hope that bunch of Indians will try to fight like white troops, and not just swarm like a bunch of yellow jackets when you stir up their nest.”
“Yellow jackets?” I said. “What do you mean by that?”
“Wasps,” Davis said. “Stinging wasps all coming at you in a wad so you can’t tell one from another. The kind of swarm I used to see back in Virginia when I was a young boy looking to get into mischief, poking at something I didn’t have enough sense to be scared of. They couldn’t hurt me, I figured. I can outrun a swarm of wasps if I have to.”
“We’re all mounted here in the Seventh Cavalry,” I said. “And we’re trained to fight as a unit. We’re stronger together than a mere count of numbers would indicate. We are the fingers of a hand, clenched to make one strong instrument with which to strike. A fist. Wasps would see us and scatter, and so will the Sioux and Cheyenne."

From 2001:

“Well, it’s a dramatic reenactment, Eagle Beak,” I said. “It’s not the thing itself. What matters is the idea of the thing, not the thing itself.”
“That’s the way you white men live. Not with the truth, but with an imitation of it, and that satisfies you right down to the ground.”

Duff is also adept at stirring description. This passage gave me chills – Crazy Horse makes his move and shoots the gap in the 7th Cavalry’s defensive line:

"It was then, as I leaned my own body to the right in sympathy with the line of troopers, hoping to witness the joining of the end of that body of my men with the left end of the company to our right, that the event transpired which cut off the success of our maneuver. A single horseman, a savage dressed only in a species of animal skin about his loins, bearing a great number of spots of white paint all over his body, along with a great smear of red and yellow coloring his face itself, suddenly burst into view just at the flank of the company which my men had been straining ranks toward. He leaned over, this apparition with long light-colored hair streaming unconstrained down his back, and began swinging a long-handled club at the head of the trooper just at the end of the company which my men were struggling to reach."

There are almost as many motivations in this battle as there are participants: patriotism, religion, duty, orders, revenge, blood lust. The reader’s task is the same as that of the reenactors: not to view these characters with modern eyes. Duff points out our (continuing) insistence on viewing people seemingly unlike ourselves as Other.

“Mirabeau,” I said, being jocular, “you are looking so good, my fine young warrior. Give me a high five.” At that, he turned and gave me a look that had about it more authenticity than any other bit of acting business I had ever seen on the banks of the Little Bighorn up until then and since that day. It said, that look of intense concentration did, not “I’m about to kill you, white man,” or “Just keep standing there until I get my stone club unlimbered,” but instead it asked a simple question: are you a human being? Are you and I of the same species of mammal, or am I being talked to by a porcupine suffering from brain damage?

Mirabeau, or as I should say, in his present manifestation, Eagle Beak, was clearly seeing before him not a member of his reenactment group from Annette, Texas, and not a fellow inhabitant of Coushatta County in a different country. No, he was in the presence of maybe a talking raccoon, or a possum that stood on its hind legs and walked around like a man, or it could be a coyote that wore eyeglasses. He was in the Indian equivalent of purgatory. Or maybe the main dining room of a giant Chuck E. Cheese."

"I never told Mirabeau what I had realized on that day those several years ago, there on the Montana prairie. Nor have I ceased to attempt to imagine a self for me other than my once and present and future one as I seek each June to escape the bounds which hold me. He didn’t need to know what an advantage he held over me, and I was certainly not going to admit to being a lesser creature than he, real or imagined. To let him know that would be to admit that what he thought about the nature of the Native American had at least some truth to it. They were different, I told myself, in strange ways, and that’s why we had had as a race to wipe them out and find ways to keep the remainder under close control. What else could we do as a people?"

The plot of Playing Custer is original and well-executed. The pace is even though I was sometimes eager to get through the character’s backstories and return to the narrative. I’d been curious as to how Duff was going to wrap this up. The ending is satisfying as well as surprising. The research required is evident in the meticulous detail. Duff has evidently set himself the goal of the reenactors: “stringent authenticity.”

I’ve come to understand that all historical fiction is speculative fiction. Duff has provided us fine speculation. As the author points out on the dedication page, history is fiction. And written by the winners.… (mehr)

By Gerald Duff
Lamar University Press, 224 pgs
978-0-9911074-2-1
Submitted by the author
Rating: 3 of 5

"I got my mojo working, but it just don't seem to work on you." Muddy Waters

The cast:

Detective Sergeant J.W. Ragsdale - Memphis PD, failed Mississippi cotton farmer, smarter than he wants you to think he is, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen, smart-ass

Tyrone Walker - Memphis PD homicide detective and Ragsdale's partner, failed nothing, well-read family man, health nut, smart-ass

Tonto Batiste - criminal 1, bad-ass

Bob Ferry - criminal 2, intellectual

Earl Winston - criminal 3, redneck 1

Coy Bridges - criminal 4, redneck 2

Jimbo Reynolds - preacher, smarmy, chameleon

Colorado, aka Do Run Run (née Randall Eugene McNeill) - honor student, apparent schizophrenic (he sees dead people), accidental murderer seeking shelter from the psychic storm

How's that for a motley crew? Memphis Mojo by Gerald Duff is impossible to slot into a genre. I am flummoxed and so I'm going to call it an example of modern regional American fiction; this particular region being the American South, which is itself a conundrum and therefore the probable cause of my flummoxation. Yep. The purported question is 'Who killed Beulahdene Jackson?' But that's not the central narrative or issue in Memphis Mojo. This book is really a sly skewering of the racial, social and religious constructions of the American South disguised as a detective novel. It strikes me that the most truthful statement in Memphis Mojo is uttered by Bob Ferry (criminal 2): "Racism is eating this country up...it's making everybody in it as dumb as a fence post." The real question is 'Why in the whole wide world does anyone listen to and trust a man like Jimbo Reynolds?' Or that's my question, anyway. I'd rather hang out with Tonto. Just don't piss him off.

Our story begins with Ragsdale and Walker eating breakfast at the IHOP. See the discussion of bacon and racial profiling below. Batiste, Ferry, Winston and Bridges are also at the IHOP, discussing invading the home of Reynolds in Nathan B. Forrest Estates(!) and high school football. Walker recognizes Batiste as a suspect in a homicide from a few years ago but there wasn't enough evidence to go to trial and Batiste was released. Cut to the lobby bar in the Peabody Hotel. Jimbo "Range Foreman" Reynolds is interviewing a candidate for a public relations position in his Sun-Rise Ministry of the Big Corral (aka Cowboy Church - I am not making this up). See the discussion of Baptists and Episcopalians below. The call comes in at Memphis PD that Ms. Jackson has been found dead in her home and this kicks off the investigation that eventually leads to the collision of our two heroes, all four criminals, Preacher Jimbo and Colorado in the Nathan B. Forrest Estates. With a cameo by Ricky Nelson.

The best thing about Memphis Mojo is the dialogue. The dialogue! Ragsdale and Walker are like George and Gracie, Ralph and Alice, Lorelai and Rory Gilmore. The dialogue between these two is intricate and seamless. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of conversation. Call and response. Examples:

On eating bacon -
"I said Caucasian, J.W.," Tyrone went on, "to distinguish between the effect of bacon on a white man like you and an African-American like myself. Not that there's really such a thing as race to be recognized, of course."
"There's not? Why you look the way you do, then, and me the way I do? Damn, this is good bacon."
"What your mouth enjoys your body despises, J.W. Get that by heart."
"Get back to this race thing," J.W. said, loading grits on his fork. "No such of an animal, you say, as that."
"That is the latest thinking, Sergeant Ragsdale, and I'm surprised you haven't come across that in your research into Memphis social structure."

Or this, upon the occasion of the arrest of a formerly particularly loquacious individual:
"He ain't made a peep. He ain't said a word, and we been standing here in the yard probably two or three minutes. Back in the old days, Ronnie would've said four or five paragraphs by now. He would've done got out a writ on your ass, Sergeant Walker, for knocking him down on that old wet grass and getting his pants all muddy and stained up."
"Sergeant Ragsdale," Tyrone said in an earnest voice, "I do believe Ronnie Katz has seen the error of his ways and has come back to Memphis to atone. He is prepared to submit himself to the due processes of the justice system of the great state of Tennessee. Do not misjudge this man."

The second best thing about Memphis Mojo is the insight into the religious strata and strategies of the American South. For example:
"Here I am, up before a congregation of believers of a certain stripe. They've come out of a fundamentalist background, and they're all employed and making some money. Putting some cash by in many cases. Got a mortgage, got a bass boat. But they are our kind of people. Hell, a Southern Baptist among them would pass for an intellectual. He'd be like an Episcopalian is to a congregation in East Memphis. You know, thoughtful."

Gerald Duff is a native of East Texas but not OF East Texas. Y'all know what I'm talking about. If you don't you can go here for my review of his memoir Hometruths: A Deep East Texas Memory. He is the author of 18 books including Blue Sabine which I reviewed here. Duff has won the Cohen Prize for Fiction from Ploughshares and the St. Andrews Prize for Poetry.… (mehr)

Blue Sabine
By Gerald Duff
moon city press, 315 pgs
978-0-913785-34-8
Rating: 4

Gerald Duff has mad skills. Blue Sabine is lyrical, it reads like poetry but in a good way. This is the story of the Holt family as they relocate from Louisiana to Texas after the Civil War and unto the present day, told by the voices of its women, who have always been the strength of Texas. Everybody knows that, right?

Don't come to Blue Sabine for plot or climax or denouement or any of those usual things, though you'll find plenty of protagonists and antagonists (sometimes the same person is both.) Come for the characters and the stories they tell. Each character is a melody joined by the chorus of stories they tell about themselves and each other. Our stories are how we know who we are, the first lessons we learn about family and how to behave or not in the big wide world.

If you are a Texan you will recognize this family because it is yours. It is certainly mine. I have an Aunt Abigail who likes to hold forth as the authority on all things appropriate and inappropriate. I have a Great Grandfather Amos Holt who has turned to God and become a preacher mostly because he is overwhelmed by the women surrounding him and finds God more comprehensible. I have a Cousin (you must capitalize "cousin") Nola Mae whose faith resides in her beauty and style and worth on the man-market (a time-honored tradition among southern women) and whose children have sometimes taken a backseat to her personal ambitions. I would like to note that we don't have anyone who was blinded by a pimp for insulting his hooker. Not that I am aware of. Not yet. Meanwhile, it is my personal ambition to be more like GrandMaude and you'll just have to read Blue Sabine to know what I mean.

For more on the author: http://www.geraldduff.com/

For more on Moon City Press: http://mooncitypress.com/… (mehr)