Reading Freely

When Harrison Scott Key was young, his father opted to uproot the family from Memphis and moved to an old farmstead out in the country – -the reason being, a boy needed to grow up outdoors doing things. Harrison did indeed growing up doing those things — attacking the dirt with a shovel in a pretense of farming, sitting in the woods freezing and sneakily reading a book while he was meant to be watching for deer with an intent of obtaining supper — but always felt a bit uncomfortable doing it, like he’d slipped the left boot onto his right foot. He’d rather be grocery shopping with his mom, honestly; that was the kind of hunt he excelled at. The Largest Man in the World is Key’s memoir of growing up as someone who didn’t quite understand his father, and who was not himself understood; the memoir follows him into his own adulthood, as he became a father to girls and developed a newfound appreciation for his own father’s befuddlement. Rod Dreher, a writer from Louisiana, referred to Key’s book as “the greatest, funniest, and tenderest evocations of Southern culture that ever was”, and while I won’t go that far (Rick Bragg and Sean Dietrich, anyone?), this book did keep me laughing all day. Part of it is his frequent absurd exaggerations, which nonetheless capture the peculiarities of growing up in the south; any story worth tellin’ is worth exaggeratin’, as they day. As a teenager listening to the patter around the family table, I often wish I had a recorder to capture the unique way deep-country people talked; not the accents, but the expressions and cadence. That’s also part of the magic here, especially at the beginning. Although the book is definitely funny, it’s not a ‘comic’ book in the way of Lewis Gizzard or someone similar; Key deals with serious themes like racism, people trying to understand one another, and marital issues as well. The latter were hard to read about knowing that Key has recently published a book called How to Stay Married, in which (with his wife’s permission) he reflects on the long night of the soul he and his wife went through after he discovered that she was having an affair.

This funny thing happens when people ask where I’m from, especially when I’m at academic conferences, where people are so often from uninteresting places. “Mississippi,” I say. “Oh, wow!” they say. I can tell they’ve never seen a real live racist before, or at the very least someone who’s related to a racist, or has seen one in the wild. It’s exciting for them. They want to tweet it. They want to write a memoir about it.

For my tenth birthday, Pop presented me with a Remington 12-gauge pump. “This gun right here can kill a grown man,” he said, which made it sound like we’d been trying to kill grown men for many years without success.

I do believe in the power of Jesus and rifles, but to keep things interesting, I also believe in the power of NPR and the scientific method. It is not easy explaining all this to educated people at cocktail parties, so instead I tell them that it was basically just like Faulkner described it, meaning that my state is too impoverished to afford punctuation, that I have seen children go without a comma for years, that I’ve seen some families save their whole lives for a semicolon.

Boredom, I knew, was a dangerous thing. For some children, it led to experiments with sex, and drugs, and alcohol, and lighting one another on fire, sometimes with the alcohol. For some of us, the never-ending rural ennui led to destructive habits with literature.

I enjoy talking about hunting about as much as I enjoy talking about new technologies in women’s hosiery, but I have very few subjects that I can discuss with my father, and those subjects are: Football, Weather, Money, Children, Children Today, Beating Children Today, and Hunting.

The camp house was no gentleman’s hideaway. It was a double-wide trailer, dog pens, a grand old Confederate flag that looked like it had been chewed by aphids and a pack of abused coyotes, the smell of old blood and rotting carcasses; it might have been a kind of romantic hideaway, if you had kidnapped your lover and planned on turning her hide into a lamp.

Out there, the beauty and the violence were all mixed up. Like the time I saw the many-pointed buck swimming across the Coldwater River one January day, perhaps the most sublime scene I have ever witnessed, and how my cousin steered his boat that way so he could stab it in the neck with a knife. It would not have been my first inclination to engage the creature in such brutal gang warfare, but then, I assumed that this was what you did in Mississippi, perhaps because there were so few actual gangs.

It was pretty clear that fights were over dignity and honor and women, and since I had no dignity or honor or women, I felt safe. Nobody had any reason to want to hit me. Then I learned that some people will hit you for no reason at all.

Mom came staggering up from a darkened corridor. “You done had a cigarette,” Pop said. “I can smell it.” “Kiss my butt,” she said. “It’d be a lot to kiss,” Pop said. These were my role models.

n the eighties, when the prevailing wisdom was that American cities were full of gangs, drugs, homeless people who raped joggers, joggers who raped the homeless, and Satanists who sat around sacrificing children and playing Dungeons & Dragons, the narrative of many a film was “moving out to the country” to get away from all the danger. But we knew what the movies did not: that the country was much worse. We had no Satanists, but we did have tractors and hay balers, which I am pretty sure killed more children during that same period than Satan ever could.

My wife was a riddle. I think all women are. Men are not riddles, even the smart ones. We are independent clauses, such as: “I like meat.” “Water feel good.” But a woman is a sentence eighty yards long with no commas, a cryptogram, a Finnegans Wake, and a man is holding the book, and he is trying to read it, and he is confused. “Women are funny,” Pop said, on the phone. “They sure are,” I said.