“Bet” on Red Clay Suzie, a Novel Rooted in Truth https://ift.tt/Wy2rjgq
In the best stories, it’s the voice that grabs you. The first page, the first sentence, plunges you into a character who might be naive or jaded, living across town or in an alien world. Maybe it was The Handmaid’s Tale or Binti or Swamplandia or Call Me By Your Name. You can add Jeffrey Dale Lofton’s Red Clay Suzie to that list of novels with incredible voices, because Philbet is a character you won’t forget.
In this debut novel inspired by true events, Lofton takes us into the 1960s and ’70s, a time delineated by Philbet’s devotion to cars of the period, and a place focused in the red clay of west-central Georgia: “A twenty-five-mile sunburst that radiated from that point was all I knew, all I wanted or needed,” he says.
The novel meanders in the best way, like front-porch stories that start with this event that then puts you in mind of another event, and then another, with digressions into the color of kiwis, who eats Roman Meal bread, and the merits of dime-store candy. This is a story of family, from “jelly-stingy” habits to names cut short and then welded together into something unique, like Philbet: “sorta like a nickname, but not the kind that wounds you…my name reminded me that Mama and Daddy had liked each other once.”
An empathetic child who struggles with his dawning gay identity and a disability, Philbet suffers teasing and nicknames like “Sissy,” but the deepest cuts come from within the family — like the uncle who tags him with his girl cousin’s name, Suzie.
Philbet grows up in a home both troubled and loving. His older brother is everything he isn’t — confident, normal. “Mama and Daddy looked at me, but only to check to see if I was still there, hadn’t wandered off, or no one had taken me,” Philbet says. Lofton gives us the striking image of a divided garden, land that fed a family cut in half to sustain two households. A straight track down the middle lets Philbet guide his pedal-car from home, where his mother tries to offer support if not always understanding, to the house where his Grandaddy provides the wisdom he desperately needs. As they dig potatoes, Grandaddy uses the twisted and marred tubers to render a gentle lesson on perseverance to the struggling boy: “that tater had to work harder than that big pretty one right there just to survive. And that means it’s got more flavor inside and more vitamins, too, I ‘spect.”
His love for his mother never wavers, and Lofton is at his most lyrical describing their relationship: “And she took the Certs and pulled one out, kissed it, and put it to my lips. I loved Certs, and I loved the ones that tasted like Mama’s lipstick even more. Sometimes, if there was some red on the Cert she gave me, I’d take it out of my mouth and rub it against my lips. That way, once the Certs was dissolved in my mouth I had one last sweet lick on my lips.”
Philbet’s experience is limited and he is slow to “read the room” about why James, his only friend, must go in a side entrance at the doctor’s office, why he won’t eat the cookie that Philbet tries to share. As Philbet grows from outsider child to careworn teenager, his across-the-road neighbor Beau goes off to fight in Vietnam. Philbet is worried for Beau’s safety and makes him a drawing to carry with him so “that person over there cain’t kill you.” Life’s routine horrors are seen and recounted, from illness and death to body-blow rejection and isolation.
His addiction to Matchbox cars and terrors of revealing his body in gym class contribute to Philbet’s status as a “weirdo,” but it is his openly expressed desire to marry a boy that causes consternation: “My brother wouldn’t notice a boy. Adam would see a guy on the basketball court and play one-on-one just because another guy was there and never ask his name or really even look him in the face.”
When Knox, the older boy Philbet idolizes, moves in at the junkyard next door, Philbet begins to hide out in a wrecked car to watch his crush, a boy as beautiful as his GTO. Philbet says, “Because I felt I was right, not wrong. And I also felt a little sad that someone as beautiful and comfortable and perfect as he was would never want a broken thing like me, especially if he was like all the other boys who wanted a girl.”
Beau returns from the war, and Philbet runs into him at an antique store in Warm Springs, one he owns with another man. Philbet sees their affection: “Beau looked over at me…he smiled very slightly and then winked. He didn’t wink like Grandaddy winked. It wasn’t like ‘Boy, I’ll be okay.’ It was more like, ‘You see me. I see you.’” Ultimately, Philbet will be seen and accepted for who he is, a brave and generous soul with a concave chest and a full heart.
The reader comes to know Philbet through all the writer’s repertoire of bold choices, nuanced characterizations, and a proclivity to play to one’s literary strengths. That and more are offered to the reader from the first chapter of Red Clay Suzie. It’s a lesson in sensory detail that transports us not only to the rural Georgia of the late 1960s and ‘70s, but takes us naturally and even profoundly into the mind of a child and eventual adolescent. Lofton lovingly crafts Philbet’s direct and unashamed voice as an expression of heart, at once endearingly naive and surprisingly sophisticated. There is an ongoing tension between “I wondered” and “I knew,” between the limited knowledge and experience of this child whose entire world is Warm Springs and Alvaton and the scraps of information he hears or intuits about the roadmap of life — and this with an uncanny, unerring sense of what is authentic and what is pretense. As Lofton writes in his author’s note, “Love, real love, is never wrong. Bravely bestow it on whomever is worthy of the gift.”
FICTION Red Clay Suzie By Jeffrey Dale Lofton
Post Hill Press
Published January 10, 2023
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