Sitting Up with the Dead
A Storied Journey through the American South
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales.
Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead. Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips through the states of the Old South to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales. Some of them are local celebrities, others national treasures. Among them are Ray Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow; Kathryn Windham, the “ghost lady”; Nancy Basket, a kudzu paper-maker; Colonel Rod, self-proclaimed “Florida cracker”; and Grammy Award-winner David Holt. You encounter plat-eyes and boo-hags, Jack the trickster and Brer Rabbit, mule eggs, singing turtles, talking corpses, and flying Africans from the sea islands of South Carolina.
Stories provide the connective tissue of the South, linking the past with the present. They join communities as widespread as the coastal plains of the Carolinas and Georgia, the swamps of the Gulf Coast, and the mountains and valleys of Appalachia. As distinctly American as jazz, they blend cultures and oral traditions as diverse as those of southern England, Ireland, West Africa, and native America. They contain bits of lived history, both from before the Civil War and after. In Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro offers a paradoxical wake for the undying body of the Old South, to hear its truths and contemplate its robust afterlife in the tallest, “lyingest,” most fruitful, and most haunting of its tales.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Petro, a travel writer based in Northhampton, Mass., embarked on four meandering trips through the South to explore the "place-bond" that particular, mysterious nexus of identity, geography and history that she imagines defines Southern culture. Doggedly pursuing a diverse group of both black and white professional storytellers, she wanders from Appalachia, Louisiana bayous and Selma, Ala., back to the Atlantic seaboard. Folktales and their tellers serve as her maps and guides; her travelogue is peppered with transcribed stories she hears on the way. The resulting chronicle is an impressive piece of cultural conservation, reportage and memoir that subtly mourns the passing of a rural way of life. Petro revels in the folksy and whimsical stories of mule eggs, plat-eyes, kudzu, rattlesnakes and singing turtles revealing as much about her sensibility as about the eccentricities of her subjects. Not all of the stories retain their power in written form, however, and Petro sometimes offers obvious lessons and characterizations: that elderly people are wise, for instance. On the other hand, she generally resists an academic penchant for overanalyzing, trusting readers to interpret the racial, ethnic, environmental and socioeconomic conditions that shape the stories. The strength of the book lies in the fine balance between the individual voices of her storytellers and her own observations and commentary. In searching out these speakers, Petro discovers her own narrative voice.
