Billy Ray's Farm, Essays From a Place Called Tula

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 30, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

Larry Brown has fashioned a marvelous little book from everyday fife in Mississippi.

"A long time ago when I was a boy, there was one slab of concrete that stretched from Oxford to Toccopola, a distance of about sixteen miles, and that was the road everybody used to get to town." So begins the prologue to Larry Brown's fine new book of essays, Billy Ray's Farm, Essays From a Place Called Tula (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95, 216 pp), in which the Mississippi writer mingles two themes: the hard work it takes to become a writer and the hard work it takes to run a farm.

Brown is a widely respected novelist whose first book of essays, On Fire, took up his years as a fireman with the Oxford Fire Department. In his novels, such as the recent Fay and the earlier Father and Son, he writes about the harsh world of working-class whites in the South, their stories told in an eloquent, resonant prose that lends dignity and weight to the characters.

The Billy Ray of his new book's title is one of Brown's children, a son who's trying to make a success of himself as a farmer. It's important to Brown that his son makes a go of it, but the demands of farming are relentless. Cattle get sick and die. They can stumble in a creek and never get up. "The lives of cows are fickle and uncertain," Brown writes, and he asserts the same of the goats on the farm, whose kids are devoured by a "coy-dog" a mean-spirited hybrid of dog and coyote.

He saves one of the horns of Nanette, a favorite goat, and keeps it in his writing desk. "The horn, hollow and fluted, is a spook, a talisman, a key. I keep it there to remind me of what a man can go through for goats. It reminds me of what is possible in this life in the country, and sometimes what is not."

Despite the hardships, Brown loves the land. In one of his most beautiful essays, he recalls that for nearly 10 years in his early life, he lived "beside a railroad track in Memphis and I never stopped longing to live in Mississippi, where I was born, and to be in the country.... It's one thing to have a life in a place, and to be happy in it is quite another."

Brown shares his rich memories of his happy life. In the essay "Thicker Than Blood," he remembers an old 12-gauge, single-barrel shotgun a great uncle gave him when he was 14. "To be able to take that ancient piece that had already been in so many other hands and go out into the fall woods and sit against a hickory tree and kill two or three squirrels of an evening after school and take them home just past dark and skin them for my mother's black-iron skillet was a fine thing for a boy to be able to do."

Much of Billy Ray's Farm is taken up with how a writer learns to write well. Brown describes getting to know in person novelists he admires, such as Harry Crews and Madison Jones, and how he came to realize that "what we had in common was that we loved the land and the people we came from, and that our calling was to write about it as well as we could, to find our own voices through years of learning to bring forth whole people" as characters in their novels.

Brown agrees with the notion that you should only write about what you know, as long as you know it concretely. And he believes you can know the past as concretely as you can the present -- that the past exists, even though it's no longer around. "What does exist is the memory of it, a faded remnant of the way things were. Write about what you know, yes, even if it doesn't exist any more."

In another of the essays, "Shack," Brown describes buying eight acres of land and a pond. He wants to build a small house there, a retreat, in the same place he fished when he was a boy. Now friends bring their kids. "I like to see little boys fishing, learning this sport of patience and discovering the beauty of nature's gifts." At the end of the last essay, the little house still isn't finished. "It'll be years at this rate," he writes. But that's okay. "It's something to look forward to."