Catfish Alley (46 page)

Q. Your Author's Note explains how
you came to write
Catfish Alley,
but when did you first begin to use
writing to explore what you needed to understand about life?

A. I think my writing has always been an outward
expression of an inner search. Whether it was childhood flights of imagination
about bubble people who lived at the bottom of the bathtub drain, snippets of
prose, feeble attempts at poetry, journaling, or other attempts at novels,
writing has always been an exploration for me. I believe we tell stories for
that reason — to understand our world. Even my doctoral dissertation was a
philosophical inquiry. Only it wasn't very publishable!

Back in 2007, I entered a contest sponsored by Borders
to write a post-Katrina love letter to New Orleans. I remember how people were
still trying to understand why so many New Orleanians did not want to leave the
city during and after the hurricane. As a Southerner, I knew that their reasons
for staying had to do with home and rootedness. Where else were they to go?
Anyway, I entered that contest, and much to my surprise, I won! My very short
essay was an attempt to understand the spirit of the people of New Orleans. I
included my love letter to New Orleans on one of my blog posts (see my Web site
at www.lynnebryant.com).

Q. Like Kathryn Stockett, author of
The Help,
you're
a white woman writing about black characters in the South. How did you approach
that particular challenge?

A. Writing fiction, for me, is a process of observation
paired with imagination. Although I know that I can never completely understand
another person's psyche, black or white, I work very hard to be as accurate as
possible. This is especially true when I'm writing in a point of view out of
the realm of my experience — from a man's or an elderly person's point of view,
for example.

Being a nurse has particularly prepared me for the
empathic process. Nurses place ourselves in our patients' experiences so that
we can better care for them. Cultivating the habits of observation and empathy
as a nurse for thirty years has served me well as a writer. So, when it came to
writing a black person's point of view, I used those skills, along with a
lifetime of memories of growing up in Mississippi. I hope I've been able to get
it right, at least some of the time — that's very important to me. Writing in
multiple points of view — black and white, male and female, young and old — is
always a risk, but I believe it was worth taking that risk to tell this story.

Q. The fictional town of Clarksville
is loosely based on your own hometown of Columbus, Mississippi. How do you
think the people of Columbus will respond to
Catfish Alley?

A. That's difficult to predict. Although Columbus has
some unique qualities, in terms of its history and antebellum structures, I
feel the characters in my novel and the relationships between blacks and whites
that I depict could be found in many other Southern towns. My characters
represent a cross section of types of people. Since I spent the first
twenty-seven years of my life in Columbus, that small community had a huge
influence on me. The African-

American Heritage Tour in Columbus wasn't started until
long after I had moved away — I think around 2004. The historic places on the
tour and the black citizens whose names are included in the historical record
were the inspiration for my story. My novel is not intended to portray their
factual histories, but to tell a story of events as they might have been.

Q. You've said that when you moved
away from the South, you finally became aware of how unique your life there was
compared to the way people lived in the rest of the country What are some of
the strengths your Southern upbringing gave you?

A. An appreciation of good cooking and cool weather!
No, seriously, I have especially come to value the sense of place I experienced
in childhood but resisted for a long time as an adult. I also appreciate the
hard physical work that we did for the delicious food we ate. The experience of
growing our own food from seed to harvest enormously enriched my childhood and
early adulthood. I'll probably become one of those old women like Ouiser,
Shirley MacLaine's character in
Steel Magnolias
— wearing an ugly sun hat and growing tomatoes and, I hope, writing more books!
There was also a sense of connectedness about my Southern life. My people
weren't on the social register, but since my mama was one of fifteen and five
of my siblings lived in town at one point or another, I couldn't help but know
everybody. That can be comforting as well as stifling. I experienced both while
living there.

Q.
What role has reading played in your life? Are any novels particularly
meaningful to you?

A. I've always been a big reader, and I read a wide
variety of books. I spent a lot of time alone as a child, so books were a
constant companion. Some of the Southern classics — William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury,
Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird,
Carson McCullers's
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
— gave me a feel for strong Southern writing and for writing about the
ordinary, especially about times past. For current women's fiction, I like
Fannie Flagg and Dorothea Benton Frank for their humor and the way they depict
family and relationships. I love Sue Monk Kidd's
The Secret Life of Bees,
because of the way she captures the essence of the South in one or two words
and makes me feel like I'm in the scene. For the lyrical quality of his
writing, and for understanding the white Southern male, you can't beat Pat
Conroy. When I'm in the mood for a thriller set in the South, I really enjoy
Greg lies. And finally, Edward P. Jones's
The Known World
and Lalita Tademy's
Cane River
were influential in my evolving understanding
of the black experience.

Q. Grace's delicious desserts help
win over Roxanne, but also threaten to ruin her waistline. What's your
relationship with Southern cooking, and would you share your recipes for
cathead biscuits and muscadine jelly?

A. Southern cooking for me, like nothing else, says
home. We always ate really well, even though there was nothing gourmet about
it! When our whole family got together there were usually at least three or
four vegetables on the table — purple hull peas, creamed corn, fried okra,
sliced tomatoes — and, of course, hot buttered corn bread. Desserts might be
fried apple pies, banana pudding, or some kind of cobbler. My mama is one of
those Southern women who shows her love through her cooking. I've often found
myself doing the same thing.

Funny you should ask for those particular recipes. One
of my first blog posts was about muscadine jelly, followed by my biscuit
recipe. The blog about muscadine jelly received a response from my sister, who
informed me that our mama did not put muscadine jelly in the canner — I had
gotten jelly making mixed up with green bean canning! So, needless to say, I
corrected that quickly. The biscuit recipe is one that I've been using for more
than thirty years. The special thing about cathead biscuits is not so much the
ingredients as the technique used in making them (although some people would
debate that — as there is a debate about the best way to make just about
everything in the South). First of all, they're large (the size of a cat's head),
and second, they're usually pinched and shaped with your hands, rather than cut
with a biscuit cutter.

Cathead Biscuits

2 cups all-purpose flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 2
teaspoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup shortening
2/3 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter

Additional tablespoon of melted butter

Preheat the oven to 450°. I use a
whisk to stir together the dry ingredients. Cut the shortening in with a pastry
cutter until the mixture looks crumbly. Make a hole in the center of the
mixture and pour the milk in all at once. Stir it just a little bit — the
secret to flaky biscuits is not to work the dough too much. When the dough
sticks together, turn it out onto a floured surface and work it with your hands
gently just 3 or 4 times.

For cathead biscuits, place 1
tablespoon of butter in a 10-inch iron skillet and put the skillet in the oven
to heat and melt the butter. When the skillet is hot and the butter melted,
pinch the dough into 4 large pieces (each about the size of a cat's head). Pat
each piece into a biscuit shape and place in the buttered skillet. Let the
edges of the biscuits touch. Brush the tops of the biscuits with melted butter
and bake them for about 15 minutes or until the tops start to brown. If you
want smaller biscuits, simply pinch off smaller pieces of dough (you may need
less baking time for smaller biscuits). A baking sheet can be used if you don't
have an iron skillet.

You can substitute buttermilk for
the sweet milk, but you'll need to add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to the dry
ingredients and you'll use 3/4 cup of buttermilk.

Q. What are you writing now?

A. I'm working on a story set in the Mississippi Delta
town of Greenville. It's the story of a young woman who flees Mississippi right
after high school, trying to leave behind a tragic event that arises out of
racial segregation. She returns to Greenville ten years later to grapple with
some unsolved mysteries of her life and, in doing so, ends up getting immersed
in her grandmother's history. It's part love story and part mystery, and it
includes a lot about that Southern sense of place. Like
Catfish Alley,
the story moves back and forth in time between now and the past.

Q. You teach nursing full-time and
have a family too. How did you manage to carve out the time necessary to
research and write
Catfish Alley?

A. It was challenging, but I have an extremely
supportive family. One of the lessons I've had to learn is the discipline of
writing. I get up early to write, usually around five a.m. during the school
year. I find that if I can get in at least two to three good writing hours, I
feel a sense of accomplishment for the rest of the day. I've also learned that
having a specific goal and a self-imposed deadline makes a huge difference in
my motivation. Middle age is all about management. Managing my full-time job
and full-time writing while trying to exercise, spend time in my garden, read,
and save some time for my family requires an incredible juggling act. I usually
feel like one of those performers spinning several plates at once! But the
privilege of writing novels is so worth it!

QUESTIONS
FOR DISCUSSION

1.
What
was your response to
Catfish Alley?
What did you like best about it?

2.
In
Clarksville, Mississippi, in 2002, blacks and whites still live largely
separate lives, and racial prejudice maintains a powerful hold. Does this
surprise you? To what degree does segregation between blacks and whites exist
where you live?

3.
Catfish Alley
is in many respects a story of female friendship. Discuss the many relationships
among the women characters — between Roxanne and Grace, Grace and Adelle and
Mattie, Roxanne and Rita, Roxanne and the other white women in town,
etc.
What
makes the strong relationships strong, and the weak ones weak? What allows
Roxanne to overcome racial barriers and form sincere friendships with the black
women in the book?

4.
At
the beginning of the book, no one in Clarksville wants to talk about the past.
Discuss the impulse to bury painful past events and the risks and benefits of
examining them with a fresh and honest eye from the perspective of many years
later. Does your town acknowledge and honor its full history or only part of
it?

5.
Discuss
how the sins of the fathers are inherited by the sons (and daughters). How does
Del Tanner inherit Ray's sins? How do Jimalee and J. R. Purvis suffer from
choices made by their father? How is Roxanne's need to hide her origins the
result of Mrs. Stanley's attitudes toward class? Do you see similar patterns of
behavior in people you know?

6.
What
do you think of Roxanne's attempt to befriend Ola Mae after so many years of
not making any effort to get to know her? Have you ever had an ongoing
relationship with a woman who provided a paid service for you — a cleaning
lady, hairdresser, or child-care giver? Did the nature of the relationship —
one woman buying the services of the other — create a barrier between you? Did
differences of race, class, and background also create barriers? To what degree
were you able to overcome them?