The Daily Novel

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I got the hell out of Tupelo. I drove day and night, stopping only for pee breaks and lunches on the run, all the way from Tupelo, Mississippi, to New York, New York. I carried with me a dream of freedom and fame and fortune, and voices from the past chased after me, nipping at [...]

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The same dumb little voice spoke the same impotent warning many other times: when I started hallucinating during the trial, during that frantic flight to New York, the first time I dropped acid…many times. And every time I said, Fine! That’s just fine and dandy.
Impending insanity is a great orgasmic release when you let yourself [...]

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Wanda’s picture was on the front page of the Daily Journal the next morning. It was a murky picture. She was lying on the ground. Dead. How could she be dead? This had to be some kind of horrible dream. The article said that she had been killed in an attempted rape. It had happened [...]

All of my life I’ve been running away. I ran away from Man when he needed me. I ran away when Johnny Lewis tried to love me, because that was not the kind of love I wanted, and I couldn’t tell him that. I ran from Tupelo over and over, but no matter where I [...]

Red Warner’s Journal
I’m a has-been hero, and I’ve got the clippings to prove it. What I wish more than anything else is that I could just be a simple fisherman down here on the bayous and purge myself of memory. Memory’s a son of a bitch.
My earliest memories are all about war, a house-of-mirrors collage [...]

Mary Walker Bayou
Mary Walker Bayou crawls through the mosquito beds of the Mississippi coast, bending around little towns with exotic names like Escatawpa and Gautier and Pascagoula. It flows into the Pascagoula River, which is vomited out into the Mississippi Sound with the outgoing tide and is sucked back into its own gullet when the [...]

1982
I first heard about it on the morning news. I was in bed at home in my Garden District Apartment. Jimmy was beginning to wake up and nuzzling against me, purring the way he does in the morning. I had my cigarettes and a cup of coffee. With chicory (practically a requirement for living in [...]

The sixties
We all graduated from Tupelo High in the spring of 1961, all but Sam Littlejohn, who had to repeat a year and eventually dropped out. Cassie graduated with top honors. After graduation, she went to New York to study dance. J.P. and Marybelle were married in June. Travis enrolled in the Memphis Art Academy [...]

Spring of 1961
Tupelo
Anticipation, alive and palpable like a covey of quail flushed by a hunting dog, fluttered over the town of Tupelo. Elvis Presley was coming to town, coming back home to perform at the Mississippi-Alabama State Fair and Dairy Show—at the fairgrounds anyway; the actual fair had come and gone back around Halloween. A [...]

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The phone rang at the Warner house. Marybelle answered it. “Hello.”
“Hi there. It’s me, J.P.”
“G’morning.”
“It’s Sunday. I didn’t know if I should call or not. I thought you might be a churchgoer.”
“Nope. Nobody in this house is big on going to church. I tried it for a while, but I had a falling out with [...]