Southern Fried
Child In Home Seeker's Paradise is about the
experiences of a sometimes lonely, but ever
independent only child growing up in Mississippi in
the 40s and 50s. On one level, Southern Fried Child
is a charming account of the unusual experiences of
an unusual child. On another level, Moomaw's stories
reflect profound and valuable insight into the
stratified social, political and denominational
milieu of a small southern town after World War II
and before Brown v. Board of Education.
Written in the
first person narrative voice of a precocious child,
Southern Fried Child is story telling at its best.
The stories range in emotional tone from "slap dab"
funny to heart wrenchingly poignant. It's as if
Jimmie is sitting beside you telling you her
stories: about the dog who loved her too much, a
game she played called "the embalming room door",
her first cuss word, the phobia she developed after
seeing her Daddy terrified of a dead mouse, and the
contrast between her immersion in the Baptismal pool
behind the pulpit at the First Baptist Church and
the "talkers in tongues" who marched around the
walls of Jericho at her Uncle Wamon's "holy roller"
church.
Moomaw writes, "you
might be tempted to believe that the Gothic
characters you see in the movies with the bad, bad
southern accents are the products of the alcohol
induced dementia of failed novelists turned B-movie
screenwriters, but the South I grew up in was
peopled with characters like Lola in "An Epitaph for
Lola and Fonnie." They walked into and out of my
Daddy's little country grocery store and service
station every day of the week. People like them were
the stuff of Truman and Tennessee and Willie and
Eudora's fiction. They were the stuff of my every
day life and reality."
