Visible Spirits
A Novel
by Steve Yarbrough
Knopf, 288 pp., $23
If you read one good novel set in Mississippi this summer, read the posthumously published Taps by Willie Morris. If you read two, pick up Steve Yarbrough’s Visible Spirits. Novels set in Mississippi invite comparison. The godlike Faulkner aside, there are also fine contemporary fiction writers like Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, and Eudora Welty with which to contend. (Did I forget to mention John Grisham?) That sort of literary high cotton doesn’t scare off Yarbrough, whose tale of post-Reconstruction turmoil in Loring, Mississippi, is set nearly 50 years before Morris’ account of Delta adolescence during the Korean War.
In Visible Spirits, his second novel, Yarbrough sets a deeply imagined cast of characters in a story of generational suffering. The protagonist, Tandy Payne, is a good-for-nothing prodigal son returned to settle down. The problem is, his well-respected brother, Leighton Payne, is mayor, editor of the town newspaper, and the voice of moderation in turbulent times. The two don’t see eye-to-eye on anything. Tandy isn’t in town long before he sets in motion a petition to oust the black postmistress, Loda Jackson, in revenge for her role in a perceived slight. Of course, this being the South and all, there’s a long personal history between Tandy and Loda that inevitably includes some stinky pinky when they were both younger. Neither whites nor blacks get off easy in Yarbrough’s aptly titled book, in which the ghosts of masters and slaves are as alive as anybody. On top of all this, Teddy Roosevelt (whose invitation to Booker T. Washington to visit the White House had already incensed the Loring bigots) steps in and suspends mail service to Loring over the petition flap. For demagogues-in-training like Tandy Payne, Roosevelt’s order to shut down the mail is a rallying cry for like-minded racists, and you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one in 1902 Mississippi.
While Yarbrough’s Loring is no Yoknapatawpha, it is an interesting postage stamp of Southern soil that tells an important story about what men fear in each other. After mourning the untimely passing of Willie Morris, readers can now embrace Steve Yarbrough’s painful vision of the South, a place where, as Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
This article appears in June 22 • 2001.