University of Georgia Press, 2006. 174pp. $24.95.
Reviewed by Brendan Hughes
11.16.06

In the early years of the republic, when the United States was still a collection of semi-autonomous provinces wedged between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian Mountains, the American frontier began in the bluegrass country west of the Ohio River. It was an isolated place, accessible on foot through the Cumberland Gap or by riverboat from Pittsburgh, and the people who settled there eked out a hard living—rail-splitters who turned the kudzu forests into tobacco fields. After the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the wagon trains left Kentucky, Tennessee, and Southern Ohio for the Great Plains, but the tobacco fields and the kudzu and even a few of the people who had come over the mountains a generation before stayed on, and they are the subject of Spit Baths, Greg Downs’ luminous new collection of stories.

Spit Baths is set in what is known today as the Mid-South, an antiseptic though geographically accurate name for the old frontier. Never wholly a part of either the Midwest or the Confederacy (Tennessee and Kentucky stayed with the Union, although the Confederacy controlled Kentucky for part of the Civil War), Downs’ Mid-South is a tangle of borders, beset by rivers and torn between the North and South. Living in a place where the present blurs into the past, Downs’ characters are often childlike adults or precocious children who display an innocence bordering on ignorance, until a moment of sudden and bitter epiphany.

A forlorn ache flows through many of Downs’ stories, none more than “Black Pork.” Branch, a young and washed-up minor league baseball player, returns to his grandfather’s cabin, where he begins a chaste love affair with Ruby-Anne, his fifteen-year-old African-American neighbor. The local university professor in the big house at the top of the hill thinks the relationship unchaste and warns Branch that he’ll be “history” if he touches the girl. Meanwhile, Big Pop, Branch’s grandfather, has spells of dementia, wandering over to Ruby-Anne’s mother and asking for “black pork, Congo cut, nigger meat.” That’s four generations, black and white, on one Ohio tenant farm, and Downs lets that tension drive the story to its climax.

At fifteen, Ruby-Anne seems like the oldest character in the story, and she is sure of her love for Branch and their future together. “The things we’re going to do,” she tells him. “I just feel like I can’t get too excited about whether we do them now or six months from now or a year. Because it’s like in my head, it’s already done, and I’m just waiting for our life here to catch up.” There’s a pang of desire and nostalgia in those words, the words of a child who is “too solemn, trying too hard to hold the moment in her hands,” but Branch knows better than to believe her. “You can love something and still not be able to keep it alive,” he tells her. “You don’t know that yet.” He’s talking about baseball, about Big Pop, and as he finally gives in and kisses Ruby-Anne, he’s talking about their love, too.

Downs, a professor of history at City College in New York, uses the Mid-South’s complicated history like a stage prop that neither overwhelms nor becomes window dressing. In “Ain’t I a King, Too,” a man walks out on his wife and child at the height of the Great Depression and heads for Louisiana, where he’s mistaken for the recently assassinated Huey Long. When the false Huey falls in with an up-country family on their way to the funeral, the dustbowl landscape and the family’s hollow desperation, like images from a Walker Evans photograph, perfectly capture the historical moment, while the man’s farcical masquerade through the bayou provides an absurd counterpoint to the bleakness. Another story, “Freedom Rides,” concerns a middle-school field trip to the Freedom Rides Museum, an educational amusement park with a civil rights-era theme, where the class is invited to reenact the police brutality of the Alabama sit-ins and to embark on a tunnel of love complete with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X mannequins. The story will resonate with anyone who has been to Colonial Williamsburg or Plimouth Plantation, those museums where history literally lives on, in painstaking reenactments.

“I can’t say as ever I was lost,” Daniel Boone once wrote, “but I was bewildered once for three days.” So it might be said for the men of Spit Baths, cousins of Binx Bolling on the less genteel side of the family. They are too much a part of the Mid-South landscape, like the rivers and tobacco fields, to be lost. Destined to wander “in the warren of things we pass over but do not often remember,” they wonder how it all came to be—how the histories of a place and a person can become the same; how the borders have changed, but not much else.

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