The Well and The Mine

I came across this book last week at Barnes and Noble. I'm about half way through it at the moment - but so far I really do recommend it! The author is doing a book signing at the store this Monday night at 6:30 - so I encourage you to head out!

It's written by Gin Phillips, a Montgomery native and Birmingham-Southern graduate whose family is originally from Carbon Hill, AL. If you're from West Alabama, then you have heard of this little town, but mostly because of how often they've lost schools to tornados. The book also makes mention of a lot of other towns such as Fayette, Jasper, and Townley (which I always remember for the toilet and couch on the side of the road under the sign reading "Townley Rest Area").

The story takes place during the Great Depression and focuses on its effects on the local miners. The book has given me some historical perspective on how this part of the state became known as such a dangerous place and why some ladies in Fayette couldn't believe I'd go to the Jasper Wal-Mart Super Center by myself. Jasper was once named the easiest place in the country to hire a hit man (I'm not sure who decides that - but I doubt it's the Princeton Review), and a lot of local senior citizens from back home still reference the topic with trepidation. This book helps you see how a tough group of unemployed miners would eventually do whatever they needed to do to provide for their families - or how such an environment could lead to organized crime in the future.

My favorite part of the book is the character development and the authenticity of the language and details. If you know me, you know one of my pet peeves is stereotypical or fake Southern that is overdramatized for effect. This is more like a snapshot straight out of poor white Alabama life in the 1930s, and I suspect most all of us could find remnants of our grandparents here.

Here is section of what the author had to say about the book on Amazon.com:
The plot of the book is entirely my invention. There was no baby thrown in a well, no investigation into the local mothers. Or at least none that I know of. But the people and the places do echo some real-life counterparts. Virgie, the Moore's oldest daughter, has my grandmother's sense of propriety. The youngest daughter, Tess, has my great-aunt's sense of fun. Their mother, Leta, has the efficiency and solidity of my great-grandmother, who died when she was 99 and I was 14. My great-grandfather, a coal-miner, died before I was born, but the stories about his razor-sharp sense of right and wrong are what gave Albert his backbone. My great-aunt still lives in the home my great-grandfather built, and I spent plenty of time in the house as I was writing this novel, sitting on the front porch and looking out over the woods, listening to the sound of the creek as I typed.
I grew up hearing stories about Carbon Hill in the 1920s and '30s being told across the dinner table or while sitting around the living room with my grandmother and her siblings. When I sat down to write the story of the fictional Moores, I delved back into my family's memories. Those memories helped bring 1931 rural Alabama to life--they gave me the sights and smells and the feel of the past. Bits and pieces of family lore found their way into the story, but also the domestic details and cultural perspectives that are hard to find in library books. Answers to questions like: What kind of underwear would you wear in 1931? What kind of floor cleaner would you use? How did a teenage girl feel about marriage? I never read good answers to those questions in library books, but I hear plenty of answers, simple and complicated, when I asked the right people.
And yet in the past, there are whispers of the future. The mining industry was unique in Alabama because it had an integrated workforce. In the mines, black men and white men worked side by side in the mines: It was a harbinger of things to come. Albert Moore wrestles with ideas of good and evil--of black and white--and comes face to face with complexities that haunt generations after him. Time and time again, he and the rest of his family struggle to do the right thing--and struggle all the harder to accept the fact that "right" may not always be such a concrete thing. It's that struggle, that drive to do what is fair and that need to see beyond their own perspective, that defines this family. And that struggle has as much relevance in 2009 as it did in 1931.