Making fun of Christians from the South is an easy thing to do; first, there’s the troubling history of the Southern Baptists as a group formed in response to the question of slavery – they recanted these origins and officially denounced racism as a sin in 1995 – then there’s the apocryphal, though quite real, tradition of snake-handling in the Pentecostal church that is as misrepresented as it is misunderstood, and of course we have our own class of regional Shakespearean tragic heroes – the disgraced Evangelist, pride/greed/lust always coming yea before the fall. As the South is no stranger to easy targets of religious satire, it offers a wellspring of inspiration to the enterprising writer. Clyde Edgerton – North Carolina native and current professor of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington – chose the Original Free Will Baptist Convention as the primary source of his comic aims in his first novel Raney.
The eponymous principal character Raney Bell – recently Shepherd – has a real problem with sex. Sex, for Raney, is the source of a great deal of hidden shame – a thing that must be less thought about than it is read about or certainly talked about. After marrying Charles – his family is from the much more cosmopolitan Atlanta and displays such unnerving cultural traits as drinking wine with dinner and refraining from the usage of racial slurs – Raney experiences her first real bout of sexual anxiety on their wedding night, when Charles suggests an unspeakable variation of the assumably proper and properly Baptist missionary position. One wonders here if the nuptial advice from Free Will Baptist mothers to daughters would sound like a variation of the British cliche: “Just close your eyes and think of the Song of Solomon.”
When Raney and Charles decide to mediate their inability to communicate about sex and other marital issues through a marriage counselor Raney’s nervousness over talking about intimacy is palpable – she is disgusted and offended that such a private topic would be discussed in front of a stranger. Raney’s obliviousness about the presence of sex and sexual substance within her own community reaches a humorous fever pitch when she decides to take a job at her father’s store. Much to her surprise, she discovers that her father’s employees are selling Playboy and Penthouse. This revelation re-establishes Raney’s strident notions of the public and the private – the division lines that a community or individual must not subvert – in her rigid interpretation of the Bible’s role in daily life. Though her father sells dirty magazines, he does so without advertising or promotion; he engages in a marketing of sex much like the wholesale of moonshine. Regardless of the propriety of these transactions, Raney still wholly disapproves of them because of their sexual nature.
A curious twist occurs in the novel when Raney discovers her father’s employee Sneeds in the act of sexual congress with a woman in the feed room. Raney, the good Baptist, observes the whiskey-soaked prelude to licentiousness through a cracked door and tries to remain silent. As an undiscovered voyeur, Raney can hold these dirty things and ponder them in her heart without the need to be accountable to her community. Ultimately, this act of sexual witnessing and voyeurism inspires Raney to attempt to reenact the moment in the feed room with her husband. This closed circle of watching and acting sanctions Raney’s latent desires to experimennt sexually. Rather than finding the inspiration in such external sources as visual or literary pornography as her husband would, Raney needs to feel sexually vindicated by her community; she can quiet the still, small voice that would inquire “What would the community think?” by witnessing “What the community might do.”
All in all, Edgerton’s novel is a humorous and insightful portrait of a small mind made larger by circumstances and tragedy; it explores what happens when the rigidity of a barely-cracked Bible runs up against the uncomprehended desires of the flesh.
Reading The South 