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Junior Ray
A novel by
John Pritchard
NewSouth Books
Montgomery | Louisville
Also by John Pritchard
The Yazoo Blues
Praise for Junior Ray
“Mississippi tourist officials won’t be handing this book out anytime soon, though they might be surprised by its effectiveness if they did . . . Not for the squeamish, but its irreverent humor will win over most.”
— Publishers Weekly
“For all Junior Ray’s ugly talk, the writing here is beautifully crafted. Providing counterpoint to Junior Ray’s perfectly calibrated invective, Pritchard sprinkles the narrative with Leland Shaw’s heartbreaking journal entries about being hunted by Nazis . . . while not for the squeamish, [Junior Ray] deserves shelf space beside the best southern literature—even if it makes its neighbors blush.”
— Barnes & Noble
“Junior Ray is an unforgettable narrator: hilarious, rowdy, and stubbornly his own. In life you’d cross the street to avoid him; in Pritchard’s delightful fictional debut, you’ll turn the pages to see what that rascal does next.”
— Louise Redd, Hangover Soup
“Junior Ray Loveblood has taken profanity and made a new language of it, which he uses to tell the often hilarious, often scary, story of life as a poor white in the Mississippi Delta, down its lonely roads and through its dark forests. Not for the squeamish or pure at heart.”
— John Fergus Ryan, White River Kid
“A whizbang of a book—funny, eccentric in that great Southern tradition, pitch-perfect, and beautifully paced. Junior Ray’s voice, while repugnant, is also beguiling, sorrowful—though
he doesn’t know it—and rich in cracker surrealism. The book drips with Delta air and brings alive its peculiar, specific population.”
— Burke’s Bookstore
“Mark Twain meets the Coen Brothers in this foul-mouthed farce. This short burst of a novel reads like a delicious white trash tirade, bound to offend but a whole lot of demented fun.”
— Square Books
NewSouth Books
P.O. Box 1588
Montgomery, AL 36102
Copyright 2008 by John Pritchard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN (hardcover): 9781588381118
ISBN (paperback): 9781588382320
eBook ISBN: 9781603061223
LCCN: 2008040562
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
To Cele
Contents
Me — Leland Shaw — Voyd — Temptation Jones — Sunflower’s Underpants
Shaw’s Notebooks — Boneface — Shaw Runs Off — Sheep
The Silo — The Search for Shaw — The Hopping Man — Niggas & Planters — Miss Helena Ferry — Disappearing Footprints — Mr. X and the Light-Skinned Miss Atlanta Birmingham Jackson
Quicksand — More About Footprints —The Nite Al Cafe & Club — Voyd Goes Home Nekkid
Mr. Floppy — The Need to Shoot Somebody — Lost in the Woods Across the Levee — a Submarine — Boy Sprouts — Mr. Brainsong
How the Submarine Provides the Clue to Shaw’s Hideout — Jack Smiley’s Crop Duster — Me and Voyd Shoot Up the Silo
Niggas, Planters, & Bankers — Miss Helena’s House — Revolving Mohammedans — A Pussy Bomb — We Go Inside the Silo
Morse Code — I Feel Unfulfilled — Eye-Fukkin-Talians & Other Foreigners — My Sex Plan Involving a Preacher’s Wife — The End
This book is not for the squeamish, yet it is essential reading for those who wish to understand the Mississippi Delta, its conflicts of class and race, its angels and, most certainly, its demons.
It was in my investigation of this peculiar region that I made two significant discoveries: (1) that the Notebooks of Leland Shaw did exist and (2) that they were in the possession of a Mr. Junior Ray Loveblood, of whom my mother had heard much from my uncle, the late Owen Glyndwyr Brainsong, formerly the Superintendant of Education for Mhoon County.
I was informed by the grandson of a Mr. Mudd that Mr. Loveblood had Shaw’s diaries—works of supposed literary merit, which, frankly, I had consigned to the closet of local mythology, or at least to the same category as that of the “works” of Professor Floodwater Scott whose famous footlockers everyone believed to be filled with his detailed record of the Southern oral tradition . . . turned out to be totally oral.
The thing is, I understood instantly the magnitude of the journals I discovered to be, in fact, in Mr. Loveblood’s possession—and I think Uncle Owen would have agreed. Namely, that just as Walter Anderson was the great Artist of the Mississippi Coast, so Leland Shaw might well be—or have been—the other great Poet of the Mississippi Delta. I hasten to assure the reader that I do not for a single moment mean to diminish the literary contribution and stature of William Alexander Percy. Indeed, though both Percy and Shaw were regional and cultural countrymen, neighbors, in fact, I can see nowhere that their work conflicts even in the slightest.
“Good God!” I had said to myself. “I must obtain those Notebooks!” Thus, I went to see Mr. Loveblood—or Junior Ray, as I came to know him.
He was not hard to find, and it turned out that what I had been told was true. I have now seen, first hand, The Notebooks of Leland Shaw, and, throughout the text of the interview, samples are provided for the reader. The mystery is why Junior Ray kept them all these years, when, after knowing anything at all about Junior Ray, one might easily have assumed he would have used them for kindling.
I know now that to have thought so would be to misapprehend the make-up of and to grossly underestimate possibly one of the most complex and