#23. Bayou, Volume 1, by Jeremy Love with Patrick Morgan
#23. Bayou, Vol. 1, Jeremy Love (writer, illustrator) with Patrick Morgan (colors)
2009, Gettosake and ZudaComics.com (online), D.C. Comics (print version)
A shoutout to chipmunk_planet for posting about this book back in June. This is the first -- and, I know, not the last -- book I've discovered via this comm that I would have overlooked otherwise, and which I found absolutely amazing
Bayou is an incredibly creepy, graphically startling work of deepest [Black] Southern Gothic, set in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and featuring as hero the courageous young daughter of a sharecropper.
All by itself, that premise would make it kind of remarkable: heroic little girls are in markedly short supply in the comics, much less poor, ragged black ones. The ambition and underlying coherence of this comic's vision, and the graphic aplomb with which it is executed, make it downright astonishing. I am really impressed by Bayou. My only serious complaint about the print version is that this "Volume 1" is really not complete; the story is published serially online, at ZudaComics.com (under the aegis of D.C. Comics), and although this book collection heralds itself as "the first four chapters of the critically acclaimed webcomic series," it doesn't end with much closure -- the author was clearly not planning these chapters to be a self-contained story arc. (That said, it just drove me online to see What Happened Next. :) You can read it online, too (if you have a fast enough connection...)
The story's basic premise: It's 1933, and Lee Wagstaff, who seems to be about nine, lives in Charon, Mississippi with her father. Daddy is a sharecropper farmer, who, it seems, raises cotton (we see Lee helping him out in the fields); Lee's mama, a juke joint singer, was lost in a storm in the nearby bayou. The land they live on belongs to Miss Westmoreland, whose daughter, Lily, is Lee's playmate, despite Lee's father's repeated warnings that Lee needs to be careful about her friendship with this white child, especially when the temperamental mother has power over them both.
Lee is a good swimmer, but doesn't like to go down to the bayou (for good reasons). The flighty and headstrong Lily tempts her there. A lost locket leads to a shocking tragedy -- one involving impossible visions, magic, and a microcephalic monster who shuffles up out of the swamp singing "Cotton-Eyed Joe" under his breath.
Lee can't tell anyone what she's seen. Lee's father is implicated in Lily's disappearance and hauled off to jail. Justice isn't justice for black people in Mississippi, and Lee knows that if she doesn't rescue her father, it won't matter that there's no evidence against him: he will be seized by a mob and lynched. So she steals away from her Aunt Lucy's house and embarks on a heroic, primordial, and terrifying adventure in the bayou...
I don't have much more to say about the story at this point, partly because it is full of strange symbolism which I think may not resolve itself until I've read further on. (I hope, at least, that at least some of it will.) I will say that, although earlier I said this story was deepest Southern Gothic -- which I think, by certain definitions, it is -- it doesn't make me think of Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams, or Carson McCullers or William Faulkner. Is there a name for Southern Gothic which comes out of a different side of Southern culture -- that isn't so obsessed with the nuances and concealments of sexuality, class, religion, and the decline of great estates, but instead has its horrors of rape, poverty, abuse and murder right out there in front, and in its mythmaking must proceed from there?
A few things that, somewhat impressionistically, this book makes me think about: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (a great work of the South and of childhood which, however, we do not call "Gothic"); Toni Morrison's Beloved (set in fact in Ohio, but about the horrors of the slave-holding South, and about the relations and interweavings between the worlds of inwardness, madness and dreams, and a reality full of sharp abominations); the silhouette art of Kara Walker; parts of the Swamp Thing comics series as written by Alan Moore (sometimes it takes an Englishman to give American myth a sharp new spin).
Criticisms: well, there are some typos and misspellings, and a couple of inconsistencies, that I would really have preferred not to see. But that's what an editor's job is for. (Note please: I am not talking about the use of dialect in the characters' speech. That ain't typos and I know it perfectly well. I find it kind of... amazing and engrossing, actually.)
Since I don't have much else to say as analysis or criticism, I'l quote you the opening (or close to opening) words of Bayou. (In the actual story, of course, there are pictures and dialogue balloons as well.):
"Last summer Sheriff Somerset paid me and my daddy three dollars to fish Billy Glass out the bayou.
"My daddy went after him first, but his body was under a tree and I was the only one small enough to reach.
"So down I went, into the Bayou...
"Billy Glass was a little older than me. I don't know why he got killed, but I heard Aunt Lucy say he whistled at a white woman.
"When I found him I got real scared, but I knew Daddy needed that three dollars.
"I was tying the rope around his foot when I saw it...
"I figure it was Billy's soul on his way to glory..."
[Tags I wish I could add: coming of age, nature, magic realism, mississippi]