Burnishing "A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage"

Image of a Southern shack courtesy of sxc.hu
and Robert Walker of Mississippi. He has a
great collection of images at Grits Photography--
Southern faces and Southern places.


It is heading toward 2:00 a.m., and I am holed up to finish a last slow burnish of the 340 pages of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage (Ferrol Sams award and forthcoming from Mercer University Press, 2012.)  See you when I emerge--on Monday, I hope! In the meantime, here's a paragraph from a little ways into the first chapter. (And I do have one of those funeral parlor fans with the greenish sheep, souvenir of childhood summers with my extended family in Georgia.)

It was high, hot summer in Emanuel County, Georgia, and not one soul was saved from the day’s blaze or from the night’s smother of warmth; up and down the county, the only sleep was a restless sleep, and near Lexsy, one or two old people woke in a fright because the air was just about too dense to breathe--their trembling hands reaching for funeral-parlor fans printed with a portrait of Christ and some luminous, faintly green sheep--and on some gully-shattered sharecropped place, an infant who had been fighting for air yielded up the ghost on his mother’s naked breast.  Mr. Sam, next door to the cotton gin, returned to bed and dreamed his nightly dream of being weighed in the scales and found wanting.  At The White Camellia Orphanage, the bone-tired children slept without dreaming, all but one, who dreamed about a lost penny.