Oh Don’t You Cry For Me
by Philip Shirley
Summary
A vivid lot of characters, each worthy of the utmost compassion or contempt—or perhaps both—inhabit this debut collection. A Bible-beating preacher of the literal kind, a tattoo-covered man who plies dead armadillos with empty beer cans, a mother bent on retaliating against her daughter’s attacker, and scores of other obsessive and temperamental personalities wander and collide in this striking collection. Running throughout the book is the recurrent theme of denial, or unshakable naiveté, in the face of disaster and its inevitable consequences. Anchored by the last piece, a cinematic, suspenseful account of a young attorney and her jealous lovers—these tales deliver a hard-hitting assortment of skillful storytelling
Excerpt
MORRISON JOPLIN HENDRIX JONES at first hated the name kids taunted him with as a child. But by age twenty he had accepted the inescapable name Mojo and a destiny that surely would follow.
Mojo’s mother Betty Elizabeth Jones, named for both of her grandmothers, read to Mojo from birth. When he learned to read at five, she began to shove books in front of him each day—mostly biographies of people she thought were the world’s great leaders. She told him he was born with a destiny. He soon believed her vision of his providence, and by the time he started school, he woke up every morning thinking about doing something the world would remember. Lead a movement for world peace. Cure cancer. End poverty. Maybe even win the Kentucky Derby or the World Series. He didn’t discriminate among opportunities for fame, glory, or contributions to the betterment of mankind.
From the year Mojo turned ten he kept a reading list. He read books about the people his mom said were famous and important--Lincoln, Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, Buddha, Catherine the Great, Emily Dickinson, Evil Knievel—though the language exceeded his reading level and spoke of places he had a hard time imagining. Mojo wrote each famous name in a journal and beside the name listed that person’s message to the world. Lincoln—all men are created equal. Susan B. Anthony—women are equal to men. Evil Knievel—people cheer for you if you might die. And so on.
When his mother returned home pregnant in 1969 from Woodstock, the future of the child growing in her belly had not yet crossed her mind. There was no grand plan for Mojo. She was in love. And the woven grass bracelet on her wrist provided all the evidence she needed that her circle of love was real.
Betty Betty, as Mojo’s mother now insisted she be called, hitched her way home wearing a tie-dyed cotton dress, her only possessions a pair of leather sandals and a backpack holding a couple of paperbacks, a toothbrush, and a twenty-nine cent horoscope she’d lifted from the rack beside a grocery store checkout. She arrived on Labor Day to the Appalachian foothills in North Alabama, just a few miles from Fort Payne, and walked down a worn-out gravel road to tell her mother she was having a baby.
When Betty Betty arrived back home her dress was so dirty and threadbare from months of wear, plus four days of a rock concert in a muddy field and several days on the road that her mother Mary, an otherwise frugal woman who wasted nothing, simply threw away what was basically a thin rag not even suitable for washing the car.
The father never showed up. And the grass bracelet on Betty Betty’s wrist soon fell apart. Her last contact with Mojo’s father, whose birth name she later realized she’d never known, consisted of a single postcard postmarked from Oregon saying the man she loved was following the Grateful Dead on tour and hoping one day to find her again, because that would be true fate and cosmic karma, and proof that they were meant to be together. There was no return address on the postcard. It was signed Yogi Bear, the name everyone called him, with a little peace sign drawn beneath the signature.
Reviews
"Immensely enjoyable." Kirk Curnutt, First Draft Magazine
"A memorable debut in the world of fiction. ” Mark Childress, author of Crazy in Alabama and One Mississippi
"Shirley has the uncanny ability to create powerful characters.”, Abby Margulies, PopMatters
Author's Biography
Philip Shirley has received more than a dozen awards for his poetry, fiction, speech, and feature writing. His work has been anthologized in Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe IV and has appeared in online and print journals including Art Gulf Coast, Southern Gothic Online, Southern Humanities Review, and storySouth. He lives in Madison, Mississippi.