M ILL!CENT BELL
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surge back in memory. It incorporates also Ada's sheltered, upper-class
young womanhood. A little like Lidie Newton, she has not looked to mar–
riage as her total destiny. And it tells the short, aborted story of her love
affair with Inman. We are also given Ruby's story and the story of her
father. Stobrod is a ne'er-do-well drunk who, after abandoning his child,
discovers in himself a gift for improvised song and music and who lives
now in a mountain cave with a community of outliers. A changed man and
still the same man in many ways, he re-enters his daughter's life, and Ada's,
with tragic results. And other, quite unrelated, lives work their way into the
narrative. In this book, which may be faulted-like Smiley's and Banks's
also-for its nearly total omission of the southern black experience, there
is, at least, the story told Inman by a fellow wanderer met at a rough way–
side inn. Odell is the oldest son of the richest planter in his county when
he falls in love with a family slave and she is sold by his outraged father to
a trader in Mississippi. Searching for his Lucinda year after year without
success, never returning home again, supporting himself as a ragged ped–
dler, Odell sees instances unknown to Inman of the white man's abuse. He
sees blacks burnt alive or mutilated for minor misdemeanors and once a
woman who may be his lost sweetheart in a cage through which buzzards
thrust their beaks at her living flesh. Ada and Ruby, for another example,
hear the story of a Home Guard captive in the town jail. He has taken a
ball at Williamsburg and now, like Inman, thinks he has had enough. But
Teague, the local Home Guard leader, and his tough catch him at home on
his farm where they brutally slaughter his father and other outliers hiding
there--an unforgettable action sequence that only
film
can hope to tell
again after Frazier's prose has projected it on the reader's inner screen.
Inman's "all-true travels" have little of the hopeful verve of Lidie
Newton's adventures; they string a series of dark encounters into an
Odyssey that reaches Ithaca only to find death at the doorstep. As he makes
his way on foot to the region of Cold Mountain, he comes upon the Rev–
erend Vesey, who would have murdered a woman he'd made pregnant
if
Inman hadn't stopped him and sent him them both back to their town. A
while later, the discredited preacher, beaten up and cast out by his parish–
ioners and bound for a new career as a feckless itinerant bandit, catches up
again with Inman and hangs on as they trudge on, making meals out of
wild honey and fish caught in the narrow woodland streams, taking shel–
ter at ramshackle inns among derelicts and grifters. Stopping to help a
farmer pull a dead bull out of a creek, they are taken home, fed, and enter–
tained by
him
and by his lubricious daughters, like Odysseus and his
companions in the palace of Circe--only to discover that their host is a
bounty hunter who gets five dollars a head for turning them over to the
Home Guard. Shot down and left for dead with Vesey in a shallow grave,
