Here to get My Baby out of Jail by Louise Shivers
By The Criticess
Every once in a while, a book comes along in which the pacing is so precise, the pitch so perfect, the language so measured, and the cast so beguiling that I am mesmerized and awed. Louise Shivers’ first novel, Here to get My Baby out of Jail appeared over twenty years ago and, when I was fifteen, brought with it an entirely new genre of teenage fantasies. My walls were dedicated largely to Mel Gibson and my head was occasionally turned by a boy at school, but my heart thumped at the thought of a man who, by any reasonable measure, I should not have found attractive.
“Red-headed, jagged-faced” and looking like “a walk-away from a nearby CCC camp”, Jack Ruffin steps up onto the porch of Roxy’s father’s funeral home “as deliberately as a casket salesman” and she’s lost in him. He’s apprenticed at the funeral home for a while before coming to work as a labourer on the tobacco farm owned by Roxy and her husband, Aaron. There are no thunderbolts or swooning love at first sight. If anything, Roxy is confused and made cautious by Jack’s effect on her. Slowly the tension between them seeps insidiously into the narrative. “Every chance we’d get we’d snatch at each other, slip, hide – and when we couldn’t it was hard not to be cross or surly. We’d stare across the kitchen at each other – our eyes dry and cagey. Watching. Waiting. I’d realized by then that the fond feeling I’d had for Aaron was just a weak hum compared to the raging thing in my chest now. I didn’t think about the rest of my life. I didn’t care. I had to have him.” The tobacco harvest ends and, along with it, Jack’s employment on the farm. Faced with the prospect of never seeing Roxy again, he kills Aaron and takes her and the baby. Away from the farm and numbed by Aaron’s murder, the hunger that Roxy felt for Jack is quelled as she realises “I’d breathed all the things I’d wanted into him and thought that that was love”, but the vessel for all her wants is just a man. She reports the murder to the police and Jack is arrested and sentenced to death. It is a quiet denouement: Roxy’s grief is neither dramatic nor maudlin and, though she cries for Aaron and Jack, she does so quietly.
To my fifteen-year-old self, the subtlety and skill of the book were as far removed as Roxy’s 1930s small town in North Carolina: all I wanted was the effect and I didn’t care how it was created. Actually, what I wanted was for a Jack Ruffin to amble into my life, press his tobacco stained fingers against my mouth, and mesmerize me so intensely that anything else was nothing to me. I wanted “the raging thing in my chest” Roxy feels for Jack and to think that a man would want me so badly he’d murder my husband to be with me, then, knowing he was being sentenced to death, tell a courtroom full of people “I love her and will die loving her”. It wasn’t something the boys at high school were really up to.
Reading the book a second and third time a few years later, it still creates the same breathy presence. I know that raging in the chest – as yet, it hasn’t been accompanied by the desire/need to murder a spouse – but Shivers’ depiction of it is as sexy and startling as it was on first reading. When she writes about sex, Shivers does so with language that is spare and frank, relying neither on euphemisms nor graphic description. From the lingering taste of tobacco left on Roxy’s mouth after Jack leaves to “lying down in the middle of the morning and raising my skirt and getting sticky and messed up”, it is written in much the same way as someone of Roxy’s background – small town polite without pretension – would describe it.
The men of Roxy’s world are depicted with similar candour: from the sweetness of funeral home apprentice, Neb, with his silky brown eyelashes walking “like he was hearing some real good music in his head”; the tenderness of Aaron towards his tobacco plants; “highpitched men’s voices singing about prison and darling”; and the hunger and ease of Jack’s love for Roxy; to the cocksure apprentices and the brutality of Aaron’s murder.
I suppose, ostensibly, it’s a tale of a lonely housewife fucking the hired help, but Shivers takes the scenario and cleaves it open. Then, with a delicacy most writers would fail to muster, she exposes its guts. It may seem something of a paradox, but the understatement of Shivers’ prose; her measured tone; and, despite ample opportunity, the absence of escalation into melodrama charge the book with an eroticism and pace in which she does not falter
About the author:
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The Criticess was born out of a desire to steal female writers, labelled classics and consigned to the doldrums of academia, and to explore them in all their unhinged, electrifying, mischievous, eloquent, mistressful glory. For a time, she wrote for the Edinburgh literary publication, The One O'Clock Gun, and now she is here, bringing to The Fine Line those women and works too vital to grow old on dusty bookshelves. |
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