Smitten by Books

Three Was the Charm: The Writing of Catfish Alley

As any struggling writer knows, it is such a thrill to be able to join the ranks of published authors. I came to writing later in life, finally allowing myself to unleash a love of storytelling and a lifetime of struggling to understand the complex race relations in my native state of Mississippi. My stories tackle issues many Southerners can identify with, and, like me, have struggled to understand. My debut novel, Catfish Alley, allows me to share a fictional story based loosely on people and events in my Mississippi hometown. I am a great believer in the power of storytelling to not only entertain us, but to challenge our thinking, and, every now and then, to change our lives. I have been thrilled to discover my voice as a writer and to share my Southern roots through the quiet power of the written word.

I initially wrote a different novel, which I now fondly refer to as my “under the bed novel.” That work got a little bit of interest from the agents to whom I pitched at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, but was never picked up. As writers, we get very attached to our characters, and in my case, one of my characters in particular, Roxanne Reeves, was someone I wanted to tell another story about. Roxanne was expert at restoring antebellum homes—the homes built before the Civil War in the South—and I wanted to try something else with Roxanne in it. This process took me well into yet another novel, but that one remains unfinished because, as fate would have it, I tripped over a question that started me on the road to publication.

While doing research on the antebellum homes in my hometown of Columbus, Mississippi, I ran across the list of sites for the Columbus African-American Heritage tour. Catfish Alley was one of those sites. I began to wonder about the stories of the men and women who might have lived during those early years of the twentieth century. I started to research places that I’d grown up around but never really noticed, and I began to ask myself “what if a white woman and a black woman were thrown together, not necessarily by choice, to examine the history of the Columbus African American community?”

The real Catfish Alley in my hometown was a gathering place for African Americans from the late nineteenth century through my growing up years in the 1960s and 70s. In its heyday, in the early 1900s, it was a short block between Main and College Street where locals could bring their catfish catch and sell it in the alley. The legend is that the Alley got its name from the wonderful smell of fried catfish wafting across Main Street on any given day.

In addition, my research revealed the name of O. N. Pruitt. I recognized that his name was inscribed on the photographic portraits of my oldest sister and brother hanging on the wall in my mother’s bedroom. These were portraits that my mother had Mr. Pruitt take in the early 1940s to send to my father, who was a soldier stationed in Germany. I found that Pruitt did much more than produce sweet portraits of babies. He also photographed freak shows, circus acts, dead children, tent revivals, and river baptisms. Pruitt, unusual for his time, photographed both blacks and whites. I discovered a scholar, Berkley Hudson, whose dissertation work was a study of O. N. Pruitt’s photography from 1920 to 1960. The images from Pruitt’s 1930s photography in the same county where I grew up touched something deep inside me and made me want to tell this story.

I wrote the first 50,000 words of Catfish Alley during the National Novel Writing Month competition in 2008. When I started it was a cold November day in Colorado, but the picture in my mind—the one that wouldn’t go away—was a hot summer night in Mississippi. In my mind’s eye it was the dead of night and a young black man, terrified and dripping with sweat, was climbing through thorny, snake-infested undergrowth up a steep  river bank, to secretly deliver a package to a wealthy white girl looking out from her bedroom balcony overlooking that same river. What will happen to this man? I wondered. The sweltering sticky heat was reminiscent of a typical August night from my Mississippi childhood—only it wasn’t the 1960s, it was 1931, and the young man was sneaking toward a one hundred and fifty year old Southern mansion called Riverview that, in my present time, I had sauntered past last March on a balmy spring afternoon when the azaleas were in full bloom, and the air smelled sweet with wisteria.

Catfish Alley tells a story about a storyteller. Roxanne Reeves can only complete her assigned task of creating an African American tour for her small fictional town of Clarksville, Mississippi by listening to the stories of Grace Clark, a beloved local retired black schoolteacher. Grace’s way of helping Roxanne understand the depth of meaning of the seemingly insignificant places identified for the tour is to share her memories of the people who inhabited those places and lived out their joys and sorrows within their narrow confines.

So, out of all of this imagery, memory, and life experience, Catfish Alley was born. I hope you will enjoy sharing this story with me. If you’re drawn to that particularly Southern sense of place, please visit my website and blog at www.lynne-bryant.com to find out more about me, and about the sense of place that saturates my writing.

What are some of your favorites things about the south? Comment and enter to win a copy of CATFISH ALLEY.