“Provinces of Night” by William Gay

This semester, I challenged myself to learn a little about what makes the south, The South. Rough South Literature is a pretty interesting class, especially as someone who spent 25 years growing up in the Shenandoah Valley. We’re basically learning about a culture which is trapped in a spiral of drug/alcohol addiction, violence, and poverty. One of the reasons for this spiral’s existence is the pressure adults put on adolescents to stay around the house and work full-time to help their families pay bills and such; a phenomena known as the cycle of poverty. I figured this would be a relevant topic for Adolescent Literature (particularly the heroism unit) because any opportunity to escape this kind of environment rests almost entirely with the adolescents. The young can’t provide their own way out, and the old linger there in regret believing they’ve lost the opportunity for better circumstances.

Provinces of Night, by William Gay, is a “Faulknerian” tale which is about a youth from Tennessee, named Fleming Bloodworth. After years away from home, his grandfather finally returns from life on the road to try and make amends with his ex-wife and children/grandchildren. Fleming’s dad is all but useless, so he looks to E.F. as a role model. He’s fascinated by E.F.’s former life as a traveling blues musician. This bonding is hindered by Flemings major protagonist, his older brother Brady. Brady is known to the whole town as a hexer and caster of curses. There’s a neat supernatural element to the whole story, which ends up being symbolic of (at least in my opinion) the real “curses and hexes” which plague impoverished areas of America – alcoholism, taxes, traditions of violence, underage and unprotected sex, the list goes on… “One mistake leads to a lawyer’s curse, and then a financier’s. Forget the witches. The real magicians of this world deprive us of our money, and power of the law is wizardry, pure and simple. Words are hurled with a palpable force, and the results can as easily be slapstick as suicide” (Rick Kleffel).

In the end, the prevailing motif seems to be a conflict between light and dark – or if not, then choosing between which path to follow. Raven Lee, a girl who ironically symbolizes darkness (lack of light, in other words, the unknown) becomes Fleming’s hope. Appropriately, the night that Fleming meets Raven, they watch fireflies dancing over a river. By the end of the evening, Fleming already senses that she might change his life, and as he drives home he reflects on what they saw: “There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn’t put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they’d seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night” (Gay – from Orlando Sentinel).

I think this novel would make good young adult literature because it contains a young adult character who shows hope in a hopeless world. The story isn’t boring, and while it does confront the issues of things like poverty, violence, and addiction, it does so indirectly through supernatural elements which I think younger crowds would find entertaining. The book does have some language in it that might get it taken off lists of appropriate materials for young readers, but I think an argument could be made for putting it on a list of alternative books for teens in secondary school to choose from themselves.

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-02-25/news/0102230439_1_fleming-ef-farms – Mary Anne Horne: Sentinel Staff

http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2002/gay-provinces_of_night.htm – Rick Kleffel: Reviewer/Blogger