You might remember The Radio Reader. It aired on many NPR stations across the country for more than 50 years. Producer and host Dick Estell read books on the air – a portion every day – about a dozen recently released books per year. That’s where I heard – way, way back in 1986 – T.R. Pearson’s A Short History of a Small Place, a delightful, funny, and very southern novel that I’ve never forgotten and often referred to. Recently I took it off the shelf for a re-read.
It’s the story of Neely, North Carolina, and narrated by the boy Louis Benfield, Jr. It’s about the whole town, but especially focuses on the final days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster lady who, after a failed romance, had retreated from society with her only companion Mr. Britches, a chimpanzee, mostly called simply ‘the monkey’. The book begins with her break from reality. Young Louis narrates:
“That was the day Miss Pettigrew stopped being just peculiar. She’d been peculiar ever since I’d heard tell of her and ever since I’d known what being peculiar meant, but now when folks spoke of her they would say she was Not Right, which was an advancement of a sort. The town of Neely had seen a blue million peculiarities in its history, but those among its citizenry who were genuinely not right were rare and cherished. In my day alone I’d seen any number of oddballs but less than a handful of the truly unbalanced.”
From here the story unfolds, through chapters titled Daddy and Momma and Junious and Mayor and Sister and Me. It’s a fun book, with many moments of laugh-out-loud humor. But there are touching moments, too. I wish we could listen to Dick Estell read the whole book to us again.
We can’t have that, but I don’t think it will spoil anything to read the last few lines:
“We do not worry much about Pettigrews at all anymore. Momma says there is no cause to dally in the past. Momma says we should forge ahead, break new ground, look to the horizon. Lately she is ever making the bravest sort of noise. Daddy figures it’s the fire and the monkey and the prospect of winter working on Momma all at once and together. He says she’s just whistling as loud as she can. But Momma has never much excelled in brave noises, and Neely is cold now and lifeless and near about at the end of another year. We have emptied the gutters and cleaned out the crepe myrtles and stacked all the screens in the cellar, and anymore when me and Daddy walk off our supper to the boulevard and back we wear our lined coats and our gloves and our fuzzy wool hats because the evening air is sharp and painfully cold and sometimes when the moon is out and the clouds blow free of the stars it seems to me you could swing a hammer against the night sky and shatter the whole business.”
A Short History of a Small Place was first published in 1985. T.R. Pearson has written numerous books since then, but this was his first. I recommend you start here.
