Barry Hannah’s Late Love Song to Mississippi: “Get Some Young”
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Tag: Deliverance
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By William Caverlee.
In devising his strange fictions, Mississippi’s Barry Hannah was nearer to a poet and musician than a prose writer, and his language inventions reached a peak in a 1996 short story, “Get Some Young,” from the collection, High Lonesome.
Hannah was born in 1942 in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Clinton not far from the state capital, Jackson. All three of these are located in central Mississippi along Interstate 20.
Today, travelers crisscross Mississippi on I-20 (east-west) and I-55 (north-south) with hardly a flicker of the dread and uneasiness that strangers once felt making their way through the state—a region known fifty or sixty years ago as the most backwards, violent, and racist of all Southern states.
Now, of course, the interstate highway system has homogenized the entire country, and one can travel from coast to coast with nothing but the familiar names of motel and restaurant chains to reinforce the illusion of oneness.
It takes a native like Barry Hannah to exit the interstate and descend among the South’s many rural two-lane roads to confront characters who haven’t received the news that America is now one big happy family. In his Mississippi fiction, Hannah leads us deep into the woods with its unaccountable dread and profound uneasiness.
In “Get Some Young,” Hannah chose to use actual towns and place-names: towns like Mendenhall (pop. 2,500) on US 49, south of Jackson. And the Strong River, which flows into the Pearl, which itself winds southward to the Gulf of Mexico. At first glance, Hannah’s portrait of the beautiful Strong River with its sand bars and rapids, its high overlooks and Edenic forests might be mistaken for a National Geographic photo spread, but veteran Hannah readers will have their ears perked, ready for anything.