****Trigger warning for racism.****

I’ve had one legitimately wealthy relative: for the sake of this, we’ll call her Aunt A. She was my godmother, and since she never had any children of her own, she a) saw me as a substitute, and b) had no idea how to relate to a child. She’s the reason I hate squash to this day, after she made me sit at the table for three hours until I ate it. Believe me, room-temperature cooked squash will convert no one.

She also ruined my enjoyment of art by insisting I draw things I didn’t want to draw, in order to learn to draw correctly. I didn’t care if my Flintstones or Batman drawings were “correct,” I cared if they were cool. But “cool” was not a valid standard. So when I started writing, I kept it hidden for as long as I could, well into adulthood.

When Aunt A found out I was a writer, she insisted I let her read something. At the time, I was deep into my Firefly Witch series of stories, which were definitely not her cup of sweet tea. She was appalled by the violence and occasional sex, but what really offended her was female characters cursing. In her genteel world, women just didn’t talk like that.

As an example of the kind of writing a proper young man should attempt, in 1995 or so she gave me a novel by North Carolina’s Clyde Edgerton called Raney. I hadn’t thought about this book in years, but on a recent trip to North Carolina, I spotted a worn paperback at a thrift store and showed it to my wife.

“This is how my Aunt A thought I should write.”

She looked it over and said, “I want to read it.” Which she did, very quickly, because it’s a short book.

“What did you think?” I asked when she was done.

“It’s…pretty racist.”

My own memory of reading it had long since faded. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah.”

So I reread it myself. And boy, she wasn’t kidding.

The front cover tells us:

As the back text says:

And by “everyone,” they must mean racists. Because that’s who the book’s about, and I’m pretty sure who it’s for.

Let me back up a little. I truly believe that if you write about the south and don’t acknowledge racism, you’re being dishonest. I’ve written eight novels set in the south, and racism is one of the threads that runs through them, because it runs through the real place. But I never condone it, or treat it as less than awful.

For reasons that will become clear, I’ve never read another book by Mr. Edgerton, so I can’t speak to them. But it’s clear that in Raney, he sees racism as just another harmless quirk that readers should look on with amusement. It’s the same racism I grew up with in my family, which I used to excuse as “benign” because it wished no active harm on anyone, it just felt liked they’d be happier with their own kind. Thankfully I outgrew that (education will do that to you), but it’s definitely how my family still feels, and most definitely how Aunt V (who worked many years as a fundraiser for various Confederate memorial causes) viewed the world.

Lest you think I exaggerate about Raney, here are some examples.

Raney and her family, good Baptists who go to church every Sunday, use the “n” word with abandon in casual conversation. The book, written in Raney’s voice, makes Charles the foolish one for objecting to it. She even says,

Charles has this thing about n******. For some reason he don’t understand how they are.

(And in case you wondered, there are no asterisks in the actual text.)

Raney’s family firmly believes in segregation, and Raney even confuses the words “integration” and “segregation” in conversation (in the context of the book, this is considered “humor”). Raney’s Aunt Naomi, complaining about blacks using the traditionally “white” part of the beach, says:

“It’s just that they need to stay in their own place at their own beach just like the white people stay at their own place at their own beach.”

Nobody said anything…but you could tell we all agreed except Charles. He walks through the screen door on outside.

“I don’t understand where he gets some of his attitudes,” says Aunt Naomi.

And at the end of chapter three, regarding Johnny Dobbs, a black Army buddy of her husband, Raney says:

…but if he is a n*****, he can’t stay here. It won’t work. The Ramada, maybe. But not here.

This is actually the set up for a joke, and the punchline comes at the very end of the book in the birth announcement of Raney and Charles’s first child:

Mr. Johnny Dobbs, from New Orleans, was named godfather and is visiting for a few days. He is staying at the Ramada Inn.

Sure, this was in the Nineties. And the book was published ten years earlier, in 1985. It was, as they say, a different time. But I definitely knew this was icky when I read it, and I’m betting plenty of other people did when it first came out. Much like Steel Magnolias, this is an all-white version of the south where black characters (such as the above-mentioned Johnny Dobbs) are either totally absent, or mentioned but never allowed to speak for themselves.

So this is what my Aunt A thought was the acceptable southern literature she wanted me to emulate instead of stories of supernatural adventures where women curse and prejudice is evil. I don’t know if she ever read any of my Tufa novels before she died; if she did, she never said anything good or bad about them to me, and once I moved out of the South, we lost touch. But I can’t imagine she approved of them.

And running across this dog-eared copy of Raney brought it all back. Since shame is the great Southern motivator, I’m certain this was her—genteel, of course, and with only my own best interests at heart—attempt to shame me into writing something that didn’t embarrass her and the family. Luckily, by that point I was secure enough in my own authorial voice that there was no way I’d ever try to write like this. Raney is a racist apologia disguised as harmless gentle humor, and whatever else you can say about my novels, they don’t apologize for racism.

And, lest you wonder, Raney has never gone out of print. Because the white “southern lit” crowd eats this stuff with a spoon.

So, sorry, Aunt A. Oh, and cool women do cuss.

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Addendum: There was a movie version of Raney made in 1997, but it’s impossible to find even a review of it, let alone a DVD or streaming copy. Only the IMDB page, and my own dim memory of an article in the Nashville Scene about its production, prove its existence. The lead actress apparently never made another film, and the director vanished as well. But it did have James Best in it.