Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail

by Louise Shivers

When Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail was first published in 1983, it was named the best first novel of the year by USA Today. Set in the tobacco country of North Carolina in 1937, the story is told through the voice of Roxy Walston, the 20-year-old daughter of the town undertaker, wife of a struggling tobacco farmer, and mother of a two-year-old. When Jack Ruffin, a wanderer looking for work, is sent out to the farm to help Roxy's husband, things are set in place that change Roxy's life forever.

"With this absorbing first novel we meet an author richly endowed and sure of her way. She puts to her use an honest, accurate and selective eye, a dramatic sense very much alive, and best of all a sensitivity to the pull and charm and magnetism, even fatality, of human characters whom life has thrown together in their time and place." Eudora Welty

"A masterpiece, a jewel, an utterly brilliant piece of work." Los Angeles Times

"Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail sets us on fire." New York Times

"A breathtakingly accomplished piece of work." Washington Post

Genres: Fiction, Book Club, Historical Fiction, Southern

141 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[F Clark]

Beautifully written coming of age story, in a manner of speaking., since the protagonist/narrator comes of age rather late. The novel examines the clash of complacency or setting and passion.

Not terribly impressed with the resolution of that conflict, but others will not likely have similar qubbles.

Recommended.

[Mic]

I'm glad I put my hands on this one. It's a small book with a slow build and no wasted pages. I look forward to finding the movie, Summer Heat, in which Kathy Bates plays Ruth.

--I just watched the trailer on Amazon. That voice over! I'm dead =)

[Linda]

I love novels with quirky Southern characters. Beautiful writing rich with fresh metaphors.

[Nancy LiPetri]

Literary fiction at its best, the story is told in a unique voice with descriptions so creative I'd stop and dwell on them, yet the writing instead of slowing me down kept propelling me forward to find out what would happen to 20-year-old Roxy. It transports you to the tobacco-growing days of 1937 North Carolina with such vividness. I said WOW out loud when the author's clever meaning of the title, which you learn right away is a song lyric (you can hear the Everly Bros sing it on YouTube), finally became crystal clear. I sent the novel to my Kindle based on other reviews and the fact that it won "Best First Novel," and am so glad I did. Be sure to read "about the author" at the end.

[Allison Malter]

“…Here to get my baby out of jail” is a phrase from a song that plays over and over throughout the summer of 1937 in a small tobacco town in North Carolina. The young woman Roxy narrates a story full of rhythm and melancholy. As a reviewer in the New York Times said, “It’s a tale that’s been told…a thousand times before. But, oh my, the atmosphere that [the author]…has given to this version of it…”

[Trish]

A coming-of-age story set in the rural, tobacco-growing part of North Carolina,

[Susan Davis]

So v good! So v old timey small town South

[Sue]

I stumbled across this book and the title was so great that I had to read it.

Turns out the title is a song lyric and worth a youTube listen. I like the version by the Everly Brothers.

This is a slow burn of a story. A young and very naive married girl becomes enamored of a farm hand her husband brought home. One thing leads to another and eventually the husband is dead.

There is no excitement, no car chase, no volatility to speak of but just a slow unfolding of the summers events. And the writing!!!! My God! I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t wait for the next sentence. I was never once shocked or surprised but I was always enthralled by the beauty of the writing.

[Kim]

A librarian friend suggested that I read this book and I was not disappointed. Southern literature at its finest.
This is a good weekend read, set in the late 1930s in a small NC tobacco town. 20 year old bored Roxy is a tobacco farmer's wife when a good looking drifter wanders through town looking for work.

[Lindsey]

Smart, interesting, intimate short novel. There's outward drama but it's mostly an internal novel. "I was used to a feeling of dread, I had been born with it, so when the most dreadful things happened, the feeling of dread had been there so long that the shock was dulled for me."

[Carrie Highley]

Really enjoyed reading this book.

[Jodell]

I actually watched the movie of this book in the 1980's. I did not know at the time it was a book. I found it the other day and thought Id give it a go. The movie is called "Summer Heat". I have no clue why they named this book "Here to get my Baby out of Jail", except it is a song her daddy sings by the Everly Brothers.

So in the Movie in 1930's on a tobacco farm a 20 year old Roxie is living the life that has been planned for her and countless other women of that era. Until one day a handsome worker comes to help with the tobacco farming. They quickly fall into lust while the husband forms a fast friendship with the man. Only thing is the worker is obsessed with Roxie. So he plans to kills Roxy's husband and kidnaps Roxy and baby her 1 year old child. Roxy has no clue of the plan but is in shock from it afterwards. He gets caught in the end and gets the electric chair for his crime but the movie dose not say much about the aftermath of Roxie and what happens afterward.

In the book you get a better look at the dynamics of a husband who basically ignores Roxy and is a man's man. He likes his men friends to visit and talk to and sex is just sex his wife is the cook and cleaner that is it. He never holds her or just talks to her or any of the things that she craves. When the worker gives her those things she falls hard. Oh what a little attention will do. So in the book it explains the ending much better. What happens to Roxy and her baby and how the town people feel about her and what she dose after he husband is murdered. Facing the consequences of being a cheater, having a affair, her husband being killed. All because of a need. A need that Roxy could not speak of back then and her husband didn't understand. Well even today this happens it sums it up in a quote: "what we have here is a failure to communicate". The hard stuff, the personal stuff, the scary stuff, the important stuff.

I really liked this book and movie because I could imagine it in my head how lonely Roxy must have been and been at age 20. A new baby, her mother is dead, her husband is always gone. The longing for something she couldn't explain. I don't necessarily think it was sex she was looking for. It was so much more. And a lot of men don't know how to give it and woman don't know how to ask for it and there is not one particular name I could give it but a longing for more. A longing to be known.
A little whisper of a book that slowly breezed from fingers to my head out my ear. But sometimes it slips back in and I can vividly see Roxie and her baby standing on the porch looking out at the tobacco fields wondering what if anything was out there waiting for her.

[Gila Gila]

*SOME SPOILERS*
It doesn't get more Down Home South than this. A 1937 funeral home surrounded by the smell of curing tobacco, the hired help a crew of straggling man-boy drifters who just land there, one way or the other, hauling cardboard suitcases; and a narrator named Roxy, a lonely farmer's wife, whose fascination with one of these men - budding in the first two pages - turns to summer passion and eventually a death, properly horrific for this genre. The buildup of heat between the 2 lovers crackles and burns and the story holds attention even after it's obvious where we'll be landing.

At only 141 pages, the book is almost a novella, though any more would have been wasteful. What doesn't work is the clash between the historical tone and the insertion of 1983 language of Finding the Self: "I'd never had a self before, and now I'd found it here in a tourist camp in Georgia." "I was going to have to do it myself. I was here alone and I'd have to figure it out for myself." "The man that I was so wild for all he summer was made out of something in my own self. Something that wanted to and see and do different things." The 80s were the beginning of "feelingism" in literature, overwrought emotions displacing description, detail and dialogue. It pops up in Here to Get my Baby Out of Jail, but amidst writing that otherwise rings true.

Honey, won'tcha fetch me some of them snap beans and a Co-Cola? I'm busy reading, won't be but a minute til I'm done.

[Elliot Ratzman]

“Our motions were like the unrolling of a Persian carpet. Our tongues were the tenderest chameleons of spring.” Someone in my book club called this “a cross between Brokeback Mountain and Bridges of Madison County.” I added that it reminded me of Camus’ The Stranger. Roxy, our young protagonist, is in a fog—of adulterous lust and small town inertia—until tragedy snaps her into selfhood, into agency: southern-fried existentialism. Written in the 1980s and made into a middling film, Summer Heat (1987), it is a taunt little novella about a farm town love triangle in North Carolina during the 1930s. It was written by a late-blooming Shivers, who was compared to Flannery O’Connor, when she was in her 50s. Everyone is quiet in this story of Southern summer heat, but the taciturn silences lead to tragedy. Her writing is spare, almost Biblical. There’s not much on plot, or philosophical insight, but it is a sharp little book with lovely images evoking the ‘bacca-growing N. Carolina atmosphere.

[May Ling]

I quite liked this book, which kept me awake and engaged throughout. The topic and the imagery is not for the faint of heart. It resonates quite realistically and draws you into the crazy situation.

Shivers definitely takes you back to another time. Her ability to write in colloquial language is reminiscent of Zora Neal Hurston. I still think Hurston is ever so slightly better. That said, I have no doubt if a different subject matter was chosen, that Shivers would be added to every US reading list to diversify point of view in literature. I look forward to coming across her other titles.

Also, this book is great for travel given it's length and the quality of the writing. Highly recommend.

[Loco4Libros]

A slight, little beauty. A wisp of a novel weighing in at 145 pages that blows through like the refrain of an old Appalachian murder ballad. (The title IS actually taken from an old song!) Originally published, to much acclaim as they say, in 1983. beautiful descriptions and period details. The book is set in 1937 in a NC tobacco town and tells the story of a doomed, aren't they always, love triangle.

[Ann]

I'm ashamed to admit that I'd never heard of Louise Shivers until I read her recent obituary and learned she wrote her first book at the age of 53. I was completely entranced by this tale of a love triangle and finished it in an afternoon. Although one can sense the tragic ending to come, in the meantime the romance sizzles in the small tobacco farming community in North Carolina in the 1930s. One can almost smell the tobacco curing.

[Sharon]

Steamy summer on the tobacco farm. Well-written and well-paced short book about a love triangle in 1930's North Carolina. The author died this past summer (2014)and there was a short article about her work and death in our local newspaper. This book was hailed as wonderful so I immediately put in a request at the library (late July) and just received in a couple days ago (late October). I am glad I was steered towards this 30-year-old book.

[Tim Armstrong]

Yet another book that’s collected dust on my bookcase virtually since publication!
It was hailed and praised upon publication and I was given my copy as the publishing company I was working for was publishing the book locally, in Australia.
I think I waited a tad too long, as it was a little dated but still plenty to enjoy and one obvious one - the writing was special!

[Darlene]

At sixteen Roxy married a North Carolina tobacco farmer. At 20, with a toddler, her daily grind had lost its luster in the summer heat, until Jack moved in as a hired hand. Restless recklessness plants seeds of its own, which provided grist for a quiet small town in 1937.

[Jo]

I'd rate it another half star if I had the option. Good solid southern feeling and writing about an ill-fated love triangle.

[Kimberlyn]

slow

[Carol Johnson]

Really enjoyed this book! Great Southern writing...easy read....gripping plot....believable, interesting characters. Very strong female characters. I read it cover to cover in 2 days.

[Jennifer Cain]

Quick, interesting read. Loved the setting!!! (NC 1937).

[Kathy Brooke]

Found about author because she died just recently. Only published two novellas. This is a short story that packs a punch. I recommend it especially if you like southern lit.

[Linda]

A love story set in tobacco country.

[Leslie Rawls]

Great writing but not a cheerful book by any stretch.