The Dixie Association: A Novel

by Donald Hays

Meet the Arkansas Reds, the oddest, craziest, rowdiest bunch of sluggers ever to step out of a dugout. The lineup consists of an ex-con first baseman named Hog, a couple of real Reds on loan from Castro, some young bucks on their way up and worn-out old-timers on their way down, a few wild Indians, a woman, a pitcher named Genghis Mohammad, Jr., and a lecherous knuckle-baller — all led by a one-armed Marxist and former major-leaguer named Lefty. Hog chronicles a season with the Reds as they travel from one seedy southern ballpark to another, always barely a step ahead of the small-town sheriffs and right-wing evangelists who think these motley minor-leaguers are an insult to “America’s game.”

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Fiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Donald Slaven Hays aka: “Skip” Hays

Arkansas author Donald Slaven “Skip” Hays has published novels and short stories as well as edited an anthology of Southern short stories. He served as director of the Programs in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) from 1998 to 2013. Hays is most noted for his novel The Dixie Association, written in 1984 and reprinted as part of the Louisiana State University Press’s series Voices of the South (1997).

Skip Hays was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on June 14, 1947. His father, Donald E. Hays, a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, returned to Arkansas with his family to farm and work in a furniture factory. His mother, Mary Slaven Hays, taught school. Hays and his brother, Philip, grew up in Van Buren (Crawford County) in the midst of a huge family of grandparents, aunts, and uncles who loved to tell a good story.

As a young boy attending school in rural Arkansas, Hays read voraciously. His mother encouraged his reading, often borrowing books for him at the library at Fort Chaffee (Sebastian County). Hays earned a BA in English from Southern State College (now Southern Arkansas University) in Magnolia (Columbia County) in 1969.

Soon after graduation, Hays faced being drafted by the military to serve in Vietnam. He believed that “people should never be asked to fight and die for a cause as vague” as the one in Vietnam. He was granted status as a conscientious objector and served two years in alternative service as a psychiatric aide at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) Medical Center. The painful choices his generation made regarding Vietnam became a recurring theme in his writing.

Hays married Patricia Chambers on September 28, 1968, and the couple has one son. The young family lived near Mountainburg (Crawford County), where Hays wrote a novel about Cabeza de Vaca, a sixteenth-century century Spanish nobleman who led survivors of a failed expedition through Florida and the southwest. Although the 900-page manuscript written over three or four years was never published, the experience taught Hays much about storytelling and perseverance. For eight years, he played semiprofessional baseball on Cape Cod and in eastern Oklahoma while holding other jobs, such as the two years he worked in Van Buren as a social worker with foster children and with abused or neglected children and juveniles.

Hays received an MFA in creative writing at UA in 1983. His first published novel, The Dixie Association (1984), about an Arkansas minor league baseball team, loosely based upon the Arkansas Travelers, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1984. The Dixie Association centers upon ex-convict Hog Durham and his ragtag teammates who play minor league baseball for the Arkansas Reds. Critics have called this witty, satirical, Southern baseball novel sacrilegious, exquisitely funny, and occasionally poetic. The 1997 reprinting of the novel in the Voices of the South series recognizes The Dixie Association’s established position in the history of Southern fiction.

Hays’s other works include the novel The Hangman’s Children (1989) and Stories: Contemporary Southern Fiction (1989), edited by Hays. His short story “Dying Light” was reprinted in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best (2003). His most recent work, Dying Light and Other Stories (2005), is a collection of Hays’s short stories. In 2006, he was awarded the Porter Prize, Arkansas’s premier literary award. He retired from UA in 2013.


Mary Hawks
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Library

Reviews

[Matt Simmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wild ride. A book both hilarious and hilariously erudite, that sends up the tropes of Southern literature in a wonderfully fun manner. Those familiar with Southern literature, culture, and history will find names and plot points hidden throughout that will be uproariously funny. But besides getting the jokes--like the Milledgeville, GA team being called the Peacocks (Flannery O'Connor, Milledgeville's most famous resident, raised peacocks and is closely associated with the bird)--The Dixie Association is a powerful, Swiftian satire of the "New South." While Hays sometimes comes down too harshly on the low-hanging fruit of politicians and religious zealots, he nevertheless writes with a grace that makes the book immensely compelling and enjoyable.

Much of this is accomplished through Hog Durham, our protagonist and narrator. Hog, a charming, foul-mouthed thief, is a working-class everyman, a fellow who just wants to get by. Of course, he's done terrible things to other people in the course of "just getting by," and the novel serves as a narrative of Hog's coming to terms with his own evil, and, in his own way, rectifying and repaying this evil, trying to do something worthwhile in the world.

As it is for Hog, so it is for most of the other characters in the novel, too. The love stories and the friendships are moving and powerful; in all, this book is the story of a bunch of misfits banding together to pay for their sins and to try to make some sort of positive mark in the world. Often times, these attempts at good and positivity are painfully, even boringly, everyday. These aren't characters out to change the world--not even the many dedicated Socialists who populate the novel. Rather, they simply try to make things better in the most quotidian ways possible. And for this, these misfits are heroes. Those who try to change the world? Well, they're the objects of Hays' damning satire.

A book, then, of hope, of love, of friendship, and, of course, baseball--and the games are fabulously rendered. Hilarious and ribald, just like its characters, The Dixie Association is a wonderfully fun and powerful novel of the dark, confused days of the 1970s for both the South and America. It's one of those books that makes your heart bigger from reading it.

[Nils Samuels · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite baseball novel, because it seems the most playful and the most understanding of what the game can and cannot do. Wonderful first-person narrator. The company it generates stands in stark contrast to the isolation of Coover's =Universal Baseball Association=. Two different leagues, two different worlds, both worth inhabiting for a while.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Dixie Association is regarded by several baseball fiction aficionados I know as one of the all-time great baseball novels. I agree it's in the conversation somewhere, on the list if you're compiling a top 20 or 30, but for me it doesn't quite make that elite rank.

What knocks it down a little is the constant, often hyperbolic, political jabbing at virtually everyone to the right of Hog Durham on the political spectrum, which is just about everyone. I'm coming at this as someone with a left-leaning political viewpoint, but also as someone who quickly wearies of the fractious red state vs blue state mindset we seem to have sunk into in this country. Each reference by itself wouldn't grate, but compiled upon each other for 384 pages, they grew a little tiresome. As did Hog's repeated introspection on how hard it was for a scoundrel like himself to settle down and appreciate a woman who loves him. Get over it already, dude.

That aside, it really was a good book. The baseball is very well done. Hays clearly understands the game, how it's played, how pitchers pitch and how hitters hit. The Dixie Association, while fictional, comes off as a realistic minor league, though as poorly run as it seemed to be, I would almost have expected it to fold midseason. The characters are colorful and well drawn, from the main ones down to the bit players on the roster. The language Hog Durham uses as the first-person narrator is wild and creative and paints very vivid images of the people and places described.

All in all a solid four stars, but I can't quite rank it with some of my all-time favorite baseball novels, such as The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Celebrant: A Novel, The Art of Fielding, Home, Away, The Might Have Been: A Novel, The Fade Away, and The End of Baseball.

[John Paul Gairhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Nothing is ever all the time.”

-

“May whatever grace yet abides in this most and least human of centuries be with us all, doomed dancers every one, until the last Amen.”

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

11 years ago I found this book on a cart outside a used book store. The price tag still says $0.48 but I think it probably was less than that. I finally decided it was time to read it. Wish I’d never picked it up. Story and the characters really didn’t hold my interest and the books climaxed on the final page with no wind down which I hate. It didn’t bother me but it he book also had a lot of what was probably true southern vocabulary in the early 80s when it was written and takes place but it’s very off color now.

[Wesley Prewett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has it all. A one-armed Communist coaches a ragtag minor league baseball team full of Native Americans, Cubans, and ex-cons, much to the dismay of the local Baptist congregants. They’ve got a Black Israelite on the mound and a beauty queen playing first base.

I had a really good time with this one. The plot points were outright silly at times and the dialogue was sometimes sharp and witty. It’s a little crude, but it certainly fits within the universe of Hays’ contemporaries, including Barry Hannah and Donald Harington.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

One really has to be au fait with baseball terminology to get the most from this book.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

what a howler! Donald Hays reclaims your "inner-adolescence" while serving up a knuckleball of grown-up irreverence aimed mostly at the "Bringing in the Sheaves" gospel crowd. Hog Durham, on probationary release from the pen, pitches more than baseball and, as expected, the strange lot of players win your heart as well as the playoffs. Allow yourself to read only five pages at a sitting; it is too good to rush!

[Manray9 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hay's "The Dixie Association" is a delightful read. It is hilarious, insightful and revealing. It's a picture of Southern life -- warts and all. Hays compares well with the late great Harry Crews as an accomplished writer of the distinctively Southern novel. If you love baseball and your culinary heritage features red-eye gravy, RC cola, grits and purple-hull peas, you'll enjoy "The Dixie Association."

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best baseball novel I've ever read. Humor, politics, sex, unforgettable characters. This book should never be out of print.

[Richard Stubbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites. You don't have to like baseball to like the book, but if you do like baseball, you'll like the book.

[Gary Geiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too preachy to get 5 stars, but I loved reading this book back wen I was in high school.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just looking through my books again.


They should have made a movie of this one. Not quite Bull Durham, but close enough

[S. Sheil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful comments, but a bit too much baseball for my taste.