92
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
“TO TAKE THE EDGE OFF” a review by Sharon Colley Terry Roberts. The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival. New York and Nashville, TN: Turner Publishing Company, 2018.
SHARON COLLEY is currently a Professor of English at Middle Georgia State College in Macon, GA. She has a PhD from Louisiana State University, where she did research on social class and status in Lee Smith’s works. She earned an MA in English from the University of Tennesse-Knoxville. Her BA degrees in English and Communications are from Mercer University in Macon, GA. TERRY ROBERTS’s first two novels received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, given by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association and the Historical Book Club of North Carolina: A Short Time to Stay Here (Ingalls Publishing Group, Inc., 2012), the subject of an interview with Roberts in NCLR 2014, and That Bright Land (Turner Publishing Company, 2016), reviewed in NCLR Online 2017). His other honors include the 2017 James Still Award for Writing in the Appalachian South, the 2016 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, and the 2012 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Roberts grew up near Weaverville, NC. His family has lived in Madison County, NC, since the Revolutionary War. He is the director of the National Paideia Center in Asheville, NC.
Terry Roberts’s third novel, The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival, is not an attempt to accurately depict Appalachian evangelicals; readers seeking such accounts should look elsewhere. Instead, the novel uses ribald humor and a trickster figure to explore how people cope with life’s challenges, ultimately championing the cause of the common man. Protagonist Jedidiah Robbins loses his beloved wife in a drowning accident. Fast forward approximately eighteen years, and he is a traveling evangelist, roaming the South with his own train and team, preaching his version of the gospel to grateful crowds. However, his moral authority could be considered compromised by the fact that he also sells moonshine. In fact, he has an advance team that goes ahead to sell the product, creating plenty of guilty souls for the revival – and for the collection plate, making money off the people a second time. Ironically, when his advance man is caught by small town officials, Jedidiah agrees to preach an antiliquor sermon as punishment; the speech is so effective that it catapults him into mini-preacher stardom as a temperance leader. This new identity proves to be good for both the preaching business and the whiskey business, as he is often seen as above suspicion. The novel bristles with broad and clever humor, as Jedidiah and his team repeatedly escape from local authorities and find ways to outsmart those opposed to moonshine, an attitude frequently tied to
a classist or authoritarian mindset. Trickster-like antics abound, such as selling Bibles out of one side of a train car and moonshine out the other, depending on the crowd. The tone is often more reminiscent of Southwestern humor or William Faulkner’s comic moments than more searching texts such as Lee Smith’s 1995 Saving Grace. That novel’s protagonist, Grace Shepherd, struggles with faith, sex, and identity as the daughter of an imperfect traveling evangelist, but the spiritual world remains real for Grace, even as she wrestles with belief and morality. Jedidiah’s own beliefs are more difficult to ascertain. The numerous sermons presented have the flavor of evangelical revival preaching and, periodically, Jedidiah seems concerned about spiritual issues such as the salvation of his team members. He routinely hears voices, usually from his deceased wife, and has some unusual visions. Despite these moments, the ever-present moonshine, the attempts to trick congregations out of their funds, and the habit of offering “spiritual” guidance to attractive females suggests Jedidiah is a huckster. To Jedidiah’s way of thinking, however, he may be something else. His preaching provides him a way to cope with the “edge” (179), as he explains to the implausible character of Henry Louis Mencken. The “Sahara of the Bozart” author has read about Jedidiah’s famous temperance sermon and found the preacher, initially hoping to expose him as a fraud.* In a private
* H.L. Mencken, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” New York Evening Mail 13 Nov. 1917: web; rpt. in Mencken’s Prejudices: Second Series (Jonathan Cape, 1921) 136–54.