9.12, still.

Last time, Emothan bonded with the apparently telepathic Lena and they had a vision about how Sherman’s march was totally worse than all of slavery put together.

Back home Amma’s cutting up lots of veggies for spring rolls because that way she has a big scary knife when he shows up. Everyone’s been calling her, including half the ladies from the DAR. And you know how I hate talkin’ to those women. Evil as sin, every one a them.”
Gatlin was full of ladies’ auxiliaries, but the DAR was the mother of them all.
True to its name, the Daughters of the American Revolution, you had to prove you were related to an actual patriot from the American Revolution to be eligible for membership. Being a member apparently entitled you to tell your River Street neighbors what colors to paint their houses and generally boss, pester, and judge everyone in town.

Okay, that’s two different things.

Another, more subtle and competent book might easily use this to illustrate how one thing was tied to another – that the social arbitrators of the town required you be related to a Confederate and willing to advertise it for you to have any say of your own in things. But here, it’s just clumsily slapped together that the busybodies of the town are also members of the dumb hick side of the Civil War he hates so much.

Unless you were Amma. That I’d like to see.

Yeah, I’m not thinking lone black woman vs Confederate Light will go down that great.

And that’s why this is failing. There should be a good chunk of the town that could never join the DAR – even if they were unlucky enough to actually be related, I’m thinking there’s not many black women willing to sign up on the basis that one of those shining patriots raped one of their ancestors and no one in the group who’d be willing to let them in anyway.

But no, Amma’s probable race and the race of the people unable to ever join the decisionmaking women of the town is apparently totally irrelevant to this. All that matters is that people who are into the Confederacy are so embarrassing, GOD I HATE LIVING WITH HICKS my life is so haaaaaard.

Must be some other boy disrepectin’ his teacher and sullyin’ his family name. Can’t be a boy I raised

Also the mammy thing is getting more uncomfortable by the minute.

He explains that they were bullying Lena and Jesus loves people who skip class to chat up hot sad girls okay. Shockingly this doesn’t work, so instead he distracts her by saying hey he went to the mysterious house of mystery (she snaps that she knows all about Macon Ravenwood) and then he shows the locket they found. But instead of making her interested, she freaks out – so, maybe the book has remembered that plantation owners = bad people? And it’s wrapped up in some handkerchief and then she pours mysterious powder on it with shaking hands and then it’s stuck in a leather bag and he’s ordered to bury it where he found it and he’s “not ready” to know about why, and also stay away from that Lena girl for similarly unexplained reasons! Yes that will absolutely get him to do exactly what you suggest, I’m sure.

He totally doesn’t do what she says. We join him the next morning in his room where he’s talking about how it’s full of stuff, including the white Adidas box with my lighter collection from my eighth grade pyro phase

Why can’t we have that you as a protagonist? At least random fires would add spice to the narrative.

We learn that he’s in charge of hanging out with the three oldest women in the town, known as the Sisters because down south they pronounce capital letters.

The worst part was, I had to take them to church on Saturdays. The Sisters were Southern Baptist, and they went to church on Saturdays and Sundays, and most other days, too.

So that’s probably a no on the timeshare church, unless the three are a remarkably rare breed of Southern Baptist that doesn’t care what church you go to.

Also, their town’s too small for a movie theater but is able to support at least one full-time pastor, even with part of the population is split between two other churches.

(The fact all three of them are Baptist and there’s a dedicated Baptist church makes me think that really, the town’s just Baptist.)

Anyway he usually hates this but today he’s planning to grill them on the locket.

After the vision, it was obvious the G in GKD stood for Genevieve. But if there was anyone who would know what the rest of the initials stood for, it would be the three oldest women in town.

I read lots of horror and supernatural books when I was younger and you know what the protagonists in those stories did? They went to the library to read through microfilm. He’s obviously at least set foot in the local library because he bitched about the card catalogue. Plus, the date Sherman burned the whole place to the ground except for all the old buildings he evidently didn’t should be pretty well known, and I’m sure there’s at least some record of it around, particularly since we’ve had it thoroughly, thoroughly established that this town is into the War of Abraham Lincoln Was A Vampire Not A Vampire Hunter Dammit. Hell, ask your history teacher! Show him the locket and say you were wondering whose it was and what happened to her. He will grasp your shoulder, tears of joy in his eyes that you’ve embraced your southern heritage, and tell you allllllllll about those tragic young lives cut short inconvenienced by the loss of their property, and also you’ll get an automatic A in that class.

Seriously what the fuck is the point of setting it in a town that’s into the Civil War if that doesn’t let the protagonist do research on the Civil War?!

He then finds one of the freaky voodoo charm dolls in his drawer and tells us again that Amma totally does freaky voodoo charms. They aren’t even cool ones, they look like sock monkeys apparently.

A couple of months later, my dad bought her a kitchen witch on the Internet and hung it over the stove. Amma was so angry she served him cold grits and burnt coffee for a week.

I don’t know if “kitchen witch” is some specific thing or if it’s just some kitschy cooking witch gift. Knowing that would let me better judge how absurd this all is.

Anyway, on to the crazy old ladies. They’re all freaking out.

pronouncing the “E” as if it was a word all by itself. Half the time I couldn’t understand them at all, their accents were so thick and their grammar so bad. But that’s the way it was in Gatlin; you could tell how old someone was by the way they spoke.

Okay, I don’t even like the damn dialect and yet I accept it’s a dialect, and also, your grammar is nothing to write home about as this very sentence demonstrates.

Plus, you’ve lived in this town your whole life and you’ve been spending your weekends with them in particular since you were twelve. If you can’t understand them after all that, that says more about you than them.

Anyway, what happened is really funny! See, one of them tried to beat another one’s dog to death because her eyesight’s going and she thought it was a rat. Harlon James was lying on the kitchen floor, looking traumatized but nowhere close to death. His back leg was tucked up underneath him, and it dragged behind him when he tried to get up. And now they’re stupidly concerned for the dumb animal’s health just because he could have horrible internal damage in addition to a broken leg! Luckily Ethan is there to dismiss their concerns and grudgingly drive the dog to the feed store where there’s a guy who plays vetrinarian in his spare time, but hey, a broken leg and unknown other injuries is no big deal so it’s fine. Because broken legs are such a minor thing for dogs.

I have yet to get any grasp on the economic setup of this town. Do they still farm? They don’t know peaches grow on trees and there’s no mention of the migrant workers they should be enslaving. But if they’ve stopped farming, why do they still have a feed store? Are they keeping around livestock for some old fashioned reason, like everyone agreeing store milk tastes terrible or is full of government mind control nanites so people keep their own cows, but not doing it as a livelihood? What are they doing? We know his dad’s a writer, but you can be a writer anywhere.

Anyway he finally shows them the locket.

“Ravenwood? What the devil were you doin’ out there?”
“My friend’s staying there.”
“You mean Lena Duchannes?” Aunt Mercy asked. Of course she knew, the whole town knew. This was Gatlin.

STOP SAYING THAT. Just reliably show how the town works instead of telling the reader the same exact thing over and over.

Anyway, they recognize the date as Evil Sherman.

They called it the Great Burnin’. At least part a every plantation in Gatlin was destroyed, except Ravenwood.

Oh my goodness at least some part of every plantation was burned? You poor, poor slave owning dears.

Anyway, since Ravenwood wasn’t burned obviously the guy at the time, the amusingly named Abraham Ravenwood, clearly struck a deal with the devil. Also, for some reason his brother disappeared that night and the body was never found.

Anyway, turns out the current Macon Ravenwood is illegitimate.

In Gatlin, being illegitimate was like being a communist or an atheist.

God, this is a shitty, shitty book.

This is set up like it’s trying to give us context for what being illegitimate means in the town, except it’s drawing the comparison to two things that the town presumably has an even weirder view on. It might as well read “In Gatlin, being THING ONE is like FILL IN YOUR SMALL TOWN STEREOTYPES FOR COMMUNIST HATING HERE.” It’s not telling us about Gatlin, it’s requiring us to already hate the place to the point we don’t need to hear anything because we’ll assume the worst.

Also, Silas was generally weird and there was a weird tall black hat stranger wandering around, and he kept a pet wolf, and also he beat the kids constantly.

Apparently, being horribly abused in this place is must be why the guy stays there so much, according to Emothan’s keen grasp of human behavior. As an additional bonus, it’s not like they were solely raised there but they shuttled between the place and their presumably less abusive mother, so they should have had plenty of positive experiences that would have further encouraged them to get the fuck out of Dodge at the first chance.

But instead they say that he doesn’t stay cooped up there at all. I’ve seen him a mess a times over at the DAR buildin’, right after supper time.” which Emothan ignores. I mean, clawing a dream girl falling in mud and ending up with dirt and then meeting her to see the scratches, that’s totally plausible, but a guy being at a place when other people say he’s a shut-in, that’s just crazy talk. And being crazy talk, it’s obviously completely baseless and not worth a single brain cell of wonder at who they’ve been seeing that they mistook for the guy.

Also, the handkerchief used to belong to Sulla Treadeau, Sulla the Prophet they called her who read tarot cards and we get the stunning revelation that Amma is related to someone else who was good at tarot cards and somehow had her handkerchief. Listen, Emothan, I know you’re kind of struggling with the idea of “interesting” but generally, it’s more of a surprise if someone’s made a complete break from their family and has the heirlooms of people they aren’t related to.

Anyway, other initials are naturally about him.

“ECW. Ethan Carter Wate.
…
he was your great-great-great-great-granddaddy Ellis’ brother.”

But he’s see his family tree and there’s no such guy! Because if there’s one thing I think of when I think of families trees in the south, it’s the scrupulous honesty with absolutely no disowning at all.

Weirdly, he doesn’t use the actual sane objection, which is they’re claiming his family deliberately named him after the guy and why wouldn’t they tell him in that case and put the brother back on the family tree?

Anyway, luckily she’s got a different copy to show him because otherwise he’d spend the rest of the book in denial.

“Why isn’t he on my family tree?”
“Most family trees in the South are fulla lies, but I’m surprised he made it onta any copy a the Wate Family Tree,” Aunt Grace said

Thank you! I don’t know why Emothan keeps going on about how crazy and unreliable they are, they seem perfectly lucid, just old.

Anyway, he was a deserter and that made his family kick him off the tree.

“There were two kinds a Confederate soldiers durin’ the War. The ones who supported the cause of Confed’racy and the ones whose families made them enlist.”

Yeah I’m not seeing what that has to do with anything. The first could have lost faith and deserted and the second could be too scared of their family’s reaction to leave.

“By 1865, Lee’s army was beaten, starvin’, and outnumbered. Some say the Rebels were losin’ faith, so they up and left.

That is some quality weasel-wording there.

Anyway Emothan reminds us he doesn’t like the Confederacy by saying he doesn’t see what’s such a big deal about that.

Well, your mamma and daddy had their own ideas ’bout all that, what with all those books they read about the War. You know they’ve always been liberal. Who knows what they were thinkin’? You’d have ta ask your daddy.” Like there was any chance he would tell me. But knowing my parents’ sensibilities, my mom had probably been proud of Ethan Carter Wate.

Yeah, who doesn’t express their pride in their relatives by never mentioning they exist?

I was pretty proud, too.

When the best thing your family tree has to offer is someone who was willing to fight for slavery up until the point it got too rough for him personally, you should maybe just burn the whole thing and start over.

He tries to grill them on the second set of initials, but their dementia is setting in preventing him from getting a good answer, as evidenced by them successfully noticing the time and being upset they’re going to be late for church. Every chapter I find new things to hate about Emothan.

I drove them four blocks to the afternoon service, at the Evangelical Missionary Baptist Church

So it’s confirmed, separate churches.

Anyway the church is very boring, which yes, yes they are.

He keeps fiddling with the locket wondering why “stopped working” because obviously it can’t be that he already saw the vision. Lena suddenly gets back in touch telepathically just in time to go WHAT THE FUCK WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT and then vision time!

She sensed someone behind her, but before she could turn around a muddy hand clamped over her mouth.

That’s right, it’s her boyfriend! You can tell by the hand over the mouth.

“I deserted, Genevieve. I couldn’t fight one more day for somethin’ I didn’t believe in. Not after what I’ve seen. Most a the boys fightin’ with me didn’t even realize what this war is about—that they’re just spillin’ their blood over cotton.”

It really wasn’t over cotton.

Anyway she says she’ll marry him regardless of how poor and hated he’ll be, and then Ivy, Greenbrier’s cook, stumbled into view. She was still in her nightgown, black with smoke. She screamed at the sight of the uniform, too frightened to notice it was gray, not blue.

The cook would probably have been black, but regardless oh she’s so upset about what happened to the precious owners of the place, because of course the evil Union burned their house with her mother and sister inside. Hilariously, more time has been spent bitching about the Union soldiers looting the places, because priorities.

Every one a them will have to answer to God Almighty Himself in the hereafter.”
…
Genevieve looked up at the sky.
“God’s the one who’s goin’ to have to answer to me.”

So…damn, are we doing witches? Evil witches who went crazy evil from the equally evil Union?

Burning a house with women in it, a house lined with lemon trees. A house where I’d bet Genevieve had lost her locket. A locket engraved with the day Lena was born, but over a hundred years before. No wonder Lena didn’t want to see the visions. I was starting to agree with her.
There were no coincidences.

I really don’t follow.