SITTING UP WITH THE DEAD

Freelance travel-writer Petro journeys through Appalachia and the Deep South to visit storytellers and record their tales, with uneven results.

The author divides her text into four “journeys,” automobile trips she took from her Rhode Island home into the South, “a famously talky place.” Between jaunts, she returns to New England for brief sojourns to do laundry and think. “First Journey” begins, appropriately enough, at the home of Joel Chandler Harris in Atlanta, where she hears a storyteller named Akbar Imhotep relate the tale of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby. Then it’s off to Florida (she sees the memorial to Rosewood, a black town razed by whites in 1922), then back to Georgia, where she meets Vickie Vedder, a storyteller who remains a presence principally through e-mails, several of which Petro reproduces at eye-glazing length. When not repeating stories, the writer expatiates on tornado warnings, kudzu, race, snake-handling (she includes a fabulously eerie story about rattlesnakes), motels, chigger bites, Gullah, and ghosts. A few tales appear without interruption, but others are paraphrased, interrupted, modified, or otherwise adumbrated by Petro. Some moments dazzle. She talks with a black woman for three hours before discovering the woman is blind; she tells the bizarre (and implausible) story of a woman born with a blackberry birthmark that darkens each year as the fruit ripens. Most dazzling of all is the intrepid author. She drives deep into the woods, visits the homes of the odd and the eerie, engages anyone and everyone in conversation about stories and storytelling, endeavors to elicit from the reluctant some words of wisdom. Alas, not all stories are created equal, and weirdness alone seldom suffices. More than a few of the tales are lifeless (they beg to be heard, not read), and some of Petro’s epiphanies never advance beyond banal.

Yep, there’s gold in them thar hills—but lots of dross as well. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)