Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506170018
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It would be easy to label Bailey White a pure storyteller squarely in the Southern tradition of storytelling, and leave it at that. She certainly has the gift and if half of her tales are to be believed, the lineage. But more importantly, she has a poet's ear for language.
Most readers have probably heard most of the pieces in this collection on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," where White is a regular contributor. Because she's so popular and so accomplished in that medium, it's nearly impossible to read her stories and essays without hearing her distinctive voice.
"Something about a microphone makes me sound 93 years old," she wrote in an NPR publication, "In normal speaking I sound my age - mid 40s. But I get nervous when a microphone is aimed at me. My vocal chords clamp up, my breath comes in gasps and spit rattles behind my molars When I meet NPR listeners face to face, they fall back, drop their mouths open with horror, and shriek, 'You're not old and wise!'''
White may not be old and wise but she knows how to write, how to use words with seemingly effortless grace and economy. (Of course, it takes a lot of effort to sound effortless.) She also knows to tell her stories from the odd perspective, the angle that's a few degrees off and so gives her subject a new dimension.
And those subjects are deeply Southern, from eccentric relatives - "Eating sounds of all kinds irritated my Aunt El. She had always been irritable, even in sanity." - to the unexpected smalltown encounter - "I was sitting on a bench outside the little library in DeFuniak Springs, Fla., one afternoon when a young man came up to me and asked, 'Is your name Electra?'" She understands how the Southern imagination works, and whenever her work threatens to become coy or sweet, there's the intelligent observation or the odd, funny detail that gives the piece a new direction.
In the opening story, for example, she says, "The first memory I have in this life is of a blackened and petrified dog, curled up in a glass case in a museum in Pompeii." From that beginning she goes on to address her absent father's Hollywood career, typewriter repair, gardening, roses, folkart and - in my own favorite - hot springs.
White describes several different resorts where one "takes the waters" to restore and refresh the soul. Her favorite is nearby:
"The water is clear, and the floor of the pool is lined with smooth round stones. Floating in that hot water with the high disk of cold blue sky above and the warm brown stones below, I can feel the thoughts leaving my head. The little ones go first: squeak in brakes, are my feet becoming larger, forgot to check box Do Not Send This Month's Selection. Then ideas begin seeping out: time and aging, perception of beauty in nature connected with personal involvement, why dead people don't contact me. At last a random slurry of images floats up and drifts away - Anasazi Indian petroglyph, two swans in Suffolk County, Thomas Alva Edison asleep under a laboratory table - until finally my mind is like an empty white room, the bare floor swept clean, the tall windows stripped of curtains.
"I float and float, wandering around in the light and air of that room, enjoying myself, until at last I pause to look out one of those tall windows, and see that it is spring in western Virginia and the lilacs are in bloom."
by CNB