Melanie Joness continues her series The Fifty States of Literature with Padgett Powell’s novel Edisto, set in South Carolina. Enjoy!

Simons Everson Manigault (pronounced Simmons: “I’m a rare one-m Simons”) is the twelve-year-old center of Padgett Powell’s South Carolina-based Edisto. Raised as a potential literary progeny by his mother The Duchess and abandoned by his father The Progenitor, Simons is left to make sense of the world with the help of Taurus, a father-surrogate who hopes to teach him observation without judgment. Simons is a strange and rather fascinating protagonist, both incredibly astute and wrapped up in childhood preoccupations (“I could go split and go to Dresser’s Rexall for a Coke or something, expressly forbidden me by the Doctor now because it makes me hyper she says, but should I drink milk all my life instead or go now on house bourbon? That is not the point”).

Powell extends the same courtesy to his secondary characters, giving them a richness of character that doesn’t mute their absurdity. The Duchess is allowed a whiskey-soaked, Faulkner-quoting freedom, and Powell treads the fine line in using Gullah (Southern African-American slang) between character-development and caricature (Somebody got to hep that boy kotch up. He so far ahead he behine”). Anyone reading Simon’s description of his favorite drink, Tom’s peanuts poured into a Coke bottle, should recognize that we are down South. But in depicting the clash between black and white, cosmopolitan and rural, and the expectations of youth and age, Powell gives to his characters, and his setting, that rare blend of hilarity and dignity.