If one is writing about a specific region, culture and history of the country, it is helpful if the author is “from here,” as the mountain slang expression goes. In the case of Dale Neal’s new novel The Kings of Coweetsee (a county name that is apparently from “some garbled Cherokee word that no one remembers”), he is a native of North Carolina and has lived and written here in the Southern Appalachians being a former reporter, arts and book reviewer for the Asheville Citizen Times newspaper. Since then, he has written several novels and has been nominated and has won major literary awards. As someone well-respected and who writes as eloquently as other well-established Southern Appalachian fiction writers such as Frazier, Rash, Caldwell and Joy, Dale Neal “makes this his best and most potent book” in the words of Keith Flynn who is also “from here” and founding Editor of the Asheville Poetry Review.
Set in the mountains of Western North Carolina, as are his other books, and in what is a character-driven novel, there are many lucid and even lascivious characters in multiple plot lines and some with great rural Appalachian nicknames such as “Junk” Jackson, Aunt Zip, Shadrack Smathers, Cutworm and the two main characters of Roy Boy and Birdie. In what is, in essence, a love story, the tale starts with a drive into Coweetsee and “a place that boasts more barns than people,” and with Roy Boy and Birdie, who are now middle-aged and divorced, but still in communication and, for Roy’s part, still in love. He’s running for the office of Sheriff of Coweetsee County where “voters got their dollars up front for voting for the right man,“ and the law spends their time “galavanting about these hills and hollers … burning moonshine stills and marijuana patches, then raiding meth labs.” And Neal adds: “ It was a wonder any crime ever got solved in Coweetsee since all those men did was park their butts on broken cane-bottom chairs, drink bad coffee, and then the harder stuff after hours.”
On the other hand, Birdie is in charge of the Coweetsee Historical Society and its museum and, as a youth with a perfect pitch voice, was a ballad singer, “which is something she took up again after she ran off with the hippie,” Roy Boy ruminates. Meanwhile, the county’s bad boy, Charlie Clyde (“who had always been a terror, a one-man crime wave,”), has been released from prison, where he has been for an extended stay on an attempted murder charge complicated by the mysterious drowning death of a young woman.
Dale Neal is old enough to know and remember “the old ways” and, particularly, ways of speaking. He poetically gives us plenty of both in Kings of Coweetsee, which reads, in part, almost like Smoky Mountain Voices and Southern Talk, books written a generation ago in folk dictionaries filled with Southern Appalachian speech. We get “snot otters” (slang for water dogs), “more devils than deacons in these parts,” “evildoers,” the expression “you dumb shank!,” “a silver-tongued devil,” “the shiftless layabouts in the far hollers from town,” and “a looker” (for a woman of beauty) to name but a few. So, one could say that, on one hand, Kings of Coweetsee is an introduction to a place and its people “with random gunfire and chainsaws from the hollers below,” and on the other hand is a softly-written crime noir novel with certain personalities being more interestingly important than their crimes. Or, in the words of the character Maurice Posey contemplating his family upbringing as self-sufficient agriculturists living on a few acres of mountain land near Laurel Creek: “There were higher occupations than managing manure and starving to death on a sloped land when all the best dirt rolled down into the brown river year after year.”
Halfway through the book and after we’ve become “residents” of Coweetsee and intimate with all the locals, Neal delves deeper into the storyline and the methods behind the madness of what is mostly a tale of male morass and feminine flair. We’ve got Roy Boy’s escapades as he’s running for Sheriff; developers clearing and grading lots for gated communities “with fancy houses popping up like pimples on the ridge lines”; and brigands of locals raiding the Coweetsee barns for wood. We have a perfect paragraph on page 192 of the 1960s Hippie counterculture and the on-going love triangle between Roy Boy, Birdie and her second spouse, Talmage, who is “a city boy turned rural romantic,” who even having died of cancer is still Roy Boy’s unrealistic rival. But Neal doesn’t stop there. He takes us to the “back of the beyond” with kudzu and tobacco beds, into the culture of local yokels, Nash Ramblers, Confederate flags and Jesus Saves signs and then into the present day of cell towers and “whoever has the money makes the rules.” Birdie had wanted to leave Coweetsee when she was in college, “but Birdie has stuck.’ Damn James Dickey,’ that’s all she could say.” In this Southern Appalachian tome, Dale Neal describes small town rural western North Carolina to a tee and has created a kind of “dance” made of characters and conversation, making it a true authentic gem to read.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas Crowe is the author of the award-winning memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods and publisher of New Native Press. He lives in Jackson County, North Carolina.