Appalachee Red by Raymond Andrews

First published: 1978

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: 1918-1963

Locale: Appalachee, Muskhogean County, Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Appalachee Red, a café and gambling-house owner
• Baby Sweet Jackson, Red’s live-in lover, called the “Black Peach”
• Clyde “Boots” White, Appalachee’s police chief and later county sheriff
• Little Bit Thompson, Appalachee Red’s mother
• John Morgan, the heir to the wealthy Morgan estate
• Blue Thompson, the second son of Little Bit Thompson and half brother to Appalachee Red

The Novel

Appalachee Red, the first part of Raymond Andrews’s Muskhogean Trilogy, traces the development of African American life in the American South from just after World War I until the end of 1963. Although the novel is perhaps best described as tragicomic, it presents readers with many truths of the cultural, social, political, and historial milieus of the South during the first half of the twentieth century.

The novel opens in late autumn of 1918, when Big Man Thompson, a twenty-one-year-old African American man, is arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. This is the first of a number of tragic but realistic injustices experienced by African Americans in the South that the author catalogs. Other such experiences include economic oppression, political manipulation, terrorization of the African American community by law enforcement officials, and forced concubinage of African American women as a rite of southern white manhood. These are accepted codes of conduct in Muskhogean County, Georgia, Andrews’s microcosm of the rural South.

Appalachee Red enters town as a mysterious stranger in the fall of 1945 and, with his own brand of manipulation of Appalachee’s African Americans and whites, goes about deliberately and calculatingly claiming the African American community as his own domain. For the next eighteen years, Red is the undisputed and uncontested king of Appalachee, with most of the population fearing his quiet, no-nonsense approach to everything, and just as many envying the number of possessions he amasses, especially Baby Sweet Jackson and Red’s long, black, chauffeur-driven Cadillac limousine.

Readers soon discover, though the townspeople never do, that Red is no mere stranger who happens to wander into Appalachee. Rather, he is a native son, the offspring of John Morgan, the prototype of the wealthy white southern elite, and Little Bit Thompson, one of the Morgan family’s maids. Red has returned to his native Appalachee following a European tour of duty during World War II to claim his birthright as heir to a portion of the Morgan estate and to seek a measure of revenge on those who have wronged him both directly and indirectly.

Red accomplishes this and more. Red drives the police out of the African American community of Appalachee, takes control of the community’s vice, shrewdly manipulates the white community, gives the African American community a degree of pride, and amasses a fortune in the process. As the novel ends, Red leaves Appalachee just as mysteriously as he came, but not before he has given in to the sexual attraction that his white half sister has for him and not before he has killed Boots White, the county sheriff who had pushed Red’s mother into insanity more than twenty-five years earlier.

The Characters

Appalachee Red is told in the folk tradition of African American storytelling. Thus, there is no central plot that develops from beginning to end but rather a number of episodes that are designed to instruct and entertain. Likewise, there is little character development, and many of the characters are types rather than complex characters in the literary sense of the term.

Appalachee Red, for example, is a larger-than-life character. He is a big man, physically, and as powerful and mysterious as he is large in physique. In fact, it may be safe to say that Red is among the most mysterious characters in African American literature, an idea that Andrews capitalizes upon in the narrative. Red is seen primarily through the narrator’s eyes. He speaks very little, a fact that adds considerably to his mystery. In addition, he is described as catlike, again a trait that adds to the power and appeal of the character. Similarly, although there are some facts of Red’s background to which readers are made privy—his real identity as the son of Little Bit Thompson and her white employer, and the fact that he served in World War II in Germany—little is told of what he did during the years leading up to his enlistment in the Army. This lapse of time contributes to the strangeness of Appalachee Red’s sudden appearance in the town of Appalachee. What does become clear upon Red’s equally mysterious departure eighteen years later is that he had revenge in mind all along and that he had gone about exacting that revenge in a quiet, calculated, catlike manner.

Because the impact of the story and its numerous characters depend upon the artistry of the storyteller, Andrews takes full advantage of the options that are available to him. He embellishes some episodes, adds humor to others, recounts tragedy in others, and digresses and backtracks; above all, he seems to have fun while he tells the story. That Andrews was able to adapt the power of the oral tradition to the written page is a tribute to his accomplishment as a writer.

Most of the novel’s other characters are character types. Clyde “Boots” White appears as the stereotypical redneck southern police chief who exploits vice, lust for black women, and fear of the African American community for purposes of control. John Morgan, Sr., appears as the ineffective paragon of the rich white Southerner. Big Man Thompson is portrayed as the quiet, brooding, black brute character, while his wife, Little Bit Thompson, is presented as the long-suffering victim of white sexual and physical brutality. Similarly, Blue Thompson is presented as the young black militant, and Roxanne Morgan is characterized as the white girl infatuated with black men (with Appalachee Red in particular). Each of these characters is presented by a knowledgeable storyteller who not only knows their traits, behavior patterns, and motivations but also knows how to present their overriding problems with a small amount of sympathy and an overwhelming, ribald humor. Their dialect is believable, their actions—while sometimes preposterous—are entirely possible in the context of the story and its setting, and even their names are typical of the time and place. Appalachee Red is a tremendously successful example of storytelling and omniscient narration at its best.

Critical Context

When Appalachee Red was first published in 1978, it was awarded the James Baldwin Prize by its publisher, Dial Press (which also published Baldwin’s work), for its spirited portrayal of African American experience. Other than that recognition, neither Appalachee Red nor the two other novels in the Muskhogean Trilogy attracted much critical attention. This neglect is in large part a result of the unsettling effect that Andrews’s blend of tragedy and comedy has on sensitive readers and is also a result of Andrews’s tendency to serve as a revisionist historian of African American experience.

By the late 1980’s, however, an Andrews revival was initiated with the reissue of Andrews’s Muskhogean Trilogy by the University of Georgia Press. Further evidence that Andrews was beginning to be appreciated came in the publication of two additional books, The Last Radio Baby (1990) and Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Claire (1991). The 1991 annual conference of the College Language Association, a professional organization of African American scholars in literature and languages, featured a symposium on the works of Andrews with a guest appearance by the author. Appalachee Red was beginning to emerge as one of the finest examples of the modern comic novel, and the trilogy itself was awakening widespread acclaim. Although the death of Raymond Andrews by suicide in November, 1991, was an unexpected tragedy, an expanding readership of and scholarship on his work remain assured.

Bibliography

Andrews, Raymond. The Last Radio Baby: A Memoir. Atlanta: Peachtree, 1990. Autobiography that focuses on the author’s youth.

Blundell, Janet Boyarin. Review of Appalachee Red, by Raymond Andrews. Library Journal, October 1, 1978, p. 2005. A brief early review that praises the novel as “pungent, witty, and powerful.”

Contemporary Authors. Vol. 136. Detroit: Gale, 1991. Contains a useful overview of Andrews’s life and career. Highlight is Andrews’s own commentary on his work. Brief bibliography. Includes information on Andrews’s suicide.

Harris, Trudier. “This Disease Called Strength: The Masculine Manifestation in Raymond Andrews’s Appalachee Red.” In Contemporary Black Men’s Fiction and Drama, edited by Keith Clark. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Discusses the relationship between race, masculinity, and power in Andrews’s novel. Bibliographic references and index.

The New Yorker. Review of Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, by Raymond Andrews. August 11, 1980, 90. Brief, laudatory review of Andrews’s second novel that stresses his abilities as a storyteller who “knows just how far to stretch his audiences’ memory and credulity as he spins and weaves his colorful yarns.”