Book’s Strength Lies in Its Silences

The subject matter of Steve Yarbrough’s new novel would have been equally congenial to William Faulkner. In 1902, the last vestiges of Reconstruction are fading from the Mississippi Delta; Jim Crow is taking over. The postmaster of the town of Loring is an African American woman, Loda Jackson. Her tenure--backed by the Republican administration of Theodore Roosevelt--provides Tandy Payne, scion of a once-powerful planter family, the opportunity to transform himself from shiftless gambler to rabble-rousing politician.

Yet Yarbrough, except sometimes in dialogue, doesn’t write like Faulkner. He’s closer to Hemingway in his terseness and indirection. Where Faulkner explored moral labyrinths in prose as tangled as Delta swamps and canebrakes, Yarbrough says things simply and clearly. It’s what he leaves out--the silences that hint of family secrets and thinly buried atrocities--that gives the story its power.

The worst of these atrocities took place 20 years earlier on the Paynes’ plantation, aptly named the Deadening. A traveling preacher was recruiting farm laborers to emigrate to Liberia. Tandy’s father, Sam, who believed that “there were not enough riches in this world to go around, and if you meant to have anything, you had to work folks right into the ground,” led a posse that murdered the preacher and more than a dozen followers, frightening the rest into returning to the fields.

Tandy longs to recover the plantation, sold after Sam’s death, and the privileged life he knew as a boy. But his older brother, Leighton, appalled by the massacre, has rejected this heritage, as Faulkner’s Isaac McCaslin did in “The Bear” and “Delta Autumn.” Now mayor of Loring and editor of its newspaper, Leighton expresses moderate racial views in a column that, like Don Marquis’ “Archy and Mehitabel,” claims to have been written by a cockroach.

Tandy’s campaign to remove Loda from office exacerbates his split with Leighton. It also isolates those in Loring who have a stake in racial harmony, from Loda’s husband, Seaborn, whose thriving insurance business has seemed to point the way for ambitious blacks, to a Jewish storekeeper who fled pogroms in Poland and sees something similar about to break out in his new home.

This is Yarbrough’s second novel, following “The Oxygen Man” and three collections of short stories. “Visible Spirits” is fairly short, it has a large cast, and it jumps from one point of view to another, each chapter leaving us with at least one question that we’re obliged to file in the backs of our minds, because the answer may be a long time in coming.

What happened, for example, between Tandy and Leighton’s wife, Sarah, before the action begins? What makes Loda so uncomfortable around Leighton, who seems to be trying to help her? What’s the link between Loda and Blueford, a farm worker whose supposed insolence to Tandy in the post office is just the excuse he needs to start agitating?

The answer in each case will come, but to be ready for it requires more alertness than we may bring to such an apparently simple narrative. Make no mistake: Yarbrough is a sophisticated writer, even to a fault. His heroes (even TR, who fails to recognize potential allies in white Southerners like Leighton) are ineffectual; his villains are understandable; his episodes of violence are rendered glancingly, as if the Delta miasma of self-serving myth shrouds them not just in recollection but at the moment they happened. The Hollywood climax is denied us.

Is this the best way to tell the story? Fictionally, we could argue either way. Historically, we can say Yarbrough lets no sentiment intrude on the facts: This was when, for slaves’ descendants in an area known as “the South of the South,” hope was extinguished for at least a generation to come.