Opposable Thumbs, by Suzanne Hudson

Livingston, AL: Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama, 2001

$12.95 (paper), 146 pp.

It has just occurred to me that in the course of the thirty or so book review/commentaries of the last ten months, I have never mentioned the publishers of the books. Most established writers, like Winston Groom, have New York or Boston publishing houses, but many of our Alabama writers have chosen to publish with houses inside the state. Mary Ward Brown, John Sledge, Jay Lamar and Jeanie Thompson used the venerable University of Alabama Press in Tuscaloosa. Frank Hollon and Mary Lois Timbes chose The Over the Transom Publishing Company of Fairhope. William Cobb, an established fiction writer, chose Crane Hill Publishers of Birmingham for his latest. Norman McMillan had his memoir Distant Son published by the Cahaba Trace Commission of Briarfield, Alabama as its very first book in the Voices along the Trace Series. David Warner, Wayne Greenhaw, and others have chosen River City Publishing of Montgomery, while Jacqueline Matte and John and Clara Ruth Hayman went with NewSouth Books, also of Montgomery.

Today’s book will be out of yet another, the seventh, Alabama publishing company. Opposable Thumbs is a feisty collection of short stories by Baldwin County resident Suzanne Hudson, published by Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama.

The title story comes first. It is an axiom of such collections that the volume should have a strong start, to engage the reader’s interest. Hudson begins thusly: "Kansas Lacey was twelve years old the summer Leo Tolbert carelessly took up a sharp hatchet, chopped off his five-year-old brother Cooter’s thumb, and threw it up on the sloping tin roof of the jailhouse." This is in the old Southern Gothic style, eh?

Since it is a premise of this story that our evolutionary process is at least partly a result of our opposable thumbs, it seems that Cooter’s developmental progress may be retarded. Well, not only his, but evolution of many of the characters in these startling stories. Leo’s daddy, the jailer, rapes all the female prisoners, and an innocent black man is found in the woods, hanged by the Klan. "Every one of his fingers and toes was missing and some said they were passed out amongst the Klansmen as souvenirs." This story, like many of the tales in Opposable Thumbs, is a sixties story---the nineteen sixties.

The story that closes this volume, "LaPrade," was published in Penthouse twenty-five years ago as the winner of the Penthouse contest, from among 7,500 entries, with Toni Morrison and Kurt Vonnegut as the judges, and it is really something.

LaPrade, a demented, depraved retarded man, lives with his daughter Missy and their baby, as yet unnamed. He goes to town only once a week, for staples and small gifts for Missy. LaPrade is a violent man with a "soul unredeemed and threatening," but Missy usually dominates. In fact, if LaPrade misbehaves, Missy ties him to a fence post with a rope around his neck, like a dog. He forgets a lot, like a dog, and runs, only to be jerked up short. This is not the South of Scarlett and Tara. This is the South of Erskine Caldwell.

In another story, "Yard Sale," the influence of the Georgia writer Harry Crews seems evident. Donny Ray, Fuqua, and John, three rednecks, one with a master’s degree in English, all are drinking themselves to death on the occasion of the educated one’s wife leaving him. They are fifteen years out of Flomaton High and still talking about the big game their senior year when they were football stars and, therefore, somebody. Fuqua, at the end of the narrative, is beginning to suspect his life is not worth much. Changes must be made. Does he have it in him?

There are ten stories in this book, five long and five short. More than one deals with the consequences of incest, several deal with the literally painful issue of race. Highly charged sexual feelings abound. Hudson has moved the fictional location of most of these stories to Georgia, but that is just an attempt to be decorous. No one is fooled.