Paperback
Retail Price: $13.95
"Primitive" is what happens when the primal is repressed - when we have to choose between the people we love and the people we are supposed to love.
In the Jim Crow South of the 1940s, black women, unacknowledged and back-door, yet perform vital parenting for white children. White Sally, growing up in the Jim Crow South, looks to black Lila for love and support, and loves her completely, in return. In the 1980s, these two come together again, to form a new relationship.
Paperback
Format: 6 x 9 Black & White Paperback, 202 pages
Publisher: Outskirts Press (Jan 14, 2014)
ISBN10: 1478700793
ISBN13: 9781478700791
Genre: FICTION / Women
Sallie Reynolds, author, photographer, student and teacher of the wild.
www.sallysparleys.com
Like all writers, I started at age three. Even then I had to have a pencil in my hand to work out what was in my head. The pencil is an an organizing object, a way inside.
I began with pages of incomprehensible scribble. Then myths, bible stories, fairy tales, changing as I went. Later: short stories and poems. I rewrote constantly – reshaping, rethinking – the fun part, like making magic beasts out of clay.
Real life included supporting children, working as secretary, editor, "executive assistant," teacher. Then, at age 60, I began to really write. In a year, I completed a novel ("Rapture"), a transformation tale. I love large birds, and yearn for free flight so strongly, I often feel it. Writing it, I found when you want anything that much, it has a price.
A wonderful editor with a small press published "Rapture," and pushed me for more. "Belonging" has a large canvas; the ugly, skewing forces in the South of the 1940s and 50s, so powerful they crippled whatever they touched. Even a child, simply growing, was marked. So Draft One was what constrained and destroyed: women and men denied meaningful lives. Good people twisted into ignorance and cruelty.
But I couldn't write it. I got the harsh and ugly down pat, but not the full human story: Was I/am I the villain? What happens to make us so? Head on, this was overwhelming. So I sneaked in the back, imagining, inventing what would break the pattern. "Belonging" is about a girl who breaks through in that place and time. It's what might have been.
But "Belonging" included a person who was very real, and it didn't finish her story. So “Virginia Primitive” tells what was. A small book, a duet for two characters and two times, then and now. It gives voice to real people: Lila and Sally. And Eddie, Dance, Lizbeth, Bessie and her "snake baby," Uncle Chillus. Mr. Perk-ups. A duet, then, with voices accompanying. 
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