The author draws on fieldwork she conducted as an anthropologist in North Carolina, where she earlier spent large parts of her childhood, among a net of paternal relations. From that ethnography and from lifelong observation, she crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist Christian belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them pull us into the complicated, variable core of religious experience among southern American Christians. Jesus in America, a perceptive work rich with cultural insight, is a singular addition to the growing genre of ethnographic fiction.
Excerpt:
Jesse lived with his mother and his father took an interest. Or that’s what his mother said. “He cain’t be here all the time, honey, but he takes an interest.” When Jesse was little, he used to wish that he took more of an interest. He saw his father sometimes. “He never just high-tailed it out, like some men would ‘a done.” No, Dan, Jesse’s father, turned up every so often at the door, and he always seemed real glad to see them, and usually he brought a present. Some kind of a present.
But… What Jesse used to wish when he was little was that he turned up sometimes on the right days. Jesse couldn’t remember him ever being there at Christmas, though his mama told him that he was there for Jesse’s first one—“and he was just so proud of you!” Jesse asked about that Christmas a lot when he was little, whether it snowed and if they’d had a big tree that stood on the floor instead of a little one you sat on the table, like they always had nowadays. And who else was there—“Did Grandma come?” And whether he could sit up at the table and chew his Christmas dinner already or if somebody had to hold him in his lap and feed him soft stuff with a spoon. He wanted to be able to make a picture in his mind of what it was like, that first Christmas, when he was a little baby. If he could make a good enough picture, he would be able to remember it. Sometimes he thought he did, but then he’d think he was just remembering the picture in his mind. So that was hard.
And he’d never turned up on Jesse’s birthday. Not even the first one, the day Jesse was born. “Some men do like to get themselves kindly out of the way for that occasion,” Mama explained. That made Grandma laugh, but Jesse couldn’t see what was funny about it. And then by the time he was one year old, Dan wasn’t there anymore. He had started just taking an interest. When Jesse was little, he used to expect his Daddy would surprise him one birthday and open the back door just in time to see him blow his candles out. He watched for him, holding his breath for the candles, but holding his breath waiting, too. He never said, because Mama worked hard so he could have a nice birthday every year. And Dan did bring him a present whenever he came. So it was no use to make a fuss. It was just a picture in his mind, like his first Christmas, which had really happened, even if he couldn’t remember it.
Now that he was twelve, it seemed to him like he’d spent a long time wishing that Dan was around. Sometimes, even now, when he knew it wasn’t going to happen, he’d wish his father would be there to watch him play baseball at Shepherd’s Field, because he’d started to be a real good pitcher. It surprised everybody, but he had. Mama came when she could, and Grandma almost always came, unless she was working. And it wasn’t as if he was the only boy who didn’t have a dad there to watch. Heck, Mama was right about that. Two or three of his friends’ dads had just high-tailed it out of there. And one of them had died. In the war, Doodle said. “What war? There hasn’t been any war since history.” But Doodle just said, “You don’t know ever’thin’,” and Jesse didn’t ask him about it anymore because he looked so mournful. Some of them kept trying to make Doodle talk about it, but Jesse thought it was probably bad enough to have your dad dead without having to explain it to everybody all the time. Hell, maybe there had been a war and he just hadn’t heard about it.
Jesse missed his dad, but he wasn’t lonesome. He had plenty of friends, and he sort of had a girl friend. Her name was Lois and she didn’t go to his school, but she lived on his road. They never said they were going around together, but they usually met on the way back from school and they’d shared a couple of cigarettes Lois had got off her older brother. Once she had a marijuana one. She wouldn’t say where she got it from, but she let him have a toke. He didn’t like it much, but he guessed he’d get used to it when he was older. Like a lot of things. There was a lot of pot around. And stronger things, he guessed, if he’d been trying to get ahold of it. But he wasn’t. Grandma would have a fit, for one thing. She’d have a fit just about the cigarettes. She was real strict. He thought Mama had done some drugs when she was young, and that made Grandma more strict with him. Mama wouldn’t say, and he didn’t like to ask Grandma. Some people said pot was better for you than tobacco, besides being easier to grow. Jesse wasn’t too interested. He reckoned the time he’d tried it with Lois he might as well have been smoking shredded lettuce like little kids did. But it was the only time she’d let him kiss her—a real, sexy kiss with both their mouths open. That was actually kind of disappointing, to tell you the truth. He was more thrilled that she’d let him do it than the way it felt. And then she’d started laughing and then he had, too, and they’d smoked up the rest of the thin joint, forgetting to hold the smoke in, the way you’re supposed to, passing it back and forth as fast as they could until finally it dropped in the grass and neither of them felt like trying to pick it up, they were laughing too much. There was only enough left to pinch between your fingers anyway. “Never mind,” said Lois, “we can easy get some more.” But they never did, so far.
He’d got into trouble at school. Not because of the pot. Nobody knew about that except for the boys he’d told. Not because of anything he’d done, really. Not because of bad behavior. Only daydreaming, Mrs. Teniers said, though he didn’t remember day- dreaming. He did look out the window a lot, it got so boring. And the homework he didn’t do. And, he guessed, lying to Mrs. Teniers about why he hadn’t done it, and lying to Mama about not having any. That was worst. And not going to school at all. And leaving in the middle of the morning. You had to lie to get away, unless you slipped out when the corridors were pretty busy. And the next day when you had to give an excuse. So it was bad behavior in a way. You could say. But not fighting or anything, or stealing. Or carrying fire- arms. There was a sign at Reception that said, “No Firearms Of Any Kind To Be Brought Onto School Premises.” Jesse thought it made sense, especially after Columbine, but Mama almost screamed the first time she saw it. “I thought it was pretty rough when I was at school,” she said, “but at least we never needed a sign like that.”
It had been rough, too, when his Mama was at school. She’d told him stories about it. She had to get used to having black people in the same school, for one thing. They didn’t used to be allowed. And they got some real tough backwoods white kids, too, down from the mountains. “But we never did have guns. And if the coloreds had knives they kept them to themselves.” She hadn’t liked school much more than Jesse did, Grandma said. One time she’d started to tell him about when Mama was his age and she was sneakin’ off school, but Mama came in and said, “Oh Mom, don’t tell him all that stuff. It’ll make him think it’s all right.” Which it didn’t, of course. He did it, but he knew it was wrong. It didn’t exactly say about sneakin’ off school in the Bible, but he guessed that bearing false witness was the same as lying. That’s why you had to swear on the Bible when you were a witness in court. And there was honoring your father and your mother, too. Which you weren’t doing if you were pretending to go to school and then hanging around town until it was time to go home.
