Read with Welty: Music of the Swamp

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Three: Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan

For one second the woman and I seemed to become twins, or closer than twins, the same person together. Maybe we said nothing. Maybe we only lay in the band of sunlight that fell across our bed. Or maybe together we said, “There is great pain in all love, but we don’t care, it’s worth it.”

I’m not sure where to even begin to tell you about Music of the Swamp. Nothing I could possibly say about this book, or really any of Lewis Nordan’s books, could accurately describe the experience of stepping into his wild, fantastic, heartbreaking world. I will try, and it will be inadequate, but maybe you’ll want to find out for yourself and read the book, which you won’t regret.

In Music of the Swamp we meet Sugar Mecklin, whose love for his daddy is vast and confusing. Fathers are often absent, disappointing, or dead in Nordan’s world, and Sugar’s is at least present, if distant and bewildering. In the title story, Sugar and his friend Sweet Austin (who doesn’t have a daddy) find a dead body in the lake. When they return to Sugar’s house to tell his daddy, Gilbert, about it, he is drunk and listening to a Bessie Smith record, unable to give the boys the attention and reassurance they need:

Bessie Smith was telling him what he already knew. You are trapped here, Sweet Austin, we all are. It don’t help to have a daddy, you’re trapped anyway, daddies will always leave, always die, always be somebody you don’t know. Daddies ain’t your trouble, Sweet Austin. Your trouble is the geography.

Music of the Swamp is a book of stories about love and death and fathers and heartbreak, but it is also hilarious in the way that weird and sad things can sometimes catch you off guard. Like this: in one story there is a four-year-old boy named Douglas who wants to be an apple when he grows up. This vexes his mother, who berates him for the choice. He’s pretty steady, until one day he says ok fine, I don’t want to

be an apple, and his mother celebrates. I want to be a dog, Douglas says. His mother sees this as progress. Not perfect, not a fireman or a senator or a painter, but it’s fine. Then he regresses and says he wants to be a cork.

Lewis Nordan grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and the Delta is infused in his work. His own stepfather was friends with Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who murdered Emmitt Till, and Nordan wrestled with his own guilt and feelings of adjacent complicity before writing Wolf Whistle, which is based on the murder.

Nordan wrote this in Eudora Welty’s copy of Music of the Swamp: “For Miss Welty, without whose influence I could never have written a word.” We readers are grateful for this influence.