Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern Comforts

by Burkhard Bilger

Release Date: 14 May, 2002

Edition: Paperback

Price:

More Info

Turn off your tv -- there's an amazing country out there

This is storytelling at its best. I first read one of the essays in this book in the New Yorker and right away I knew I'd be looking to read everything that Burkhard Bilger writes. This book contains eight essays but I think of them more as real-life stories. In the table of contents each essay title has a subtitle. Even they are a pleasure to read, each one beginning with the words "In which". To give you an idea of what I mean, here's the subtitle for the essay on moonshining: "In which the age of the microbrewery meets the modern police state, with intoxicating results".

In the introduction the author tells us how he started writing these tales about the South. He was living in Massachusetts and decided he wanted to get a coonhound which he knew, and missed, from growing up in Oklahoma. But finding a coonhound in New England wasn't easy. He says "A few people had heard rumors of such dogs, but none had actually seen one in the flesh." He ended up at the home of a breeder who handed him a magazine "American Cooner". The author said "It was the strangest publication I had ever seen." And so began his journey in search of life outside the popular culture which is all most of us know, beyond the "range of most antennas".

Each of the essays is about a tradition, or sport, or way of life that is in danger of dying out, some of them illegal, some not. He visits a woman in Oklahoma who breeds coonhounds and hunts racoons more than 340 nights a year, a man in Kentucky who hunts and eats squirrels, and a man in Georgia who owns a fish hatchery, frog farm, and wild hog preserve. Each of these stories is, in the end, about people and this is where Bilger's writing really shines. He knows how to write about people better than almost anyone else I've read. I read alot of non-fiction and profiles of people and I know it's not easy to write about people in a way that gives the reader the sense that they now know that person, at least a little. The writer spends a few days with someone, hangs out with them, talks to them for hours. Then he has to sit down and from all those hours pick just the right details, just the right quotes, just the right observations, to make that person seem real on the page. And Bilger has mastered that art.

Beyond the people, he also puts the stories into a larger, sometimes historical, context. In the story on cockfighting he goes to Louisiana where some people are reluctant to talk to him even though it's one of the few states where the sport is still legal. He tells about the popularity of the sport in different parts of the world and in the early history of America, when it was not only legal but a "fashionable amusement". In fact it didn't begin to be banned until the 19th century, and New York in 1867 "became the first city to ban all blood sports." The author talks about the efforts to outlaw the sport in the few states that still allow it, and he does mention animal rights activists but he doesn't interview any. He doesn't seem to be trying to write an unbiased account, and if there's any doubt about where the author's sympathies lie, that doubt will be dispelled by the time you get to the last paragraph of this essay which gives us his view (brilliantly written, I think) of modern civilized America.

The final story is about marbles. Yes, marbles. A specific game called rolley hole, which he tells us "is to other marble games as chess is to checkers". It's about the near extinction of the game and how it was revived by a folklorist, and how the revival led to, among other things, an international competition in England. Even if you know nothing about marbles, even if you've never heard of rolley hole, this story will have you on the edge of your seat wanting to know what this is all about. But in a larger sense this story is also about how and why life is changing in our country and whether anything can be done about that, even by a well-meaning folklorist. The last few pages are reflective and philosophical and I was left not quite sure whether to feel sad or hopeful.

Make no mistake about it, the author likes the people whose stories he tells. He writes about each of them with great warmth and affection. And reading this book made me feel happy to be in this world with all its strangeness.

Yikes? Who knew?

Most of us who live outside the South have adopted the "New South" image, consisting of budding high-tech nodes, car plants in South Carolina, and, of course, the Atlanta Olympics. Bilger shows that unique southern traditions, including those squirrel brains, are still around and thriving. He is not judgemental (although he doesn't seem too anxious to relocate), but rather paints a detailed and sympathetic portrait of a unique and still vibrant rural southern culture.