Chalktown(白粉镇)

From the acclaimed author of Mother of Pearl conies the story of Chalktown, an eerily quiet village ill George County, Mississippi, where folks communicate with one another solely through chalkboards hanging from their front porches. Sixteen-year-old Hezekiah Sheehand lives down the road with his reckless sister, Arena, his mentally disabled younger brother, Yellababy, and their often cruel mother, Susan-Blair, whose husband has abandoned the family. The mystery of Chalktown calls to Hez, and one day he sets out with Yellababy strapped to his back, determined to divine the key to the chalk. Meanwhile, his family confronts a tragedy that just might pave an unexpected road toward a hopeful future.

Melinda Haynes

Melinda Haynes (born 1955) is an American novelist.

She grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, has been a painter most of her life, and her writing is intimately connected with the Mississippi of the 1950s and the 1960s.

She is the author of Mother of Pearl, Chalktown, and Willem's Field.

Publisher Comments:

From the acclaimed author of Mother of Pearl comes the story of Chalktown, an eerily quiet village in George County, Mississippi, where folks communicate with one another solely through chalkboards hanging from their front porches. Sixteen-year-old Hezekiah Sheehand lives down the road with his reckless sister, Arena, his mentally disabled younger brother, Yellababy, and their often cruel mother, Susan-Blair, whose husband has abandoned the family. The mystery of Chalktown calls to Hez, and one day he sets out with Yellababy strapped to his back, determined to divine the key to the chalk. Meanwhile, his family confronts a tragedy that just might pave an unexpected road toward a hopeful future.

From Amazon.com

The lifeline of Melinda Haynes's novel Chalktown is a rutted, meandering dirt road that winds its way past the murky waterways and through the one-shop towns and backwoods of George County, Mississippi. It's also a red flag to anyone looking for a good dose of surreal Southern gothic. Here is the isolated shack of a disintegrating white-trash family, there the village dwellers who communicate solely by writing notes on the chalkboards in their front yards. One character is grotesquely scarred by an adult bout with chicken pox, while others are eaten up by less identifiable diseases and appetites. Dreams are pursued, discarded, and eerily enacted, always in the sort of luscious, graphic prose you would expect from the author of Mother of Pearl.

Perhaps the term family is a misnomer for the Sheehands, a bunch of misfits drawn together by impulse and wrenched apart by hope, desire, and murder. Fairy, the philandering father camped out in an old school bus, can't extricate himself from the burden of "women and their sticky flaws." His wife, Susan-Blair, is slowly burying herself beneath other people's possessions in her makeshift consignment store, even as she neglects her children and chats it up with the ever-present Christ of her Pentecostal upbringing. No wonder 16-year-old Hezekiah sets off down the road to Chalktown in the opening pages of the novel, carrying his disabled brother in a backpack. His encounters along the way make for a Robert Altman-like series of takes on the bizarre nature of reality in George County.

The literary landscape of the Deep South is, of course, teeming with eccentric characters. Yet Haynes's are so fleshed-out that the reader is left feeling almost crowded, like (to quote Susan-Blair) a "durn closet full a somebody else's coats. Coats put there by people who went on to someplace else, some other thing." The author is no less gifted at conveying a sense of place. She uses the colorful brushstrokes of a painter--which she also happens to be--to imbue this story with a dark, sultry, and unmistakably Southern feel. The result is a captivating, consuming read.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly

Undisciplined floods of off-kilter prose choke this fitfully lyrical second novel of affliction and redemption in early 1960s Mississippi. Haynes, a Mississippi native and author of Oprah-selected Mother of Pearl, knows the country she describes, but where her first novel sailed, this one founders. In the spring of 1961, 16-year-old Hezekiah ("Hez") Sheehand plans to walk to nearby Chalktown, a hamlet where folks are rumored to communicate only by writing on chalkboards. On his back he totes his mentally retarded five-year-old brother, Yellababy. Behind him, Hez leaves his mother, Susan-Blair, a slattern who hits her children; his father, Fairy, who lives in a bus in the yard; and his older sister, Arena, who has run off with a man who pays her to "work on him with her hands." As Hez nears Chalktown, Haynes slips back in time to 1955 to chart the silent community's history. Eerie as it is, the place is strangely soothing, and Hez wishes he could stay a wish that may be granted when Arena's promiscuity drives Fairy to commit a terrible crime. Throughout, Hez's next-door neighbor, Marion Calhoun, a preternaturally good-hearted "colored man," keeps an eye on the feckless Sheehands. The overwritten narrative features a plethora of figures of speech (sometimes mixed to comical effect), occasional anachronisms and awkwardness in establishing point of view. Convincing dialogue, however, hints of miraculous doings, and a happy (albeit not credible) ending for Hezekiah and Yellababy will appeal to readers not deterred by the narrative's surges and lapses. (May 2)Forecast: Mother of Pearl sold more than half a million copies in hardcover, but this uneven follow-up allotted a $100,000 marketing campaign and a 10-city Southern author tour isn't in the same league (nor, likely, will it be blessed with Oprah's seal of approval). Expect a lesser success.

Book Dimension
Height (cm) 21 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Width (cm) 13.6