Once again my friend Theresa has steered
me to a book I have found fascinating and can recommend wholeheartedly: The
Last List of Miss Judith Kratt by Andrea Bobotis. The story is set in
Bound, South Carolina, in the present-day with narrator Judith Kratt, 75, harkening
back to her youth in memory to give readers the complete story.
If I am pressed, I will admit that
Southern authors are my favorites. In no particular order, Eudora Welty,
William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Carson
McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Alice Walker, and Kate Chopin come quickly to
mind. These authors tell stories that remind me of family stories and of the
way of telling the story. Rarely straightforward, each story ambles on its way
with tidbits thrown in to explain or further enhance the main story. Or sometimes
to go completely off track onto another path only to wander back to the
original story after all.
Jim Hartz interviewed Eudora Welty for
the Today Show on 6 Feb 1976. Welty “describes growing up in a culture
that ‘relished’ storytelling.” She further explained that “growing up in Mississippi,
in Jackson, is good for any writer because we are a nation of talkers, listeners,
and storytellers. And when you live in a small town where you know everybody
you get it all.” She continues by saying storytelling is “unique to the South
maybe.” She hedges a bit there, but we know Southerners do love telling
stories. Of course, other areas of the country and other cultures do too.
Pat Conroy, a South Carolina native,
weighed in on Southern storytellers: “Every region has their oddballs, for
sure. But in the South, we embrace our oddballs and listen to their tales.”
My heart is still pounding fifteen
minutes after finishing the last page of The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt.
While I will not include spoilers, it will not surprise readers to learn that
long-kept family secrets will come to light as Miss Judith faces the past her
family has lived.
Having grown up in a very small town
populated with many of my relatives, I am aware of secrets long-held. One of those
family secrets came to light last year when I had my DNA analyzed through
Ancestry.com. I discovered my cousin’s daughter who had been adopted at birth
sixty years ago in a closed adoption. That discovery resulted a cousins’ family
reunion and an opportunity to meet our newly-found cousin. Sadly, her mother has
died, but she did get to meet her two aunts and a whole passel of cousins.
This review will include no spoilers. Let
me say, though, that I hate Daddy Kratt even though he was long dead when the
story opens. He is a thoroughly despicable character and I still feel a
visceral hatred and repulsion when I think of him. He is the archetypal bully,
villain, and miscreant all rolled into one person. Caring only for himself and
what he can amass in money and goods, Daddy Kratt rolled over everyone and everything
in his path exactly like a bulldozer without caring about the consequences as
long as he got what he wanted.
And Daddy Kratt succeeded—for a time.
He owned cotton gins, many acres of land, a fine home, a store, and a gas
station. He even pushed Mr. Delour, his own father-in-law into bankruptcy and
never looked back. Mr. Delour had mentored Daddy Kratt when Daddy Kratt was a
young man working toward amassing his fortune. None of that means a thing to a
miscreant, however.
In the present-day, Judith lives in
the family home, now in some disrepair as fortunes have fallen long ago, with Olva,
a Black woman only slightly older than Judith. The two have been together all
their lives. Judith’s brother Quincey, age 14, died from “a fatal gunshot to
his person in the early hours of Friday, December 20, 1929.” This news is
related to readers at the beginning of the book.
Then Bobotis works backward and
forward to complete the story. Judith and Quincey’s younger sister is Rosemarie,
named for their mother, also Rosemarie. Other important characters include Dee,
Rosemarie’s only sibling, Charlie who works at the store and repairs all things
including mechanical ones, Marcus, and Amaryllis. A few other townspeople enter
the story as well.
Bobotis writes with a delicate use of
the language. Olva, holding a shotgun on a nasty white man from Bound, says, “I
will tell you a thing or two about tension. I will tell you that we did not
create it. You did. You merely have not felt it until now. Understand this—for me,
for Marcus—for [Amaryllis], tension lives under the surface of everything. We
feel the itch of it under our skin. But we sill rise from that tension.
Agitation is what sheds the snake of its skin, what shucks the moth of its
cocoon.”
One cannot read those lines and not feel
the passion. To whom is she referring when she uses we?
Near the end of the book, Miss Judith
Kratt asks Marcus to take her to her lawyer’s office. What Judith takes in “an
old, distinguished piece of Daddy Kratt’s luggage,” will surprise readers. The
suitcase contained the following items: “pickled okra (one jar). Wray Little’s
rum apple butter (one jar, already opened), a sleeve of saltines, four butterscotch
candies, my social security card, and an antique brass teacher’s bell, which I
thought would be useful in an emergency.”
Andrea Bobotis has received a number
of awards for her debut novel, The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt. After
reading it, I can see why it has received such acclaim. Discover more about
Bobotis at her Web site: https://www.andreabobotis.com/.
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