Title: Then Like the Blind Man: Orbie’s Story
Author: Freddie Owens
Publisher: Blind Sight Publications
Pages: 332
Language: English
Genre: Historical Fiction/Coming of Age
Format: Paperback & eBook
Purchase at AMAZON
A storm is brewing in the all-but-forgotten backcountry of Kentucky . And, for young
Orbie Ray, the swirling heavens may just have the power to tear open his
family’s darkest secrets. Then Like The Blind Man: Orbie’s Story is the
enthralling debut novel by Freddie Owens, which tells the story of a spirited
wunderkind in the segregated South of the 1950s and the forces he must overcome
to restore order in his world. Rich in authentic vernacular and evocative of a
time and place long past, this absorbing work of magical realism offered up
with a Southern twist will engage readers who relish the Southern literary
canon, or any tale well told.
Nine-year-old Orbie already has his cross to bear. After the sudden death of his father, his mother Ruby has off and married his father’s coworker and friend Victor, a slick-talking man with a snake tattoo. Since the marriage, Orbie, his sister Missy, and his mother haven’t had a peaceful moment with the heavy-drinking, fitful new man of the house. Orbie hates his stepfather more than he can stand; this fact lands him at his grandparents’ place in Harlan’s Crossroads,Kentucky ,
when Victor decides to move the family to Florida without including him. In his new
surroundings, Orbie finds little to distract him from Granpaw’s ornery ways and
constant teasing jokes about snakes.
As Orbie grudgingly adjusts to life with his doting Granny and carping Granpaw, who are a bit too keen on their black neighbors for Orbie’s taste, not to mention their Pentecostal congregation of snake handlers, he finds his world views changing, particularly when it comes to matters of race, religion, and the true cause of his father’s death. He befriends a boy named Willis, who shares his love of art, but not his skin color. And, when Orbie crosses paths with the black Choctaw preacher, Moses Mashbone, he learns of a power that could expose and defeat his enemies, but can’t be used for revenge. When a storm of unusual magnitude descends, he happens upon the solution to a paradox that is both magical and ordinary. The question is, will it be enough?
Equal parts Hamlet and Huckleberry Finn, it’s a tale that’s both rich in meaning, timely in its social relevance, and rollicking with boyhood adventure. The novel mines crucial contemporary issues, as well as the universality of the human experience while also casting a beguiling light on boyhood dreams and fears. It’s a well-spun, nuanced work of fiction that is certain to resonate with lovers of literary fiction, particularly in the grand Southern tradition of storytelling.
Nine-year-old Orbie already has his cross to bear. After the sudden death of his father, his mother Ruby has off and married his father’s coworker and friend Victor, a slick-talking man with a snake tattoo. Since the marriage, Orbie, his sister Missy, and his mother haven’t had a peaceful moment with the heavy-drinking, fitful new man of the house. Orbie hates his stepfather more than he can stand; this fact lands him at his grandparents’ place in Harlan’s Crossroads,
As Orbie grudgingly adjusts to life with his doting Granny and carping Granpaw, who are a bit too keen on their black neighbors for Orbie’s taste, not to mention their Pentecostal congregation of snake handlers, he finds his world views changing, particularly when it comes to matters of race, religion, and the true cause of his father’s death. He befriends a boy named Willis, who shares his love of art, but not his skin color. And, when Orbie crosses paths with the black Choctaw preacher, Moses Mashbone, he learns of a power that could expose and defeat his enemies, but can’t be used for revenge. When a storm of unusual magnitude descends, he happens upon the solution to a paradox that is both magical and ordinary. The question is, will it be enough?
Equal parts Hamlet and Huckleberry Finn, it’s a tale that’s both rich in meaning, timely in its social relevance, and rollicking with boyhood adventure. The novel mines crucial contemporary issues, as well as the universality of the human experience while also casting a beguiling light on boyhood dreams and fears. It’s a well-spun, nuanced work of fiction that is certain to resonate with lovers of literary fiction, particularly in the grand Southern tradition of storytelling.
CHAPTER ONE
EVERYBODY ON EDGE
Momma and even Victor said I’d be coming to St. Petersburg with them. They’d been saying it for weeks. Then Victor changed his mind. He was my stepdaddy, Victor was. It would be easier on everybody, he said, if
I stayed with Granny and Granpaw in Kentucky . Him and Momma had enough Florida business to take care of without on
top of everything else having to take care of me too. I was a handful, Victor said. I kept everybody on edge. If you asked me, the only edge everybody was
kept on was Victor’s. As far as I was
concerned, him and Momma could both go to h**l.
Missy too. I was fed up trying to
be good. Saying everything was okay when
it wasn’t. Pretending I understood when
I didn’t.
Momma’s car was a 1950 model. Daddy said it was the first Ford car to come
automatic. I didn’t know what
‘automatic’ was but it sure had silver ashtrays, two of them on the back of the
front seats. They were all popped open
with gum wrappers and cigarette butts and boy did they smell.
One butt fell on top a bunch of comic books I had
me in a pile. The pile leaned cockeyed
against my dump truck. Heat came up from
there, little whiffs of tail pipe smoke, warm and stuffy like the insides of my
tennis shoes.
It rattled too – the Ford car did. The glove box. The mirrors.
The windows. The knobs on the
radio. The muffler under the
floorboard. Everything rattled.
We’d been traveling hard all day, barreling down
Road 3 from Detroit
to Kentucky . Down to Harlan’s Crossroads. I sat on the edge of the back seat, watching
the fence posts zoom by. Missy stood up
next to the side window, sucking her thumb, the fingers of her other hand jammed
between her legs. She was five years
old. I was nine.
I’d seen pictures of Florida in a magazine. It had palm trees and alligators and oranges. It had long white beaches and pelicans that
could dive-bomb the water. Kentucky was just old
lonesome farmhouses and brokeback barns.
Gravel roads and chickens in the yard.
Road 3 took us down big places like Fort Wayne and Muncie . It took us down a whole bunch of little
places too, places with funny names like Zaneville and Deputy and Speed.
Missy couldn’t read.
“P**s with care,” I said.
“Oh Orbie, you said a bad word.”
“No.
P**s with care, Missy. That sign
back there. That’s what it said.”
Missy’s eyes went wide. “It did not.
Momma’ll whip you.”
Later on we got where there was a curve
in the road and another sign. “Look
Missy. Do not p**s.”
“It don’t say that.”
“Yes it does. See.
When the road goes curvy like that you’re not supposed to pee. But when it’s straight, it’s okay; but you
have to do it careful cause that’s what the sign says. P**s with care!”
“It don’t say that.”
“Does too.”
We crossed a big pile of water on a
bridge with towers and giant ropey things looping down. On the other side was Louisville , Kentucky . After that was just small towns and little
white stores with red gas-pumps, farm houses and big barns and fields, empty
fields and fields of corn and fields where there were cows and horses and pigs and
long rows of tobacco plants Momma said cigarettes was made of.
I had me a war on all the towns going
down.
Tat
Tat Tat Tat! Blam! There goes Cox Creek!
Bombs
away over Nazareth !
Blam!
Blam! Boom! Hodgekinsville never had a
chance!
“Let’s keep it down back there!” Victor said.
“A grenade rolled into Victor’s lap!” I
whispered. “BlamOOO! Blowed him to smithereens!”
I wished Momma’d left him back there in Toledo like she said she
would. She was always threatening around
like that, but then she would get to feeling sorry and forget all about
it. She’d been mad ever since Victor
spilled the beans about Daddy. Victor
was mad too, drinking his beer and driving Momma’s Ford too fast. After Louisville
he started throwing his empties out the window.
I liked to watch them bust on the
road.
“Pretty country, Kentucky ,” Victor said.
**
It was the end of daytime and a big orangey-gold
sun ball hung way off over the hills, almost touching the trees. The Ford jerked over a ditch at the foot of a
patchy burnt yard, thundering up a load of bubble noises before Victor shut it
down.
“Get off me,” Missy said.
“I ain’t bothering you.”
“Yes you are.”
“But Missy, look!”
A big boned woman in a housedress had come to stand
in the yard down by the well. She was
looking into the sun – orange light in her face - standing upright, sharp edged
and stiff, like an electrical tower, one arm bent like a triangle, the other
raised with the elbow so the hand went flat out over her eyes like a cap. She stared out of wrinkles and scribbles and
red leather cheekbones. Her nose was
sunburned, long but snubbed off at the end, sticking out above a mouth that had
no lips, a crack that squirmed and changed itself from long to short and back
to long again.
Missy’s eyes widened. “Who is that?”
“Granny,” I said.
“Don’t you remember?”
I saw Granpaw too, sitting squat-legged against
Granny’s little Jesus Tree. He was
turning in one big hand a piece of wood, shaving it, whittling it outward with
a jackknife. The brim of a dusty Panama shadowed
his eyes. In back of him stood the
house, balanced on little piles of creek rock.
You could see jars and cans and other old junk scattered underneath. It was the same dirty white color as before,
the house was, but the sun ball had baked it orange, and now I could see at one
end where somebody had started to paint.
As we got out of the car, the big boned figure in
the housedress let out with a whoop, hollering, “Good God A Mighty! If it tain’t Ruby and them younguns of
hers! Come all the way down here from
Dee-troit!” Blue-green veins bulged and
tree-limbed down the length of her arms.
Victor stayed out by the Ford, the round top of my
ball cap hanging out his pocket. A gas
station man had given it to me on the way down.
It was gray and had a red winged horse with the word ‘Mobilgas’ printed
across the front. Victor had swiped it
away, said I shouldn’t be accepting gifts from strangers. I should have asked him about it first. Now it was in his back pocket, crushed
against the Ford’s front fender where he leaned with an unlit cigar, rolling
between his lips. The sun was in back of
him, halfway swallowed up by a distant curvy line of hilltop trees.
“Hidy Victor!” Granny called. “Ya’ll have a good trip?”
Victor put on a smooth voice. “Fine Mrs. Wood. Real fine.
You can’t beat blue grass for beauty, can you?” A long shadow stretched out on the ground in
front of him.
Granny laughed.
“Ain’t been no farther than Lexington
to know!”
Granpaw changed his position against the tree,
leaned forward a little bit and spat a brown gob, grunting out the word ‘s**t’
after he did. He dragged the back of his
knife hand sandpaper-like over the gap of his mouth.
“I want you just to looky here!” Granny
said. “If tain’t Missy-Two-Shoes and
that baby doll of hers!”
Missy backed away.
“Aw, Missy now,” Momma said. “That’s Granny.”
Missy smiled then and let Granny grab her
up. Her legs went around Granny’s
waist. She had on a pink Sunday dress
with limp white bows dangling off its bottom, the back squashed and wadded like
an overused hankie.
“How’s my little towhead?” Granny
said.
“Good.”
Missy held out her baby doll.
“This is Mattie, Granny. I named
her after you.”
“Well ain’t you the sweetest thang!” Granny grinned so big her wrinkles went out
in circles like water does after a stone’s dropped in. She gave Missy a wet kiss and set her
down. Then her grin flashed toward Momma. “There’s my other little girl!”
Momma, no taller than Granny’s chin, did
a little toe dance up to her, smiling all the way. She hugged Granny and Granny in turn beat the
blue and red roses on the back of Momma’s blouse.
“I just love it to death!” Granny said. “Let me look at you!” She held Momma away from her. Momma wiggled her hips; slim curvy hips
packed up neat in a tight black skirt.
She kissed the air in front of Granny.
Like
Marilyn Monroe. Like in the movies.
“Jezebel!” Granny laughed. “You always was a teaser.”
They talked about the trip to Florida,
about Victor’s prospects – his good fortune, his chance – about Armstrong and
the men down there and that Pink Flamingo Hotel. They talked about Daddy too, and what a good
man he’d been.
“It liked to’ve killed us all, what
happened to Jessie,” Granny said.
“I know Mamaw. If I had more time, I’d go visit him
awhile.” Momma looked out over the
crossroads toward the graveyard. I
looked too but there was nothing to see now, nothing but shadows and scrubby
bushes and the boney black limbs of the cottonwood trees. I remembered what Victor’d said about the n**ger
man, about the crane with the full ladle.
“I want you
just to look what the cat’s drug in Mattie!” Granpaw had walked over from his
place by the tree.
“Oh
Papaw!” Momma hugged Granpaw’s rusty old
neck and kissed him two or three times.
“Shoo! Ruby
you’ll get paint all over me!”
Momma laughed and rubbed at a lip mark she’d left
on his jaw.
“How you been daughter?”
“All right I reckon,” Momma said. She looked back toward Victor who was still
up by the Ford. Victor took the cigar
out of his mouth. He held it to one
side, pinched between his fingers.
“How’s that car running Victor?” Granpaw
called.
“Not too bad, Mr. Wood,” Victor answered,
“considering the miles we’ve put on her.”
Granpaw made a bunch of little spit-spit
sounds, flicking them off the end of his tongue as he did. He hawked up another brown gob and let it
fall to the ground, then he gave Victor a nod and walked over. He walked with a limp, like somebody stepping
off in a ditch, carrying the open jackknife in one hand and that thing, whatever
it was he’d been working on, in the other.
Granny’s mouth got hard. “Ruby, I did get that letter of yorn. I done told you it were all right to leave
that child. I told you in that other
letter, ‘member?”
“You sure it’s not any trouble?” Momma
said.
Granny’s eyes widened. “Trouble?
Why, tain’t no trouble a-tall.”
She looked over my way. “I want
you just to look how he’s growed! A
might on the skinny side though.”
“He’ll fill out,” Momma said.
“Why yes he will. Come youngun.
Come say hello to your old Granny.”
“Orbie, be good now,” Momma said.
I went a little closer, but I didn’t say
hello.
“He’ll be all right,” Granny said.
“I hope so Mamaw. He’s been a lot of trouble over this.“
Veins, blue rivers, tree roots, flooded
down Granny’s gray legs. More even than
on her arms. And you could see white
bulges and knots and little red threads wiggling out. “I’ll bet you they’s a lot better things
going on here than they is in Floridy,” she said. “I bet you, if you had a mind to, Granpaw
would show you how to milk cows and hoe tobacco. I’ll learn you everything there is to know
about chickens. Why, you’ll be a real farm hand before long!”
“I don’t wanna be no d**ned farm hand,” I
said.
“Boy, I’ll wear you out!” Momma said. “See what I mean, Mamaw?”
“He’ll be all right,” Granny said.
The sun was on its way down. Far to the east of it two stars trailed after
a skinny slice of moon. I could see Old
Man Harlan’s Country Store across the road, closed now, but with a porch light
burning by the door.
A ruckus of voices had started up by the
Ford, Granpaw and Victor trying to talk at the same time. They’d propped the Ford’s hood up with a
stick and were standing out by the front.
Victor had again taken up his place,
leaning back against the front fender, crushing my ball cap. “That’s right, that’s what I said! No good at all.” He held the cigar shoulder level – lit now –
waving it with his upraised arm one side to the other. “The Unions are ruining this country, Mr. Wood. Bunch of meddlesome, god**ned
troublemakers. Agitators, if you catch
my drift.” He took a pull on the cigar
then blew the smoke over Granpaw’s head.
Granpaw was stout-looking but a whole
head shorter than Victor. He stood there
in his coveralls, doubled up fists hanging at the end of each arm, thick as
sledgehammers – one with the open jackknife, the other with that thing he’d
been working on. “Son, you got a
problem?”
“The rank and file,” Victor said. “They’re the problem! They’ll believe anything the god**n Union
tells them.”
Granpaw leaned over and spat. “You don’t know nothin’.”
“Anything,”
Victor said.
“What?”
Victor took the cigar out of his mouth
and smiled. “I don’t know anything is what you mean to say. It’s proper grammar.”
“I know what I aim to say,” Granpaw said,
“I don’t need no northern jackass a tellin’ me.” Granpaw’s thumb squeezed against the
jackknife blade.
Cut him Granpaw! Knock that
cigar out his mouth!
“Strode!”
Granny shouted. “Come away from
there!”
Momma hurried over. “Victor, I told you.”
“I was just sharing some of my thoughts
with Mr. Wood here,” Victor said. “He
took it the wrong way, that’s all. He
doesn’t understand.”
“I understand plenty, City Slicker.” Granpaw closed the knife blade against his
coveralls and backed away.
“Ain’t no need in this Strode!” Granny
said. “Victor’s come all the way down
here from Dee-troit. He’s company. And you a man of God!”
“I’ll cut him a new a**hole, he keeps on
that a way,” Granpaw said.
Momma was beside herself. “Apologize Victor. Apologize to Papaw for talking that
way.”
“For telling the truth?”
“For insulting him!”
Victor shook his head. “You apologize. You’re good at that.”
Over where the sun had gone down the sky
had turned white-blue. Fireflies winked
around the roof of the well, around the branches of the Jesus Tree. Victor walked around to the front of the car
and slammed the hood down harder than was necessary. “Come on Orbie! Time to get your stuff!”
I couldn’t believe it was about to
happen, even though I’d been told so many times it was going to. I started to cry.
“Get down here!” Victor yelled.
Momma met me at the car. She took out a hankerchief and wiped at my
tears. She looked good. She always looked good.
“I don’t want you to go,” I said.
“Oh now,” Momma said. “Let’s not make
Victor any madder than he already is, okay?”
She helped bring my things from the car.
I carried my tank and my box of army men and crayons. Momma brought my dump truck, the toy cars, my
comic books and drawing pad. We put them
all on the porch where Missy sat playing with her doll. Momma hugged me one last time, got Missy up
in her arms and headed to the car.
Victor was already behind the wheel,
gunning the engine. “Come on Ruby! Let’s go!”
“You just hold on a minute!” Momma put Missy in the car and turned to hug
Granny. “Bye Mamaw.”
“Goodbye Sweetness. I hope you find what you’re looking for down
there.”
“Right now I’d settle for a little peace
of mind,” Momma said; then she hugged Granpaw.
“I’m real sorry about Victor Papaw.”
Granpaw nodded. “You be careful down there in Floridy.”
“Bye Momma! Bye Missy!”
I yelled.
Momma closed her door and Victor backed
out. I hurried down to where Granny and Granpaw
were standing. The Ford threw dust and
gravels as it fishtailed up the road.
Granpaw tapped me on the shoulder. “This one’s for you son,” he said and handed
down the piece he’d been working on. It
was a little cross of blond wood about a foot high with a burnt snake draped
lengthwise along its shoulders. Granpaw
moved his finger over the snake’s curvy body.
“Scorched that in there with a hot screw driver, I did.”
It was comical in a way, but strange too;
I mean to make a snake there – right where Jesus was supposed to be. Like most everything else in my life, it made
no sense at all. Momma’s Ford had
disappeared over the hill. Pale road-dust
moved like a ghost into the cornfields under the half-dark sky. It drifted back toward the skull of Granpaw’s
barn, back toward the yard. I stood
there watching it all, listening as Momma’s Ford rumbled away.
About the Author:
A poet and fiction writer, my work
has been published in Poet Lore, Crystal Clear and Cloudy, and Flying
Colors Anthology. I am a past attendee of Pikes Peak Writer’s Conferences
and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and a member of Lighthouse
Writer’s Workshop in Denver ,
Colorado . In addition, I am/was a
licensed professional counselor and psychotherapist, who for many years
counseled perpetrators of domestic violence and sex offenders, and provided
psychotherapy for individuals, groups and families. I hold a master’s degree in
contemplative psychotherapy from Naropa
University in Boulder , Colorado .
I was born in Kentucky but soon after my parents moved to Detroit . Detroit was where I grew up. As a kid I
visited relatives in Kentucky ,
once for a six-week period, which included a stay with my grandparents. In the
novel’s acknowledgements I did assert the usual disclaimers having to do with
the fact that Then Like The Blind Man was and is a work of fiction,
i.e., a made up story whose characters and situations are fictional in nature
(and used fictionally) no matter how reminiscent of characters and situations
in real life. That’s a matter for legal departments, however, and has little to
do with subterranean processes giving kaleidoscopic-like rise to hints and
semblances from memory’s storehouse, some of which I selected and disguised for fiction. That is to
say, yes, certain aspects of my history did manifest knowingly at times, at
times spontaneously and distantly, as ghostly north-south structures, as
composite personae, as moles and stains and tears and glistening rain and dark
bottles of beer, rooms of cigarette smoke, hay lofts and pigs. Here’s a quote
from the acknowledgements that may serve to illustrate this point.
“Two memories served as starting
points for a short story I wrote that eventually became this novel. One was of
my Kentucky
grandmother as she emerged from a shed with a white chicken held upside down in
one of her strong bony hands. I, a boy of nine and a “city slicker” from Detroit , looked on in
wonderment and horror as she summarily wrung the poor creature’s neck. It ran
about the yard frantically, yes incredibly, as if trying to locate something it
had misplaced as if the known world could be set right again, recreated, if
only that one thing was found. And then of course it died. The second memory
was of lantern light reflected off stones that lay on either side of a path to
a storm cellar me and my grandparents were headed for one stormy night beneath
a tornado’s approaching din. There was wonderment there too, along with a vast
and looming sense of impending doom.”
I read the usual assigned stuff
growing up, short stories by Poe, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The
Scarlet Letter, The Cherry Orchard, Hedda Gabler, a little of
Hemingway, etc. I also read a lot of Super Hero comic books (also Archie and
Dennis the Menace) and Mad Magazine was a favorite too. I was also in love with
my beautiful third grade teacher and to impress her pretended to read Gulliver’s
Travels for which I received many delicious hugs.
It wasn’t until much later that I
read Huckleberry Finn. I did read To Kill A Mockingbird too. I
read Bastard Out of Carolina and The Secret Life of Bees. I saw
the stage play of Hamlet and read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle too.
However, thematic similarities to these works occurred to me only after I was already well into the writing of Then
Like The Blind Man. Cormac McCarthy, Pete Dexter, Carson McCullers, Raymond
Carver, Flannery O’Conner and Joyce Carol Oates, to name but a few, are among
my literary heroes and heroines. Tone and style of these writers have
influenced me in ways I’d be hard pressed to name, though I think the
discerning reader might feel such influences as I make one word follow another
and attempt to “stab the heart with...force” (a la Isaac Babel) by placing my
periods (hopefully, sometimes desperately) ‘... just at the right place’.
Freddie Owens’ latest book is Then Like
the Blind Man: Orbie’s Story.
Visit his website at www.FreddieOwens.com.
Connect &
Socialize with Freddie!
My Review:
This is as much a blast from the past as it is a coming of age story. The author's take on the mind and thoughts of a 9 year old boy in the south was worth the read. The turmoil in the book was typical of the time period that the book was set in. The characters were so well described, and their conversations seemed so real, that there were a few rimes that I found myself feeling that I was a part of the book as well. The language was crude and racist. I was not a fan of the racist slurs. I am giving this book a 3/5. I was given a copy to review, however all opinions are my own.
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