“Sometimes the debt you pay ain’t exactly the one you owe, but it works out jus’ the same anyway. Lord knows I done caused my share of heartache in this life.”
To quote my girl Rachel, “Sometimes Audible proves a skillful matchmaker—pairing me up with [a great] read based on books I’ve loved. One that I may never have stumbled across otherwise,” like The Pecan Man. If you’ve been following along with us for a while now, maybe you’ve noticed that Rae and I are big fans of Southern fiction. We’ve recommended southerly winners like Where the Crawdads Sing, All Over but the Shoutin’, The Giver of Stars, and Charms for the Easy Life, to name a few. And we have to weather the persistent urge to defend against altering quite possibly the most perfect character in modern-day literature, Atticus Finch. It’s hard to resist lit from “a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.” (Thank you, Rick Bragg, for that little bit of starriness right there.)
The Pecan Man shot to the front of my tbr pile when I read that, “This [novella] has been described as To Kill a Mockingbird meets The Help.” Any time, I said, any time a book is mentioned in the same realm as Harper Lee’s phenom, I’m down to give it a try. The pee-can man, a homeless elderly black man named Eddie, did remind me a little of Boo Radley—mothers would call their children inside when he came into view. And Ora, a widow with a big heart and dispassionate eyes, who hires Eddie to help about the yard certainly has elements of Atticus Finch in her. You’ll have to read this little southern gem to discover whether or not Eddie was unjustly accused and sentenced for the death of the police chief’s son.
I’m grateful I met Ora. She’s both progressive and kind, and her moral compass is somewhere in the vicinity of true north. Let’s be honest, she didn’t start a movement. But in the summer of 1976, Ora demonstrated a deep understanding of this truth: Black Lives Matter.
P.S. Looks like Laurence Fishburne is set to play The Pecan Man onscreen…should be good!