To: My vast BLOGger audience---LOL!!!
From: The estimable, if unfortunately shunned, Sir Jimbo
Re: Another Southern tale like yesterday’s that I’ve actually written into my
THIRD screenplay.
Well then!! So nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I guess I’ll go and eat dirt. Ah to have Michael Moore’s polemical genius and populist pen, instead of my tendency toward didactic and bombastic pontification. I guess I like pontification. The stories are certainly beyond amazing. I have the energy and the sense of mission to keep writing. Who knows? Someday---it could even come to pass long before I croak, so that I could begin to draw down the massive reservoir of yarns already spun into liquid form, ready to achieve the point of every pontificator, which is to pontificate TO someone, preferably someone who has something cogent and useful to offer in return.
WE’RE ALL COUSINS AFTER ALL. As you know, “THAT’S MY STORY, AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!!”
Ciao for now,
Jimbo
SYNOPSIS/”Mother Led the Way”(working title)
SUMMARY: This is a story about nine year old Todd, and his eight brothers, of whom he is the middle child. Their dictatorial disciplinarian farmer father, distraught that his wife withdraws conjugal favors because he refuses to use birth control, takes out his frustrations on his sons by increasing their already draconian workload and cancelling a promised vacation that is their only escape from the routine drudgery of a Georgia ‘peasant’s’ lot. This confronts the boys with the choice between surrender and struggle, and, emboldened by their mother’s bravery, they rise up against their father, literally tying him up in order to claim their sacred “beach holiday,” which action in turn demonstrates to dad that he has no option but to reform his relations with both his wife and his sons.
Matthew Martin epitomizes white Dixie manliness. He is slender, sharp as steel and strong as a whip. He fought in Korea as a combat sergeant. He has worked himself and his family mercilessly to accumulate acreage of fertile bottom land, on the borders of the eerie and magical Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia. He avoids debt by working himself and his sons like draft animals. His wife, the ancient chemistry of mutual desire serving for him its intended Biblical purpose, produces a brood of strong sons, who fear and worship him in turn.
This prototypically Southern “peasant’s” existence teeters precipitously on a precipice, when Madeilline, Matthews beautiful, shrewd, and powerful wife, claims her right to determine her own fate, and her own fertitlity. A thirteenth pregnancy has ended with her second miscarriage, and due to Matthew’s personal and theological disgust with birth control, he refuses to use condoms. She pronounces one night, “Martin, that’s enough,” and closets herself away from his advances. Earlier in his marriage, he might have reacted violently, but an important element of ‘back story’ is that, after the last time he hit her, she packed and left him, at that time with only seven of their event-ual eleven children. For Matthew, a hellish two weeks followed, and when she returned, he swore never to strike her again. He has to win her over with either charm or logic or will, which might have worked earlier in their marriage.
Now, however, his pleading and demands are ineffectual. Madeilline continues to serve as their farm’s food and logistics coordinator, but she is steadfast in resisting sexual contact. Matthew’s carnal urge is powerful and primordial, and his frustrations make him a walking bomb. He sees things “backed up” on the farm everywhere, and he begins to drive the boys even harder than their regularl Herculean chores demand. All of this occurs as misty Autumn unfolds toward Thanksgiving, one of the two times during the year when the boys get a break, their precious “beach holiday.”
His sons(an oldest daughter, struggling to balance her role as mother’s helpmate and daddy’s girl, and an infant girl, round out the eleven children in the house)are as strong and capable as boys will be under such circum-stances. They know what is really “backed up” in the scheme of things. They are children of the farm and understand breeding and hormones much better than any ‘sex education’ course can teach. While their dad’s decisions stretch them to the point of collapse, they follow him through brutal labor that includes removing partially petrified stumps from swamp muck, unimagineably difficult and dangerous work. Todd, the middle boy, embodies his father’s quickness and power and his mother’s insight and compassion. He is the spiritual leader of this brood of boys, although a pair of subplots that involve the two oldest sons throw additional light onto coming of age in the rural South.
While the tension which this battle engenders is almost unbearable, the survival instincts of the participants let them see multiple instances of humor and irony. At one point, having learned that his second son is having sex with his sweetheart, the ‘Sergeant’ shows them a military “VD” video. The irony of the army’s admonition to use “pro-tection” is hilarious to the boys, especially in light of their dad’s distaste for rubbers. This becomes especially poign-ant, when Matthew takes up with a local prostitute, and his family all know he would never engage in such actions without donning a condom, which is all that keeps him from the woman he truly loves and desires, his wife. Other goofs and gags and practical jokes are part and parcel of coping here, and Todd is master of these games. Like good soldiers, the boys support each other and carry on in spite of their pass, even managing to have fun in the face of their father’s fury.
Their situation becomes unbearable, however, when Matthew cancels their vacation, a sacred time of rest and rejuvenation. The boys, exhausted from a pre-dawn exercise extracting a stump from a field, pass over the border separating grumping and grousing from open rebellion. As they await the ‘sergeant’s’ return with breakfast, Todd announces offhandedly, “We oughta tie him up.” The boys find themselves laying a trap for their father, the springing of which sends them off on their holiday. It also shows irrefutably that Matthew Martin must either change his ways or perish.
Thus, a mother’s stand for herself portends revolution in the most unlikely context. Boys become men not because of macho ministrations, but because of a woman’s insistence on her own power.