Goodlife, Mississippi

by Eileen Saint Lauren

Overview

"Goodlife, Mississippi" chronicles the first twelve years--1950 to 1962--of Mary "Myra" Boone, a questionably biracial young Southern girl of the sixties. The setting of the novel begins in Meridian, Mississippi, and then moves onto the fictional city of Goodlife. Eileen Saint Lauren captures the experience of growing up in "pockets" of a regressive and repressive Southern culture. The novel is truth mixed with magical realism achieved by the constant threading of the ordinary with the extraordinary, supernatural, and the sublime.

A sequence of linked stories comprises events in Myra Boone's life. Myra persists through extreme adversities because of her dream of meeting Ray Charles Robinson and her natural sense of place in the grand scheme of life: her true calling. Though her scars--inside and out--will remain, she emerges a young woman of compassion with a self-forged faith in the underlying goodness of the universe and her value in the world. And in having Myra Boone prevail, Saint Lauren leaves the reader contemplating the resilience of the human soul far beyond the pages of her novel.

"Goodlife, Mississippi," includes a Study Guide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798986196329
Publisher:	Eileen Saint Lauren Books, LLC
Publication date:	06/20/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	279
File size:	584 KB

About the Author

Eileen Saint Lauren is a natural-born writer with a pure and original voice who in her debut novel, "Goodlife, Mississippi," embraces the rural South of the fifties and sixties where she witnessed segregation. She provokes the reader to contemplate an understanding and tolerance of people whose life experiences and perceptions appear outside the norm though are very real. "Goodlife, Mississippi's" timeless voices of every color and social class both together reflect the message of compassion, forgiveness, and love.Saint Lauren was born in Hattiesburg and raised in the once two red-light town, Petal, Mississippi. She is an award-winning photo journalist and news and feature writer who worked early in her career as a commentator for Nebraska Public Radio and at Smith College Museum of Art. After graduating from Jones College in Ellisville Mississippi, with an Associate of Arts degree in journalism, she continued her education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. She then continued on with her education in creative writing at The Washington Center, Duke University, Kansas Newman College's, The Milton Center, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She divides her writing time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Madison, Mississippi. Saint Lauren was blind for three years due to back-to-back retina detachments at an early age. Although she did not regain her full sight back, she is functional. She is visually disadvantaged.

Table of Contents

IN SPRING OF 1961, we were living in Meridian, Mississippi, in a little plank house that Daddy had made and painted white with his own two hands because he was a carpenter and all. He got the wood at the sawmill and from left over carpentering jobs. It had a tin roof that when it rained, you could count the raindrops until you fell sound, sound asleep. It was as fine as you can imagine with not only the usual two bedrooms, but we were blessed enough to have three. Momma was as proud as any North Carolina Cherokee Indian chief who had won out and had been given his own land back sitting on our front porch in her store-bought rocker fanning the Southern heat and believing that the Boone family had been blessed with the joy of the Lord.

I tried to make myself satisfied. That was for sure. But the embarrassing facts remained; my daddy was a deaf drunk who, for all my life, shared a love-hate affair with moonshine whiskey. And to cope with Daddy's drinking infidelity, Momma began her own love affair with the Lord Jesus Christ. There was nothing I could do but watch and pray that we'd all be saved, mainly from each other.

Listening to the voice of Momma's words is how I learned the rhythms of reading and writing. Then, amid my Meridian Piney Woods of solitude and the long hellish days of summer, I took to copying entire books from the Bible, word for word, to keep from going insane amid the Mississippi heat and the isolation that came with living in the Piney Woods. My other means of escape was reading mail-order catalogs that came once a month by way of the United States Post Office postmarked "New York City." I found myself torn been two cities, Heaven and New York, that to me were one and the same, though I never dared speak of the latter.

Like many God-fearing Southerners, rich or poor, black, or white, I was taught to live to die, and only then would I have a good life-in heaven not hell, that is. Death doesn't scare me none, but life sure does. I don't know why I'm still here.

Daddy passed the time off by telling us stories of him and Ray Charles Robinson. He'd tell of riding the roads together back in Saint Augustine, Florida, when they were charity students in a state supported boys' school for the deaf and blind learning a trade on account of their shortcomings; Daddy was deaf, and Ray was blind.

Ray dropped Robinson, so folks wouldn't confuse him with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. It was Ray who in-full-force hit the pavement first to Seattle, Washington, before moving on to Hollywood, California. Daddy hit the moonshine whiskey bottle as fast, only to nowhere save for carpentering in Meridian.

I guess I knew about Ray Charles before I knew of any other musical performer. In the 50s and 60s, folks called him Colored instead of Negro or Black or African American like folks do today. Colored sounds like the racial remark it is, but the once-segregated South has come a long way from saying the N-word, that's for sure. I never used that word because I was a God-fearing, church-going Believer who took the words seriously that we sang in the song "Jesus loves the Little Children."

We would sing: Jesus loves the little children / All the children of the world / Red, brown, and yellow / Black and white / They are precious in His sight. / Jesus loves the little children / Of the world. So, it didn't matter to me if Ray Charles was Colored or green or what, he was my hero. Some folks dreamed of meeting Elvis Presley one day. My dream was to meet Ray Charles. I had another dream too, to be a bonafide writer.

To keep our spirits high, we sang. And sing we did. When I was eleven-years-old my momma sang You Are My Sunshine to me right along with Ray Charles on the box radio. Having a song and sunshine in your heart makes life worth living.