LOW COUNTRY

Ghosts and legends swirl in an affecting family memoir.

Making a captivating debut, Jones recounts growing up in coastal South Carolina amid alligators, water moccasins, and Venus’ flytraps, seedy bars and souvenir shops; where raging hurricanes pummeled the shore and strong-willed ghosts haunted the land. While her relatives became wealthy from the tourist trade in Myrtle Beach, her own family eked out a living, “beaten down by one bad break after another, surviving as always due to the generosity of family until it was too much effort to imagine escaping.” The disparities between rich and hardscrabble were as blatant to her as those between men and women. “I come from a line of women,” she writes, “for whom being walked all over and jumped on for the fun of cruelty was progress.” Nowhere was this cruelty more evident than in her paternal grandparents’ marriage. “Granddaddy’s violence needed no provocation,” writes Jones about the physical beatings that plagued his wife, sons, and grandsons. “I came to understand,” she writes, “from the first time I saw him raise a hand to Nana, that his inner well of fury ran too deep to be contained in just one body, and that the terrifying anger behind his violence was the spring of his other most defining quality, his racism.” If her grandfather represented fearsome patriarchy, Jones, even as a young girl, felt oppressed by sexism. Dolled up with her hair curled, she was pushed in a circuit of pageants “that fostered all the little girls of future means.” Education, she realized early, would be her escape: “though I wasn’t sure where that was, I knew that it had to be different and far away” from Myrtle Beach. The author also lovingly portrays her feckless, hard-drinking father, who aspired to country-music stardom; her mother, often anguished and overwhelmed; and her beloved Nana. Her confidential asides to readers create a genuine sense of intimacy.

Lyrical prose graces a deftly crafted narrative.