THE WRITING OF SMALL GAMES OF CHANCE
My novel of hard labor. Small Games of Chance is set on one day, Annunciation Sunday in 1928. It revolves directly or indirectly around May Skinner a woman in her late 20s with seven men to care for, her husband GB plus his three sons from his previous marriage and the three they’ve had together.
It is laid on an abundant but sinister large plantation in far southern Alabama. This is plantation Sainte Elisabeth, originally French. May’s family shares the plantation with hired field workers, all black, who live there in squalor working the fields of cotton, sugar cane and peanuts.
GB is the plantation shack bully, its manager. Black and white get along, mainly because GB is a decent man even though without a doubt a son of his place, time and lineage.
This is the Bell family. Who themselves are so poor that they perch at the bottom of the white caste system.
Amid the sunny splendor of the once grand and noble plantation, the mansion burnt to the ground during the Civil War, there are dark forces gathering. A big forbidding swamp walls the place in. The field workers are descendants of Haitian slaves bought after an uprising and brought in along with their Voodoo. Voodoo is still present on Sainte Elisabeth. And too surrounding the family are the local poor whites, with their bigotry and threatening violence.
This day in the life of May moves in a dislocation of time and place, from the 1870s to 1928, from Sainte Elisabeth and the nearby towns to East Texas, New York and Hollywood. Future, present, past tenses, sometimes a narrator relates the story, sometimes it is told alternately in the first and second person, and in the third person singular.
May is my grandmother, her next to youngest son is my father, Mancil Bell. She has been raised by nuns in Indian Territory, left there by her father as a baby. She’s only been back in Alabama a few years yet remains the ‘Skinner Woman,’ tainted by her grandfather’s northern sympathies and his murder by locals as a traitor.
Her difficulties are compounded by being herself a ‘Yankee girl’ with a talks strange.’ When raising her the Nuns also imbued her with French language and culture, and the telltale accent of French in English.
One critical question: is May mad or sane. She’s prone to flashes of hot temper. She can lose herself in quick sand scenes. Be they real or imagined?
One of the points of labor in writing Small Games of Chance was research. It required many hours of that. I sought to make the settings and times in toto as genuine as I could.
Further despite the daunting complexities of writing the novel I wanted it to be an easy read, a flowing, engaging narrative in my own voice as well as in the dialects I use. This meant that the writing itself took concentration and sincere dedication. Having always been a facile writer this was something knew for me.
May Skinner Bell, my grandmother, is an imagined person. The real woman died in the 1930s, about 15 years before I was born. Source material was slim. My father‘s silence in her regard was deafening. I knew enough to never inquire. His siblings too very rarely spoke of her. Whether so from dread of an unmanning emotion or from politeness in saving her memory from the unpleasant memories they harbored, I’ll never know.
The little I do know about her, all tantalizing, came to me from her only daughter, a much loved aunt dead now too for what seems a lifetime. From what she told me, however, it would seem that her children held her in such great affection, even in a special reverence., that to remember her made them choke in grief. This despite her Titans’ temper and putative eccentricities.
Certainly it was she who set the tone for this poverty stricken family, raising her children to have impeccable manners, to be polite to a fault, to be well read and considerate. All of them were most charming characters.