Books: High Water

THE FORTUNE TELLERS (442 pp.)—Berry Fleming—Lippincott ($3.75).

Homer’s description of Ithaca as the home of Odysseus has kept classical scholars puzzling for centuries to reconcile his landmarks with the topography of that small Ionian island. Berry Fleming’s Fredericksville, Ga. scene of The Fortune Tellers presents no such problems of identification: the place is plainly Augusta, with its Broad Street, its Confederate Monument and its levee against the Savannah River. But this will be no news to Augustans; many of them have grown casehardened to their fellow citizen’s revelations in thin fictional disguise (Colonel Effingham’s Raid, The Lightwood. Tree) of their community’s seamy side and shoddy behavior.

Violent River. There is nothing seamy or shoddy, though, about Fleming’s account of Fredericksville’s struggle against the Savannah River in full flood. Under the grey smear of incessant rain, its people scrabble heroically for survival behind their leaky dike. The warm yellow water climbs a foot an hour up the face of the levee. Sweating, grunting workers raise extra barriers of sandbags just ahead of the rising river. Sand-boils, bubbles, slides and settles, one after another, threaten to wipe out all efforts in one great gush of doom. The glare of fusees mixes menacingly with the sweet smell of floating gasoline. Debris swims silently downstream to clog up on the bridges, finally carry them away. A privy goes by, “pivoting slowly like a model in a fashion parade.” Fleming conveys the protracted melodrama of a bold, restless river in flood without once raising his voice adjectivally or using the verb “rampage.”

Cleve Barfield, well-to-do kaolin mine operator, has his mind on another man’s wife and an ancient legal injustice when he is jockeyed into the thankless job of captaining what looks like the town’s losing battle against the river. Twenty years before, one of his Trafford in-laws had been mysteriously murdered. Later, a luckless Negro, pawning the dead man’s watch, was arrested, tried, convicted and, strangely, given only a life sentence. Now a Yankee journalist named Vitner is carpetbagging in Fredericksville, poking into this old case, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together from back newspaper files and court records into a sensational scandal. Icily insolent, he mouths cliches about the “sins of the South” and its “incipient fascism”—which he says only his kind of newspaper exposure will cure.

Two Battles. As the high water crests along the levee, Barfield finds himself waging two battles, one against the flood, the other against Vitner. That he manages to win both with no loss of personal integrity is due as much to the dogged skill of the engineer in charge, whose wife he coveted, as to Vitner’s secret softheartedness with flesh & blood people in trouble.

Berry Fleming usually succeeds in telling a good Southern story in a moderate Southern accent without resort to miscegenation, lynching, rape or general degeneracy to obtain his effects. In The Fortune Tellers, he has put the race issue into a perspective of human rather than political terms that is probably more accurate than most current Southern writers would have you believe. No Homer, he has, nevertheless, caught the epic essence of man against nature—nature in this case being not only a violent river, but a violent heart.