Parched and Gritty Land

...the town "one Saturday just past noon when Jesse joined his gang of buddies on Main Street pullulated with the news...

...of a farm boy whose burning ambition, when his girl throws him over after her father strikes it rich, is to become as great a bank robber as Clyde Barrow...

...He had often wondered who he really was, and had felt that like the changeling prince in the fairy tale he had been cheated of his birthright and brought up in a meaner station of life than fate and his gifts had intended him for...

...a gigantic Negro tamale peddler, cursed with a voice whose lush organ tones sound like impudence to his white customers, is casually murdered in the main square while the townspeople look the other way...

...In the first story, an impoverished farmer with a large and hungry family discovers the emptiness wealth imposes on his own life and the ruin it makes of his children when oil spouts like black blood from his formerly thankless acres...

...It is best to ignore the phrase-making Sainte-Beuve of the book jacket, who sees a dust bowl in every grain of sand, wrath in every grape, and a vision of history in any short story that contains a specific date...

...That time, that place, the jacket copy tells us, are "the realities, the dreams, the feelings of the now almost legendary 1930s in the American heartland...

...The best of the stories, "The Last of the Caddoes," has little connection if any with "the legendary 1930s...

...Because his mother, irritated and disdainful of his mission, threatens the vanished Caddoes with total extinction, Jimmy declares war upon her in the name of his own holy ghosts...

...In "The Ballad of Jesse Neighbours," originally published in 1963, that latter-day culture hero Clyde Barrow is a stark presence, far more convincing than the chic dreamboat of violence he was to become a few years later in the hands of Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty...

...Like a dybbuk, the brooding ghosts of a vanished Indian tribe take possession of the soul of a 12-year-old boy...

...The groups of men collected on the corners were both subdued and excited, with an air at once conspiratorial and challenging, as if defying a ban on public gatherings...

...More important, these stories are charming, sardonic, occasionally funny, and often beautifully written...

...Oil and rain are supranatural presences in this parched and gritty land, and they are prayed for and dug for with both pathetic and absurd desperation...

...In actuality, any collection worth reading finds its essential unity in the sensibility and experience of the writer, and Humphrey's book is a loosely related group of stories about Oklahoma and east Texas, where he grew up...

...If they should strike oil we could be millionaires"?results in a couple's impoverishment after they house and feed the drilling crew like royalty...

...Dead...

...If Humphrey sometimes mars his unpretentious colloquial naturalness by affecting an air of backwoods simplicity that is specious and irritating, country-cousinish almost to the point of being corny, such lapses are neither frequent nor pervasive...

...A mountebank rainmaker in the second, an endearing schlemiel wandering the country in a circus cart full of amateurish engines, is hoist with his own petard by torrents and floods he cannot stem...

...As William Humphrey uses Barrow, this tawdry Texas folk hero is altogether genuine, both awesome and contemptible in all the messy provincial bravado he exuded for Texans in his own day...

...In the Texas of Barrow's time, unlike Hollywood of the '60s...

...When he learns that he is part Indian on his father's side, Jimmy Hawkins becomes obsessed with the idea that his white blood can betray the fragile tribal link he carries within himself...

...Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker...

...In "Mouth of Brass...

...This is a world of men who are indigent farmers one week and millionaires the next, when their gushers come in...

...A desperate village misfit, in "The Human Fly," tries to climb the walls and tower of the county courthouse, and then spends 33 bitter years as a crippled ward of the town...

...Reviewed by PEARL K. BELL Contributor, the "New Yorker," New York "Times Book Review" William Humphrey's publisher has tried to ward off the curse that usually bedevils a collection of stories by making grand claims for A Time and a Place as more than the sum of its miscellaneous parts...

...But it is hard to see this book as quite so consciously unified an attempt to "give us back the essence, the good and the bad, of a recent but strangely remote part of our lives—and an innocence lost when the affluent paradise was regained...

...In this story about the dark ambiguity of ancestry in a plundered land, William Humphrey achieves a tragic resonance that at once transcends reminiscence and ennobles it...

...In two of the more ambitious stories in this volume, "A Job of the Plains" and "The Rainmaker," Humphrey writes with affectionate, ironic, mock-Biblical solemnity about the way people of the southwestern near-desert scrabble for these liquid miracles, and are then dismayed and broken by the very manna they tried so hard to find...

...He had been born with a horror of the ordinary, and had always known he was not what he seemed to the world to be...

...The reason, as he now knew, was that he was the last of the Caddoes: rightful heir to all that he surveyed, with blood in his veins that cried out for vengeance...

...The mirage of oil?Think of it...

...and as with the people of an occupied country, when a partisan hero (and heroine), one of their own, had been caught and executed by the authorities, the flag of their traditional classless, blood sympathy with the outlaw flew at half-mast...

...The most powerful writing in A Time and a Place is found in this sinister, brooding tale: "What Jimmy Hawkins had always known was now confirmed: he was meant for no common fate...