Texas Kin

...And the lost boy, Little Ned, is a glamorous, romantic Western hero to young Tom...

...to thirteen, when he secretly builds himself a tree house and can answer his father satisfactorily the questions, "Are you going to get hurt...

...Most impressively, whether glimpsed briefly in an anecdote or seen in the round, his characters are vividly warm and alive and their surroundings—a farm kitchen, a deserted house, a town square on a busy Saturday, the empty plains —visualized with a clarity that can almost be reached out and touched...

...There were indeed giants in those days and not the least of them were the women...

...In a sense, too, it is the mythology of the South and the West, but only incidentally...

...After his discharge, he, with his pregnant wife and two children and all of the family bones in marked kegs and the matching tombstones, treks from Tennessee to north Texas...

...The poverty and hardships of the Depression are surmounted by a loving family, right here and now, so to speak—and what price Mr...

...Gumbo, a first novel by Mack Thomas, is a collection of impressionistic episodes, fourteen of them covering about ten years, which together present one of the most moving and delicate pictures of childhood and a loving family life that I know...

...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson We Southerners are accused of living in the past," says William Humphrey's narrator, young Tom Ord-way...

...The Ordways is the mythology of the Ordway family, full of intimate, personal gossip and jokes about its deities as well as epic tales of their great adventures...

...Gumbo and The Ordways show two faces of a time and a place and a people...

...Humphrey's need for the past...

...Sam, the first Ordway to be born in Clarksville, Texas, is the next giant as he sets out on his long and hopeless search for his stolen little boy and discovers himself in exploring the land and people of Texas in their mysterious variety...

...The past lives in us . . . that collection transmitted orally from father to son of proverbs and prophecies, legends, laws, traditions of the origins and tales of the wanderings of his own tribe...

...It is with kin, not causes, that the Southerner is linked...

...Both are wonderfully worth reading...

...What can we do...

...William Humphrey raises this desire for the past to a philosophy and its delineation to an art...

...Toby is a real boy and a part of a real family—from the age of about three, when things are scary and confusing, through five, when he learns that "growing things . . . living things, that is, are making a trip . . . going somewhere, on their way from what they are to what they can be...

...Toby's father and mother, who work in the mill, his two older sisters, his younger brother, his grandparents, his teachers at school, the neighbors, the people they go to church with—all are as close and natural a part of the boy's life as are the grape arbor, the frog pond, the old elm tree, and the dusty backyard full of chickens...

...Thomas compounds nostalgia with revelation to make significant a game of dominoes, the paring of an apple, or a case of mumps...

...Many others besides these major figures crowd the background with their stories, brought to mind at an annual Graveyard Working Day in late October in the 1930s...

...Thomas Ordway, great-grandfather of young Tom, was wounded in the legs and blinded at Shiloh...

...Probably not more than fifty miles from William Humphrey's Clarksville is the town Mack Thomas calls Cotton-mill, where his Silers live during the Depression of the Thirties and where young Toby grows up...

...The stories do fall into certain sweeping, general patterns, but their richness and flavor come from their detailed individuality...

...Are you making any trouble...

...Are you going to get finished with it...

...Every reader must have known some of the charm of the past in the present, even if it was only as a child asking to be told about the old days, or having one's own child ask about when his parents were young...