John Wray - Canaans Tongue

Table of Contents

Acclaim for John Wrays

CANAANS TONGUE

Wildly imagined.... Dark and fascinating.... Wray is rambunctiously unafraid of language.

Esquire

Wray is a talented young writer.... The writing is often brilliant.

TheBoston Globe

He owes a debt to Cormac McCarthy, not to mention Mr. Clemens himself, as well as to Poe.... Canaans Tongue is the evil in the heart of the American Dream.

TheNew York Times Book Review

Pure Southern gothic.... Reads like dark poetry.

TheDallas Morning News

A tense, topsy-turvy Civil War tale.... Wray skillfully employs the ambiguity of narrative.

TheVillage Voice

Highly original.... If Ambrose Bierce were alive today, he would be gratified to read Canaans Tongue.

TheNew York Sun

A wild and rocky ride through history.... A revelation.

TheBu falo News

Raises the hair on the back of your head.... Even as remarkably accomplished as his first novel was, it would not prepare readers for [the] obsession and violence of his stunning second effort.

TheCommercial Appeal (Memphis)

A stunning narrative composed of multiple voices: an epic of violence and greed and inescapable judgment that somewhat resemblesand arguably surpasses in richness and powerCormac McCarthys Blood Meridian. Wray is the real thing, and CanaansTongue is itself a masterpiece.

KirkusReviews (starred review)

Chilling, entertaining and very well-written.

TheStar-Ledger (Newark, NJ)

Original and provocative, Canaans Tongue is a stunning achievement. DailyNews-Record (Harrisonburg, VA)

A tour de force.

TheMemphis Flyer

Striking and powerful.... Wray imbues the Mississippi with the feel of a living entity.

TheFlint Journal

I

He appears to have been a most dexterous and consummate villain, thisRedeemer... The stealing of horses in one State, and the selling ofthem in another, was but a small portion of [his gangs] business; the mostlucrative was the enticing of slaves to run away from their masters, thatthey might sell them in another quarter.

This was arranged as follows; they would tell a negro that if he wouldrun away from his master, and allow them to sell him, he should receive aportion of the money paid for him, and that upon his return to them a secondtime they would send him to a free State, where he would be safe.

The poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain moneyand freedom; they would be sold to another master, and run away again, totheir employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or fourtimes, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them; butas, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was to get rid ofthe only witness that could be produced against them, which was the negrohimself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into the Mississippi...

Life on the Mississippi

Geburah Plantation, 1863.

THERE IS A HOUSE, Parson says.

There is a river. The house, built of the corpses of historic oaks, leans toward the river as if parched. The grounds stand vacant and abashed. A finger-bowl of bare red clay surrounds the house, which seems more desolate even than the grounds. But there are seven men inside of it, and one woman. They are faithful to the house; they are beholden to it. They could make their home no other place, as no other place would have them.

They are wanted for blood-crimes in eleven states and their lives are held in forfeit. They are wanted by the Union for the murder of ninety-seven slaves; they are wanted by the Confederacy for destruction of private property. The War the rest of the nation curses has sheltered them, till now, in its great and ample shadow. They are free and at liberty to take their ease. The War rolls past them on the river, and makes the woods unquiet in the evenings; no more than that. The War is an entertainment. But now a thing has happened that flushes the War from their thoughts like a sparrow from a thicket.

A body has been found. Virgil Ball has found it. Virgil Ball, the most skittish of them all, the most inquisitive, the most tender. He hovers above the body like a bucket above a well. Three other men are with him. The men look at Virgil, then down at his feet, where the body lies stiff and equitable and naked. They draw closer and squint. It is a particular body, known to them by sight. They are each of them killers and well used to unpleasantness but the sight makes them curiously restless.

A question has begun forming in their minds.

Virgil Ball.

MY LIFES NOT WORTH A PIGS KIDNEY, Virgil says. Everyone knows I murdered the Redeemer, driving a sliver of pier-glass through the back of his neck and stuffing him, with the help of the house-nigger, down the hole of the privy: everyone knows it, and now another of our gangs been snuffed.

The three holy horrors beside me know it. They know it because I told them; I told them because Im a donkey. And now another of us is killed. Goodman Harvey, a lisper, whom nobody liked much, and I liked less than anybody. They suspect me, of course. How could they not suspect me? The thought sends a tear guttering down my cheek, but Im not such a fool as to look anybody in the eye. I keep mine fixed on this mornings cadaver, once a man I knew well, laid out like a catfish at my feet.

The story I mean to tell will be a right cameo of this nation, truer than a daguerreotype, more telling than the Constitution. Its the story of the Trade, and of my twists and turns inside it: the crimes that I committed, the blasphemies I abetted, the passions I conceived. I speak as of the past, but I am frying in it still. How the devil, then, to tell it? Frontwards, like a Roman history, or backwards, like a Mandarin scroll? From all sides at once, like the Gospels of the Christ? Im an educated man, but also something of a ponce. I have ever balked when left to my own counsel.

Ever, that is, except once. Once I did not balk. Best to start there, perhaps: back at the height of my achievement. Best to start at the beginning of the end.

I might begin it as a rhyme, a scrap of school-yard doggerel:

Virgil Isaiah Dante Ball
Murdered the Redeemer in the fall.

The Redeemer was what we called him, out of devotedness; but his given name was Thaddeus. Thaddeus Morelle. A plain-faced dumpling of a man, remarkable chiefly in his smallness, like Alexander the Great, or Bonaparte. He was set to eat America like a biscuit. He was set to make princes of us all.

Instead I cut his wind-pipe, and he died.

The War for Southern Liberty had just turned a year and a half: that fixes the date at October 12, 1862. The house-nigger and I hauled him to the privy (his favorite part of the grounds, in life) and forced his little body, after a brief eulogy, through the square-cut opening in the planks. He fell without fanfare, hit the bottom with a whoomp: the hole was freshly dug and deep. After the service I sprinkled a bit of quick-lime after him and answered natures summons. I took my time about it. Then I went back to the house and brought the rest of the gang together and told them what Id done.