Department
of English

Maco Light

Story about the Maco Light

Review of Kudzu

About Bland Simpson

Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian's Coastal Plain
By Bland Simpson, Photography by Ann Cary Simpson
The University of North Carolina Press, 269 pages, $34.95, 1998.

Slant-floored cottage," "curl of rolling surf," "channel markers red and green." Words rich in evocation—of summer, of the coast. Into the Sound Country, Bland Simpson's latest, is a mural of memories and history, a meander into the country east of Raleigh.

We follow Bland and Ann Cary Simpson on their wanderings, moving in each chapter to another county or town down in the Down East. With each stop we're rewarded with a tale: the summer Bland and the boys tried to drive up a high-tide beach in his mother's Ford, his granddaddy's encounter with a municipal skinny-dipping club.

Says Simpson, "I wanted the family stories and anecdotes to be easy going, to pull the reader in and make a connection, then give the text a jumping-off point toward the more serious historical part." So he begins one chapter with a search for a fabled apparition—the Maco Light. He and a host of friends get to enjoy the spine-tingling experience of spirit chasing. But the story ends with the haunt's land turned into an industrial park, the light vanished. The Maco Light, Simpson points out, is not the only spirit snuffed by development. Such shiftings give the book a near musical form to match its lyrical language.

No wonder. Simpson is a musician in his other life as a pianist for the Red Clay Ramblers—a Southern string band that mixes music with fiction. Simpson may call it "nonsense entertainment," but he likes the way they "create lyric evocations of other times." And that's what he's set out to do in his book.

"A book may have a form totally different from song, but it would be hard to have a lyric impulse and have to put it aside and dry out one's prose," says Simpson. He adds, with a laugh: "Especially when you're talking about a soggy area."

It's not all song and dance though—there's a strain of mortality that runs throughout the book. We hear much of failed missions: Simpson takes us by burial sites of ancient Confederate aspirations, later passes around a brittled obituary notice—the remains of a father's dreams wrecked by Vietnam.

Simpson says that the Sound Country is a place where you think about the cycle of life. Which makes sense, especially for Simpson. After all, along certain parts of the coast many more of his relations rest below ground than above. He says, "You take more note the more you go along in life, as you see your own kids growing up and you see your older family passing away. It's how the wheel works and where you are on it."

Anyone living along the coast knows that people aren't the only things changing with each tide. The land is also changing, shifting with the sea and with human development. He writes: "In fifty years or a hundred perhaps, not even an eyeblink in God's time, this green and golden coastal plain, field forest swamp marsh and sound, may be half or all beneath the waves of the sounds or of the sea herself. But for now...this ephemeral, water-loving land, is ours, our title to it as true as our blood and our beating hearts."

Bland Simpson teaches in the English department's creative writing program. He and the Red Clay Ramblers are performing at Ford's Theater with Kudzu, a Southern musical based on Doug Marlette's cartoon. Ann Cary Simpson is associate director of development for the Institute of Government.

—Julia Bryan