The Evening Road by Laird Hunt

The Evening Road is ostensibly about the events surrounding a lynching in the fictional town of Marvel, Indiana, but it is really the story of two very different women, Ottie Lee Henshaw and Calla Destry, who are changed by the events of the day.

Ottie Lee is at her job in an insurance office when her boss tells her to put her things away, they’re going to a “rope party”. Everyone in the office is aflutter with the excitement. Ottie and her boss pick up her husband and begin a very circuitous trip to Marvel on which they see two dogs wearing neckties, get threatened by a Civil War veteran, and meet many other colorful characters. They also learn more about themselves and each other than any of them expected.

Calla comes home from a picnic only to find that her foster parents and many neighbors have left Marvel. She sets off to find them and finds a good amount of trouble along the way. Calla’s story, much like Ottie’s, is both funny and sad, but also carries with it an overarching sense of fear. As a person of color so near to a lynching, Calla is in danger from the minute she walks out the door. While both women’s stories occur at roughly the same time and even overlap in strange ways, their experiences of the day could not be more different.

Hunt does not use the terms “cornsilk” and “cornflower” as racial epithets. While this could have easily been a hokey literary device, it was instead a way to encourage the reader to slow down and think. By removing known words for race from the vocabulary of the characters, Hunt forces the reader to think about what words we ourselves use that so often reduce someone to one aspect of their personhood. Each time a character refers to someone as a cornsilk or cornflower, the reader is confronted with the assumptions that are being made about that person and why.

The Evening Road is inspired by real events that happened in Marion, Indiana in 1930. A photograph of the Marion lynching was the inspiration for the song “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol and made famous by Billie Holiday. 

-Portia Kapraun

My Favorite Cashew

Carroll County, Indiana resident C.B. Anderson, who we know locally as Cindi Anderson, has written a memoir of her husband, Dr. Tom Anderson (Doc Anderson), a beloved country doctor. Doc was not your typical doctor but was one who charged little, sometimes nothing. He wanted to be a doctor, not to make lots of money, but to merely help. And that he did! (Doc passed away in 2008).

The story is written for several reasons. Yes, to honor Doc but also for the purpose of  encouragement to any who have suffered and are yet suffering from being sexually abused as a child. This book shows how such horrific childhood abuses, on any scale, stay with you for a lifetime!  Cindi also wrote to encourage any suffering from bipolar disorder, as Doc. himself did. 

C.B. Anderson, in My Favorite Cashew,  is honest and real as she shares their years of mariage, Doc's grieving for the love he felt he missed as a child, their country-style existence, and the ups and downs of depression and sorrow from childhood trauma.  It's a memoir and it's special.  

This book comes electronically and in paper and is available at the Delphi Public Library.