My first experience with Truman Capote was as a young teenager. I was taking an English class at the local junior college. I was taking it more for fun than anything. I still had to complete my required homeschool English courses. The first book the teacher assigned was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I was unprepared. I had never read anything so grotesque. That is, I had never read a scene as jarring and bloodied as the massacre scene in In Cold Blood. I promptly dropped the class and I have ever since had a bad taste in my mouth regarding Capote.Fast forward to the past year when I've been obsessed with the southern Gothic writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Carson MacCullers. Capote's name keeps coming up... I decided to try him again. This time, I selected a slim, old volume on the library shelves: The Thanksgiving Visitor.
No joke, Capote is an INCREDIBLE writer. He draws you in. He pushes you out. He makes you love and hate his characters. You ARE the characters. You ARE in the scrubbed clean, poor Alabama farmhouse with his relatives entertaining Odd Henderson, his hated classmate who tortures him on a regular basis at school but has, in a twisted turn of events, come as a guest to the family Thanksgiving. The ending is satisfying. I promise you.
Possibly my most favorite parts are those dealing with food description because, well, you know me, I LOVE food in books and movies. Here is Capote's description of "a regular stomach sweller," served at 5:30am on the dot no less."To the present day I retain a nostalgic hunger for those cockcrow repasts of ham and friend chicken, fried pork chops, fried catfish, fried squirrel, fried eggs, hominy grits with gravy, black-eyed peas, collards with collard liquor and cornbread to mush it in, biscuits, pound cake, pancakes with molasses, honey in the comb, homemade jams and jellies, sweet milk, buttermilk, coffee chicory-flavored and hot as Hades."
(The edition I read was illustrated by Beth Peck and these pictures come from her.)
