In N.C. writer Randall Kenan’s final book, his imagination flies

Nearly 39 years after "Let the Dead Bury the Dead," Randall Kenan turned in another short-story collection rooted in Duplin County, where he grew up.

I put that in past tense, since Kenan died Aug. 28 at the age of 57. Unless someone can shape his big, unfinished novel into something publishable, "If I Had Two Wings," will probably be his last work.

As it is, it's a fitting testament for a significant and original talent.

Once again, the setting is Tims Creek, the mythical eastern North Carolina crossroads town with notable parallels to Chinquapin, where Kenan grew up. Wilmington is mentioned, and folks drive over to the county seat, Crosstown (Kenansville?), and elsewhere in York County (Duplin?).

Kenan's characters are older now, well into middle age if not AARP range. Most of them are strivers: descendants of slaves, children of go-getters. They own their land, work as preachers, school principals or other professionals and send their children to Howard, Spelman and the Air Force Academy.

Their adventures have the feeling of tall tales, trailing over into magical realism. In the first of the 10 stories, a Tims Creek plumber, attending a Baptist convention in New York in the 1980s, runs into Billy Idol. (Well, his name is Billy, and he has spiky blond hair and a British accent and he sings a song about dancing with himself.) Billy introduces the plumber around as "The Deacon," a legendary blues musician, and before long, the plumber has picked up a guitar.

In "The Eternal Glory That is Ham Hocks," Howard Hughes travels to Tims Creek to try to hire an African-American lady as his personal cook. (Her son gave up a finance job to go to culinary school and become a hit chef in Los Angeles, serving his mama's recipes as "Nouvelle Soul Food.")

In "Ain't No Sunshine," a cuckolded preacher takes his belt to his wife's boyfriend in the parking lot of an IGA. (His great aunt always said she was nothing but a strumpet.)

In "The Acts of Velmajean Swearington Hoyt," a mild-mannered, widowed church lady suddenly -- and with no volition -- begins performing miracles: healing, raising the dead, feeding a multitude of homeless people with one pot of turkey barbecue and a few rolls of French bread. Her feats draw the attention of a silver-tongued megachurch pastor from "The Atomic Church of God and Worship Center."

Even the side characters can be larger than life, such as a 6-foot-6 Brazilian wunderkind architect, flamboyantly gay, with a fashion sense that runs in the direction of a latter-day Carmen Miranda.

A couple of the stories read like first drafts, but one of the best, "Now Why Come That Is?" could stand comparison with Flannery O'Connor. A wealthy Tims Creek farmer, lord of all he surveys, suddenly finds himself haunted by a giant boar hog. "Everywhere that Percy went, the hog was sure to go" -- into his chicken barns, his general store, his bedroom, even church. Others see the hog, but it always manages to slip away before anyone can catch it and ship it to Animal Control. Obviously, symbolism is involved, and an epiphany will be ignited before the close. (Once, one of the infallible markers of Southern fiction was the presence of a dead mule. With Kenan, this might have shifted to a live hog.)

One of the few outliers in the collection, "Resurrection Hardware," follows a character named Randall Kenan who buys an antebellum farmhouse in Alamance County. Before long, he's living alongside the very real-looking shades of escaped slaves and Quaker "conductors" on the Underground Railroad.

Along the way, Kenan deals with the changes in Southeastern North Carolina: the growing Hispanic population, the passing from tobacco to factory livestock operations, the threat of hurricanes. In an age of the coronavirus, he quietly reminds of the toll of AIDS and its continuing shadow. (Another side character, a good-ol'-boy auto mechanic and seemingly a walking cliche, turns out to be HIV-positive.)

The variety and invention of these tales reminds readers how much we lost with Kenan's death. But at least we have "If I Had Two Wings" to remember him by.

Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-616-1788 or peacebsteelman@gmail.com.

Book review

’IF I HAD TWO WINGS: Stories’

By Randall Kenan

W.W. Norton, $15.95