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Diane Wilson's Holy Roller is a memoir of a Pentecostal childhood in the tough shrimping community of Seadrift on the Gulf Coast of Texas, but it is also a true-life murder mystery and, as the subtitle says, the record of growing up to "quit loving a blue-eyed Jesus." Wilson may have left the church but she did not leave the community. The publishers tell us she is a fourth generation shrimper, mother of five, and a celebrated environmental activist whose first book, An Unreasonable Woman, was the story of her successful pursuit of Formosa Plastics, who were dumping toxic waste in the Gulf Coast shrimping grounds.
She is not only a determined and courageous woman but also an exhilarating writer who somehow must have found time to read books in that busy life of hers. Her story is dramatic and uproarious but never overwritten. Even the violence threaded through it is presented without prurience or embellishment: shooting yourself accidentally with your first gun is just what happens if you are seventeen and careless like Mom's brother Delbert; so too losing your little brother, as her grandfather did, when he fell into a beach fire because Daddy had left and Mother was too harassed to be there with the kids. "Little brother Sand Dune" stayed where he fell on that barren island when the fatherless family decamped to the mainland.
There is a lot of humor in the book, but it is never patronizing or malicious; Wilson's wit is interwoven with intimations of the dark aspects of life in such a hardscrabble community. And the dialogue is utterly convincing. Once begun, Holy Roller is as hard to put down as any whodunit, though not because there is ever any doubt about the identity of the murderer (an out-of-control game warden whose own appalling story is finally disclosed in the testimony of his sibling, Brother Dynamite, an ex-convict who becomes a born-again preacher and snake handler). You simply don't want to leave this richly re-imagined world and the resilient little girl who already has the imagination of the writer she eventually became.
The dedication and the epigraph of Wilson's book are eloquent clues about what is to come. The epigraph is taken from Antonio Machado's "Proverbs and Songs": "Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it." This suggests not only a certain literary taste but also a teasing indirection. Related passages in the Machado oeuvre tend to contrast living and dreaming with a third and better thing: awakening. This would fit nicely with a coming-of-age memoir. On the other hand, the author seems to have spent much of her childhood in a visionary state between waking and dreaming— going to the moon, attending her own Last Judgment, scratching gnomic letters to Jesus on her windowsill and receiving messages back, lying in the road or hiding in the chinaberry tree in a state of suspended animation. Moreover, the hero of Wilson's book is her grandfather, "Chief." This patriarch, "part Cherokee or Blackfoot (he never said which)," though he "would sooner take a blunt end of an ax to his head then go to church or associate with any of the practitioners of such," nevertheless "talked minor talk to the dead" (including "little brother Sand Dune").
Chief has regular visions and gets messages from the other side—crucially for the story, from his son Archie Don, whose murder he enlists "Silver" (as the tenyear- old Diane is known) to help him solve. So perhaps the term we are to guess is visions rather than awakening. Take your pick. The dedication, by contrast, is entirely unambiguous: "To Chief, Billy Bones and Archie Don. Wherever you are." These, we soon discover, are the "backslidden" men of the family who were regularly threatened with hell and damnation by their believing womenfolk. Billy Bones is Diane Wilson's father under the piratical pet name by which her mother called him when she first fell for him, and Archie Don, his unmarried younger brother, is the murder victim. These men, whose trade Wilson followed, are her chosen genealogical line rather than the believing women of the maternal line. There is her pretty, timid mother, Goldie, forever anxious in case the Rapture catches her with the washing and cleaning unfinished, or her Aunt Silver, who outdoes the male preachers at their own game. The strongest personality among them is Wilson's grandma, Rosa Belle, perpetually "on the warpath for God," who finds all the churches too milk-and-water for her fierce theology but plays a particular radio evangelist at top volume all day long to keep the devil and the backslidden on their toes—and sends him most of her meagre earnings.
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