Southern Fried Child in Home Seeker's Paradise

Southern Fried Child In Home Seeker's Paradise is about the experiences of a sometimes lonely, but ever independent only child growing up in Mississippi in the 40s and 50s.


On one level, Southern Fried Child is a charming account of the unusual experiences of an unusual child. On another level, Moomaw's stories reflect profound and valuable insight into the stratified social, political and denominational milieu of a small southern town after World War II and before Brown v. Board of Education.


Written in the first person narrative voice of a precocious child, Southern Fried Child is story telling at its best. The stories range in emotional tone from "slap dab" funny to heart wrenchingly poignant. It's as if Jimmie is sitting beside you telling you her stories: about the dog who loved her too much, a game she played called "the embalming room door", her first cuss word, the phobia she developed after seeing her Daddy terrified of a dead mouse, and the contrast between her immersion in the Baptismal pool behind the pulpit at the First Baptist Church and the "talkers in tongues" who marched around the walls of Jericho at her Uncle Wamon's "holy roller" church.


Moomaw writes, "you might be tempted to believe that the Gothic characters you see in the movies with the bad, bad southern accents are the products of the alcohol induced dementia of failed novelists turned B-movie screenwriters, but the South I grew up in was peopled with characters like Lola in "An Epitaph for Lola and Fonnie." They walked into and out of my Daddy's little country grocery store and service station every day of the week. People like them were the stuff of Truman and Tennessee and Willie and Eudora's fiction. They were the stuff of my every day life and reality."