The Osceola Community Club: A Novel

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Summary: The Osceola Community Club
Review: A tasty tale to be read with a super sweet iced tea and the smell of homemade biscuits baking in the oven.

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Summary: Pure Southern Gold
Review: From "priss-pot" to Piketon this novel is pure Southern gold. It's different enough to be a must read. The recipes are good, also, particularly when placed in context.

Rating:
Summary: Pure Southern Gold
Review: From "priss-pot" to Piketon this novel is pure Southern gold. It's different enough to be a must read. The recipes are good, also, particularly when placed in context.

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Summary: D. H. Eaton's Down Home Delights
Review: I've read many sensory stories in my time, but I can think of only two that made me hungry: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and The Osceola Community Club. Remember all those delectable dishes in Irving's "Legend"? Those "heaped-up platters of cakes"! Those "dainty slapjacks, well buttered, and garnished with honey"!

Well, Darlene Eaton gives us equally tasty fare in The Osceola Community Club. "Hoppin' John," "Bird of Paradise," "Copper Pennies," "Sweet Potato Muggin," "Lazy Gal Brunswick Stew," "Poverty Chili"----just a few of the down-home delights in this novel! No, I won't give away any recipe. Read the book; enjoy the cooking and much more. This much more includes an extraordinary variety of story food served up by Cassandra Burquette, Eaton's main character/narrator.

In 2002 Cassandra arrives in Osceola, Florida, with a group of clubwomen for a day of antiquing. She barely recognizes this time-forgotten village where as a child she spent many hours visiting her grandmother Nanny Ellie and her cousin Della.

In "a hole of a bookstore," Cassandra finds Osceola's Favorite Foods Compiled by the Osceola Community Club, 1958. This "fundraiser of a cookbook" arouses memories of an unforgettable summer when Cassandra was 12 and felt her first womanly stirrings. As she relishes the cookbook, Cassandra also recalls later experiences, like her "Take Us Back" speech at the reunion of her 1964 high school class. Some of her memories stand alone as delightful stories like the "Civil Defense" tale (featured on the Fresh and Ripe page of this web site). Others sparkle as vignettes, like this one: 

"Christmas Eve morn. 1958. And colder 'n bare babies' butts hangin' downside in an outhouse. Granddaddy indulged my Nanny Ellie with the luxury of a nighttime burr pot beneath her bed. But the rest of us had to hustle our shivering butts to the outhouse, flashlight in hand, cold be damned. Don't never let anybody tell you it don't get cold in Florida. There's more to Florida than Miami Beach, folks. Wind could evermore rip snort up and down Nanny Ellie's hill, I'm here to testify...."

Eaton gives us Southern characters we've seen before and endows them with her own fresh vitality: For example, the no-nonsense grandmother, tough and straight-talking on the outside, loving and caring on the inside; the extra special childhood friend you told your secrets to; the stupid, self righteous preacher; admirable eccentrics; snooty girls; horny boys; gossipers; racist Christians; devious aristocrats; segregated blacks with deferential masks for whites; Atticus-Finch-like whites who defend the downtrodden; and others-all of whom give us vivid insights into small-town Florida of the 1950's.

On just about every page, Eaton puts a picture, drawing, or icon. These devices plus the recipes complement and underscore setting, characters, and action.

To my mind, the author's shining achievement is Cassandra Burquette. Perky, loquacious, sensitive, funny, keen, nostalgic, Cassandra shows traces of some of the most memorable women in Southern literature. Mostly, though, she is an original who galvanizes Eaton's vision of Osceola into a microcosm of the last days of the Old South.


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Summary: Novel crafts culture through recipes
Review: When I first heard about D. H. Eaton's novel, I thought it sounded like a fantastic idea. The novel wove stories of the residents of a small town by means of recipes culled from a cookbook. The narrator finds the book in a store that sells used books.

I'd met D. H. and through various conversations, felt quite a kinship with her. Our Southern upbringing coupled with the fact that we were both writers made for a broad stretch of common ground. She'd invited me to two different literary events, even featured some of my poetry at one of them. On both occasions, last minute problems with my younger child kept me from attending. My opinion of D. H. was based entirely on a social assessment. She's one of those women who has a natural grace about her. She has an energy that is contagious. She looks good in hats. And she is never, ever dull.

I had no idea what to expect of her novel, however. I'd never read anything she'd written. She'd been kind enough to send me a copy of her book. If the author is known to me, I try very hard to be objective, to look at the work with an even keener eye than I'd apply to the work of a stranger. Of late, I've been preoccupied with a manuscript deadline and other projects. But a few days ago, I was having my lunch and needed something to read. I read a few pages and was immediately put out with myself for picking the book up.

I found I could not put it down. In truth, I had too many things to do to get involved with a book, particularly a novel. But I was drawn into D.H. Eaton's novel in much the same way a bee is drawn to clover.

Within the pages of her book, an entire town comes alive. Each recipe in the fictitious cookbook is listed with the name of the contributor. Using the cookbook as a literary device is very effective. We see Charmaine Mosley's "Banana Salad" recipe, and the chapter it introduces relates the story of the Mosley family. In addition, each recipe builds into a composite whole that draws a picture of a culture, the Southern culture I knew and now recall with the same bittersweet emotions the narrator, Cassandra, carries to the end of the book.

I do not think it an accident, the choice of name for the heroine in the book. Cassandra, in some versions of ancient mythology, received the gift of prophecy from the god, Apollo. In Ms. Eaton's novel, Cassandra offers a historical account of Southern life that begins around 1958 and continues to the present, and within that account, the history of a small town, like so many, that, through growth and change, became quite a different place entirely. Just as the mythological Cassandra's warnings were ignored, so are the warnings of many, including the narrator in the novel, who caution that the culture we value will in time be lost.

As I read the book, each recipe, like the little cakes in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, propelled me backwards, to my own upbringing and coming of age in a small Southern town. Food is a primary component in any culture, and using that as a means to move the plot works wonderfully.

D. H. Eaton writes in an unpretentious, staccato style that immediately engages the reader. As each family's story unfolds, there is a flavor of oral history-for what family below the Mason-Dixon line is without this exceptional legacy, from the poorest of us to the richest? She recreates a culture that put women on a pedestal and religion on the table, one that took care of its own, that tolerated those less fortunate and viewed the rich with a cynical eye. A sub-setting in the book is the front porch, that wonderful place where so many of us sat and took in summer evenings and stories spun by our elders, where philosophy and poetry were dispensed in plain language that shaped our hearts and values.

What strikes me about D. H. Eaton, besides her charming personality, besides her abundance of civic contributions to literature and history efforts, involves the fact that she is incredibly endowed with talent as a writer. The book deserves critical attention from serious quarters, and I certainly hope such attention will be given. For a writer to establish such a strong voice with a first novel is quite a feat.

This book is a valuable contribution to history, for it creates a metaphor for all the small, dusty towns throughout the sunbelt that fell on hard times when textile or lumber mills closed and the best and brightest left for big city job opportunities. For anyone doing research on life in the South in the decade after World War II, this novel is an incredible resource.

By the end of the novel, we have bonded to the families in Osceola in a manner that makes us sad the story is over. If we are Southern, we have journeyed to our own childhoods, and recalled the summers, the winter holidays, and the family reunions this author brings to life for us. And as a reader, we come to realize that the real character in the book is the very Southern village of Osceola. In a particularly poignant passage at the end of the book, the author writes:

"And don't forget Nanny Ellie's spices-her lighthearted expletives that mixed with her Confederate cooking smells and traveled from her kitchen outward, making us giggle, causing Mama to feign being shocked.
Nanny's kitchen. Impossible to duplicate. Impossible to recapture."

All I can say is, "Bless your heart, D.H. , you certainly did recapture that kitchen. And the one I grew up in as well. Most splendidly, I might add."