The Last Of the 'Waltz Across Texas' and Other Stories (review)

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"public work" outside of their homes. Englewood women tell the story and describe the roles women played in the industry and in the creation of this small textile mill town. The book includes photographs and stories relating the history from the 1850s opening of the first cotton mill to the 1990s, when there were two remaining sewing factories. There are stories of hard work, of changes in the women's lives as they moved from agriculture to industry. There are stories of creative survival techniques during the Depression and hard times when the cotton mills closed. Drawing on oral histories and local research, the book also includes an introductory essay, The Regional Context: Textile Manufacturing in the South, by Benita J. Howell, anthropologist from the University of Tennessee, who was an adviser for the project, which gives a good historical context for Englewood 's story. Several other humanities advisers helped the community teaching research, interviewing, and book production skills. Members of the community learned these skills as they developed the book. The book is well researched, documented , and written by several women in the community with Helen Brown as project director and co-editor. Many former industrial centers are seeking revitalization through historical tourism. It is a way in which communities keep control of the development and use it to remember their history and educate the visiting tourists to the contributions they have made to the industrial history of this country. Englewood may never be another boom town, but it has collected the memories in an excellent book, a creative memorial to the "strong willed women" who worked in the textile industry Then and Now. This book can be purchased from the Community Action Group, PO Box 253, Englewood, Tennessee 37329. —Helen M. Lewis Jo Carson. The Last Of the 'Waltz Across Texas' and Other Stories. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1993. 160 pages. $10.50. If you ever encountered any of Jo Carson's "people pieces" on National Public Radio, you'll readily recognize the seriocomic voice that speaks in these stories; in fact, you may pretty soon begin to think that the printed words are literally talking to you in that distinctive dry and wry tone. Although the author has written several children's books and a number of plays, this is her first work of adult fiction, and it isn't like any other book that 64 comes to mind. True, the stories deal with all the staples made familiar by generations of Appalachian writers—courting, marriage and drinking and more drinking, rage, divorce, and death—but they give us a special understated presentation of themes often handled in a surpassingly lugubrious fashion. These are serious matters, of course, but yet there's often something inescapably droll about them, too. Sometimes this comes in an epigrammatic summation of a situation or an action, as when one character, after settling scores with her common-law husband by shooting him, observes that "Harry is not the kind of man who comes up with regret by himself." In the same story ("Maybe") the husband's new wife pays a special tribute to the avenging cast-off common-law spouse: "I think it was awful nice of her not to shoot me too." And what, in this context, is marriage? "Marrying is not having to sit with your back to the wall anymore." Marriage is also not a state to be entered upon lightly, as we see in another story ("Big Yellow Onions"). When a gossipy lady asks a young woman when she and her boyfriend are going to get married, the answer comes with its own kind of precision: '"He said he'd ask me when I let him take my bra off,' said Raynell, 'but I've not let him do that yet, so we've not set no date.'" (Later, when they do get married . . . well, that's another story—"Free Will"—and the humorous undertone has departed.) Planning a funeral, a woman is afraid that the members of an up-tempo singing group might take it into their heads to stage a sing-along. Actually, we'd better hold up on the quotes and citations. If the greatest...