Southern Fried Child In Home Seeker’S Paradise - Softcover

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."

Jimmie Meese Moomaw was "born and raised" in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Named by her Daddy eighteen years before she was born, she grew up as the only child of alcoholic parents in the Deep South during the 40s and 50s. Though she left Mississippi in the 60s to go to graduate school in Illinois, she never lost touch with her Southern roots. At the end of the "Prologue" to Southern Fried Child, she wrote: "I'll never know for sure who or what I might have been or would have been if I had been born in Connecticut or Detroit, but I am now sure that I am who I am in large measure because I was born in "Home Seeker's Paradise" and lived a Southern fried childhood, complete with horses and healers and heathens and whores and flawed parents who loved me both too much and not enough "Moomaw taught Communication on the college and university level for 40 years. Now retired from teaching, she is a political consultant, writer and popular public speaker living in Avondale Estates, Georgia.