A Curious Matter of Men with Wings by F. Rutledge Hammes

F. Rutledge Hammes comes to the blog today with a lovely story laden with Lowcountry legend and atmosphere in his debut offering

A Curious Matter of Men with Wings

Bohicket (Bo) Walpole lives in Gullah country – those barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina, with his parents, his brother Lay and his sister Dew. Life is a series of challenges to obtain food, money and the things needed to survive and live in this curiously unique place. When not fishing or doing their chores by mending nets, boats and maintaining the ‘rain barrels’ for freshwater, Bo and Lay are often out playing ‘pirate’ raiding yachts and sailboats moored by tourists for booty: beer, food, fishing gear and occasionally, cash. Dew, being the girl, isn’t allowed to travel with the boys -and they are usually immune to her begging. But one day, she accompanies them on their adventure and everything that could go wrong does. Left to watch the boat and keep quiet – she hears Lay fire off a warning shot to Bo, who is still in the midst of searching the targeted boat for booty. She sees their boat is drifting away from Bo – and reaches up to grab his hand but instead falls into the water, and doesn’t resurface. Frantically searching without luck, Bo and Lay believe that they see the Flying Men leaving the islands with Dew in their arms.

Raised and immersed in the legends and lore of the islands, the boys have heard the stories from their father that came from the Gullah people, people that they trade with for items they need and cannot source, children that they know and have played with, and their remove from the mainlanders mean the Walpoles are not prone to opening up their own lives to mainlanders, let alone sharing secrets or information about the Gullah peoples and their lives. Full of secrets and a touch of legend, we see Bo’s mother dealing with her grief by attempting to follow the flying men with her own homemade wings, we discover the pure perfection of a series of islands that while beautiful, are layered in legends centuries old and how they become the perfect place to redefine and redesign a life, as Bo’s father has done, or even that the mainland doesn’t provide that sense of invincibility and security, or even answers about the flying men that Ley found on the island – everyone on the mainland is vulnerable and different – and he can’t believe that he won’t find Dew, alive and well and with the flying men.

What emerges from this story is the richness and magic that is to be found in isolation, where legends are crafted to provide answers to big questions, or engender a sense of fear into children to keep them close and safe. Hammes is obviously well-versed and familiar with the legends and lore, the place and the manner of storytelling that one could expect from the griots who saw that oral histories of tribes and people are remembered and heard. And as storytelling goes sometimes, the tale is not quite linear- as an element or person seems to take flight and move us to another facet of the story, rolling forward and back with ease, building an atmosphere that is as haunting as it is beautifully nuanced, a real love story to the islands and the people who have survived and thrived, lived lives of great joy and sorrows, but lived on their own terms by their own definition. Perhaps a bit wordy and some of the conversations seem to try too hard to be funny or important, but as a whole, this debut is a new definition of the southern voice in literature and one to be watched.

A Curious Matter of Men with Wings by F. Rutledge Hammes

Title: A Curious Matter of Men with Wings
Author: F. Rutledge Hammes
Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Multi-Cultural, Southern
Published by: Southern Fried Karma
ISBN: 1732539820
Published on: 25 September, 2018
Format:eARC
Source: Publisher Via Edelweiss
Pages: 280
Rated: four-stars

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One day, Bohicket and Ley Walpole take their little sister out on a johnboat to pirate the waterways for beer and loose change. Dew falls overboard and appears to drown, until two men with gigantic wings swoop down and carry her body away into the sky. The news of her disappearance hits the family hard, driving the mother to fashion wings so she can fly after men who took her daughter. The Walpole boys set off in search of their little sister and discover love and the truth behind the centuries-old tale of the Flying Men, as well as numerous other mysteries native to the Carolina sea islands.

A copy of this title was provided via Publisher Via Edelweiss for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review: all conclusions are my own responsibility.

About F. Rutledge Hammes

As the oldest in a family of ten, stories of family come naturally to F. Rutledge Hammes. His grandparents moved out to the Sea Islands early in their marriage and made friends in the Gullah community, and he grew up enamored by all the stories and folklore he was told as a child. It wasn’t until he was a junior in college that Rutledge decided to try his hand at writing fiction; a proud and pledged poet, he became inspired by the minimalist style of Raymond Carver, Pat Conroy’s sense of character and place, and the hard-hitting subject matter of Dorothy Allison. He has long believed that magic is at the heart of Charleston, SC, and so magic must be at the heart of the Charleston novel. Through A Curious Matter of Men with Wings, Rutledge hopes readers will see the redemption that comes to people who keep their promises to one another and stand together regardless of ethnicity, culture and class. He earned his MFA in fiction from Old Dominion University, has had numerous short stories, essays and poems published in various journals and magazines around the country, and is a contributing writer in several books. He is presently Director of the Creative Writing program at the Charleston County School of the Arts, the most awarded middle- and high-school writing program in the nation, and is the 2019 South Carolina Arts Commission Prose Fellow.

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