Homily Grits

WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY (281 pp.) --Borden Deal--Scribner ($3.50).

The widespread American belief that man is essentially good runs into hard going south of the Mason-Dixon line. Perhaps because they are the only Americans who ever lost a war, Southerners are more likely than others to take a tragic view of life, and man's depravity is the favorite preoccupation of Southern literature--whether magnolia-scented or corn-likker-tainted. Borden Deal, 33, a Mississippi-born short story writer, belongs to the white-mule team. Readers who can digest a sort of homily-grits style and who have a strong head for Southern discomfort will find that in his first novel the corn has not been squeezed in vain. Walk Through the Valley is a solid book.

Its theater is Tuxahatchie County, with its poor-white farms and rich bottom lands. Virtue is represented by Fate Laird, who comes onstage with a roll of factory-wage dollar bills pinned to his work shirt. He has a vision of the good life, where he plows a straight furrow in bare feet, and feels the good black soil of the valley squinch between his toes. It is Faulkner country, but there is a difference between Deal's Tuxahatchie and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. In Faulkner's unprincipled principality, it is the proletarian Snopses who slither to power over the aristocratic Sartorises. In Tuxahatchie County the red-soil, rednecked goodness of the hill farms is posed against the black-soil, black-souled wickedness of the valley. Indeed the valley, Fate Laird is forced to decide in the end, is "like a pretty woman loaded with syphilis." The chief disease carrier is a dropsical old shark called Book Gresham, the tag end of Tuxahatchie's first family. In defiance of the 13th Amendment, Book Gresham keeps a slave called Bodoc whom he won in a crap game. Symbolically, Book is impotent, apparently the result of one of those odd Southern boyhood experiences (with a Negro woman "musty like wild grapes") that suggest Dr. Kinsey was wasting his time among the modest aberrations of Northern folk.

Book Gresham's evil power is opposed by Brother Cox, the "webbed faced" preacher who tries to close the valley honky-tonk but loses his "holy war agin sin" when Book frames him for "a sight of carrying-on'' with a no-good girl. Fate Laird takes on too much when he gives Bodoc a job and takes the preacher's side against the courthouse-cathouse gang. Laird's son Clay shoots a mean deputy and is convicted of murder in Book Gresham's court. But in the end a sort of moral truce settles over Tuxahatchie County, with virtue still walking barefoot on the hills, and evil, condemned only by the knowledge of its own corruption, still ruling the valley.

The publishers say that Borden Deal is one-eighth Chickasaw Indian. Philosophically, he is also part Manichee--an adherent of the doctrine that good and evil are unmixed. This view of life handicaps a novelist of great honesty.

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