An uplifting tale

“There’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place.”

SUE RIDDLE CRONKITE begins each chapter of her new novel, Louette’s Wake, with a few lines from one of the old gospel hymns popular in our part of the world. She didn’t include this one, but it’s evident nevertheless on nearly every page of her story.

Sue grew up in New Hope, another little Holmes County community just a few miles down the Hog and Hominy Highway from Esto, on the other side of the river. She’s part of the storied Riddle clan. And even though she went on to become one of the pioneering newspaperwomen of her generation — with a decade as a reporter and editor at the Birmingham News, among other stops — she’s never gotten far from home.

Sue came back to the area in the mid-1980s to become the founding editor of a new daily newspaper in Dothan, Alabama, called Wiregrass Today. That’s when I met her, introduced by our mutual friend E.W. Carswell, another notable newspaper reporter who became the historian of our stretch of the Florida Panhandle during his long career as a staff writer and columnist for the Pensacola News-Journal.

Sue turned me down for a job on her new paper. The publisher didn’t want some college boy who thought he knew it all about exactly the kind of newspaper our area needed. Sue said there was no place for me, which left me with no excuse not to take the opportunity I’d been offered to become editor and publisher of a magazine for lawyers in California.

Instead of a job on an upstart Alabama newspaper that folded after its first year, I got a lifelong friend. She and I have kept in touch across the years and miles and had an occasional visit. So it was a treat to hear a few weeks ago that she’d published the novel that had been rolling around in her mind for many years. I ordered my copy from Downtown Books and Purl in Apalachicola, where Sue now lives, and read it on a recent trip back home to the Florida Panhandle.

In short: It’s terrific. The book lives up to its billing as “an uplifting southern tale,” one that takes place in New Hope and across the state line in Geneva, Alabama. It’s a gentle story that centers on Louise Ella Kelly’s decision to throw herself a wake while she’s still alive. Even more impressive than the story is the writing, which manages in its simple words to capture the particular idioms and cadence of the way we talk — without the false dialect and ignorance and ain’ts and y’alls usually larded into books with a southern accent.

You’ll know these people, and their ruminations, and the honest country food they eat. For those who don’t — Yankees, maybe — she includes recipes at the end for chicken and dumplings, collard greens and chocolate fudge cake, among others. “Buy a big bunch of collard greens off the back of Lige’s pick-up truck, if he comes around,” that one begins.

On my recent trip home, after a couple of dozen of Apalachicola’s finest oysters, I stopped to visit Sue and collect her autograph on a few more copies of her novel I’d picked up at Downtown Books. I found her nearly finished with her next novel, this one involving Esto’s own Two Toe Tom, the legendary alligator that spawned an annual festival in my home town.

“I don’t have any aches and pains,” Sue told me, although the accumulation of years would give her every right. It’s a good thing, since she may have to live forever to finish all the stories she’s started to tell.

My advice: Call Downtown Books and Purl in Apalachicola at 850-653-1290 and ask them to send you a copy of Louette’s Wake. They have yarn, too, if you need any. You could order Sue’s book on Amazon, but it won’t be as good. I promise you’ll love it.