Reefer Moonlight Shines High and Bright

From his outpost on Daufuskie Island, a partially developed Lowcountry jewel, Roger Pinckney spins a tale about Sea Island tomatoes, pot smuggling, voodoo, lovemakin’ and the ancient pull of moonlight. His characters interact in a world where nature still holds the aces, but Pinckney is a not a traditional American naturalist. Pinckney’s natural world is in peril and it is up to human beings to stop other human beings from destroying it. Pinckney is a conservationist writer on many levels. It is not only the natural assets of coastal South Carolina and Georgia that Pinckney seeks to preserve, but also the wildness of man.

One might suspect the author’s sparks from the past are showing up in print, but that is a confession he may include in a later book. For now, we have a homegrown yahoo on Lowcountry ego trip who attempts to shoot the developer’s local elephant in the room and succeeds in at least clearing the air. This book needed to be written. Pinckney is Hunter S. Thompson meets Mary Alice Monroe; you’ll find him a damn good read and deliciously too close to home.

Pinckney’s wild Lowcountry heroes are of a different time and seem perpetually endangered by the real and modern world outside of Daufuskie, which seldom makes an appearance but looms ominously at the fringes of his set. Charleston is pre-Greenberg and teeming with corruption. Daufuskie is an island in both a literal and a metaphorical sense — an island where man and nature run wild in the Southern moonlight. The rules are there but like the foreboding survey stakes than Yancey Yarboro moves around to throw off the developers temporarily or the boat-riding law enforcement officers Christy Seabrook avoids with his police scanner, the rules are there to be skirted.

If anything this author suffers from liking his main characters (especially Yancey) a little too much. At times Pinckney gets in his own way. At its worst, Reefer Moon reads like a romance novel for male adolescent Southerners. It has playful rebelliousness to it that isn’t quite fresh; if you were to take out all the references to pot and cocaine the plot would be far less eventful.

In Reefer Moon, neither its tomato-growing moon-crazed war veteran, its blue-blooded pot smugglers, nor its lonely rich pointy-breasted night golfing blond deity have any use for the mundane or outside modern world. There is a blatant lack of reality that works to the author’s advantage and disadvantage.

Pinckney creates a kind of pluff mud version of the Wild West, or wild South, actually. Yet this is also part of the novel’s weakness, as its main characters all seem to be rogue “badass” stereotypical manifestations of the author himself. At times the author even confuses their names, calling Christy “Yancey” and so on. Much like the great land the author writes about, Roger Pinckney is a great writer who needs to get over himself. He is at his best with lines such as these: “A man could mouth himself that way. The mouth is a self-fulfilling prophecy, ju-ju he could bring on just thinking about it. It was African, like a lot of things in the South, like cast nets and cooking collards, playing blues and mojo. Like the singing in Sea Island churches, baptizing on the falling tide so the river carries the sins out to sea.” Pinckney’s work picks up where Southern literature left off decades ago. Reefer Moon fights the good fight and gives birth to heroic outlaws.

One of those outlaws is Yancey Yarboro. Yancey becomes the most interesting of the bunch. The more he drinks and the fuller the moon gets the more Faulknerian and ancient becomes Yancey’s voice. The full moon pulls at “a bit of Chinese copper that the surgeons dared not remove. The slug had wanged off the good of the armored vehicle, burst through the windshield and into his mouth, and that slowed enough not to kill him.” The moon’s interaction with the copper sounds like the squeal of a short wave radio in his head and makes him “do fool things sometimes.” These “fool” things include killing wild hogs with his bare hands, standing in the surf with a school of hungry black tip sharks and bringing home strippers from Savannah clubs where he smashes beer bottles across thugs’ faces.

The wise moral consciousness of the book is ju-ju man Gator Brown, a wise old Gullah who gets around on a cart driven by a mule named “Henrietta Fode.” Gator Brown, the character, is perhaps Pinckney’s most significant contribution to Southern literature and embodies his genuine first-hand knowledge of Gullah culture.

The beginning of the novel is the weakest and the more the author writes the better the book gets. The characters connect well and after Pinckney’s poignant, sometimes self-serving descriptions of them, it is very exciting when they interact and collide on Daufuskie Island. The slow-burning plot crackles and roars with urgency at these interactions, and the book comes together brilliantly in its own quirky way.

Pinckney is at the top of his game when he doesn’t over-write, when he doesn’t force himself on his characters and when he lets them find their way in the quirky colorful South that he has forged out of a land that is relatively unknown to the rest of the country. This Southern land is a magical place and like Prospero’s island in The Tempest, Pinckney’s Daufuskie is a place of legends.