Red Clay Suzie by Jeffrey Dale Lofton
Jeffrey Dale Lofton’s stunning debut novel Red Clay Suzie (Post Hill Press) is a coming-of-age story about a gay, physically-misshapen young man growing up in the rural and segregated Georgia of the 1960s.
A work of fiction inspired by his own childhood and set in his hometown of Warm Springs, Lofton explores issues of identity, family and place with a stream-of-consciousness intimacy and a rich sensuality that hearkens back to James Joyce.
Rural Georgia Comes Alive
The story, split into three parts and many short chapters, brims over with an emotional pacing that won’t let up, engendered by a protagonist whose nuanced observations of those around him and the machinations of his always-tender heart draw us in, time and again.
With his older brother and parents, Philbet lives in a cinder-block house situated between his grandaddy’s gorgeously tended red clay vegetable garden and the unofficial town dump that sprawls behind them, full of abandoned appliances and junked-out cars. Philbet’s emotional life embodies the same yin and yang.
Bolstered by a mother who sews him custom shirts to hide his misshapen chest and a paternal grandaddy who imparts “loving guidance to last a lifetime,” the giggly and innocent Philbet nonetheless must endure uncles who taunt him with nicknames like Suzie and Tittysack. Transition to school brings kids who shun him for being small and deformed and — as he calls himself often — a weirdo. He slowly befriends a Black boy named James and their bond forges over a mutual hatred of PE and experience of being isolated.
The Boy Next Door
Cars enthrall Philbet. From his earliest moments, he carries around his favorite green Mercury Cougar Matchbox car “with red interior and doors that opened” and parks it on the table by his bed every night. But this is no kid playing with toys. Philbet visualizes cars with imagination and love. He may have a deformed body but the cars he envisions, even those covered in rust at the junkyard, are sleek and beautiful to him, full of power and possibility.
“As a rising first-grader I was a GM man. My beloved Mercury Cougar was still a joy each time I saw one but the GM lineup in the early 70s was sublime, with beautiful graceful lines … so glorious that I didn’t want 1973 to come.”
Also at an early age, Philbet idolizes Knox, the older boy next door. At seven, Philbet begins a habit of hiding in a totaled-out 1973 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency that sits behind his house, skipping breakfast and his homework so he can watch Knox’s comings and goings in his GTO, even if it’s just “to see his hand pull the shifter into second gear as he rocketed off somewhere.”
Emotionally Satisfying
The first chapter serves as a prologue to the whole story, in which the fourteen-year-old Philbet has his first face-to-face meeting with Knox. Awed in the presence of his hero, Philbet overthinks his every word and struggles with the attraction he feels.
Yet Knox “didn’t look at me like I was a scared kid. He looked at me like I was a person, an equal.” Knox then reaches over to pick a cookie crumb off Philbet’s chin, puts it in his own mouth and asks if Philbet has more. Philbet hands him the last cookie from the baggy, Knox breaks it in half so they can share it, and their connection takes off.
The ending chapters of Red Clay Suzie are some of the most emotionally satisfying of the entire novel. Philbet turns out to be, in his grandaddy’s words “just about as perfect as any man can be.”
A Hopeful Ending
Approaching adulthood, Philbet recognizes his original family as “innocents … not equipped for life in the world beyond our small community.” Yet with his generosity of heart and mind, we have come to know him like we know ourselves, and we applaud as he finally leaves “a shell behind that no longer fit me, sort of like the cicadas that come out of the ground and start crawling up the pine trees … leaving their amber, translucent husks behind mid-climb.”
Lofton knows not to wrap things up neatly with a pretty bow, but what he leaves unsaid and what we know to be true is how Philbet is going to be a hero to those who know him and best of all, true to himself.
It is an ending to a hopeful story that makes us insist that the world in which Philbet is coming of age must be a more inclusive one than 1960s Georgia, if only because beautiful young men like him will make that change happen and deserve it for themselves.
About Jeffrey Dale Lofton:
Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known as the home of Roosevelt’s Little White House. He calls the nation’s capital home now and has for over three decades. During those early years, he spent many a night trodding the boards of the DC’s theaters and performing arts centers, including the Kennedy Center, Signature Theatre, Woolly Mammoth and Studio Theatre. He even scored a few television screen appearances, including a residuals-rich Super Bowl halftime commercial, which his accountant wisecracked “is the finest work of your career.”
Ultimately he stepped away from acting for other, more traditional work, including providing communications counsel to landscape architects and helping war veterans tell their stories to add richness and nuance to historical accounts. At the same time, he focused on pursuing post-graduate work, ultimately being awarded Master’s degrees in both Public Administration and Library and Information Science. Today, he is a senior advisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love books — in short, paradise.
