When I was about 12, my mama handed me a book and told me it was a good read.
Up until she turned 45, Mama was a voracious reader. Then, she decided books weren't good anymore. Her loss. Perhaps I should have handed her the same book she gave me when I was 12.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" was written by a lady from Alabama. She wrote about the things she knew and in a setting familiar to most Southerners.
Harper Lee wrote about hot evenings on a street in a small town when kids used to stay out after dark and tell stories around the porch's edge while the grownups shared gossip from their rocking chairs and swings on the veranda.
She wrote about conflict - the greatest conflict the South and, perhaps, the nation has known - race.
And she penned all this from a child's point of view.
The book has become a classic for adults and children.
There's another book, more recently published, that appears destined for the shelf reserved for classics, such as "To Kill a Mockingbird."
It's written by a man from Alabama, Watt Key.
Key was here last week, signing copies of his book at Turnrow Book Co. He spoke at Pillow Academy to an assembly in the afternoon and visited with readers and read a piece of "Moon Over Alabama" later that evening.
Except for his ties here, Key would be just another author rolling through here to sell a few books.
Yet, he's home folk, having family who own and once farmed Rack Rent Plantation near Minter City. Key spent the night in the cabin there after his book signing last week.
It's clear that Key has a tie to the land. He admits as much. His eyes light up as he talks about his characters in this, his first published novel.
"I've written nine," he said with a grin over a plastic cup of white wine. "This is the first book I've published."
It's that kind of honesty that will make "Moon Over Alabama" a classic for children and adults.
The book is about a boy who grows up in the woods with his dad. His dad dies, leaving this youth, 10-year-old Moon, to fend for himself.
But growing up in the woods with a survivalist father has taught Moon much more than survival. It's given him a will that most don't have - a will that folks tied to land and nature can understand.
Most interesting is Key's setting: the bottom land of the Noxubee River.
The Noxubee River begins in the Tombigbee Forest in Choctaw County, Mississippi. It rolls through Noxubee County on through Alabama and joins the Tombigbee River about two miles west of Gainesville.
That's known territory to Key. When he wasn't visiting his grandparents at Rack Rent, he was wandering those river bottoms in rural Alabama.
When I read about the Noxubee River, it made me think of when my family moved from Sidon over to Macon.
I was a little younger than Moon in the book, but I was filled with the same innocence and a bit on the wild side because of my grandfather's love for nature.
Mama tried to mold me into a Southern lady but the call of the outdoors - the cool of a thicket where a body could hide on a hot, humid day and still feel human - wore on my body more comfortably than scratchy slips and pinching patent leather shoes she had to offer indoors.
It's those type memories stirred by Key that'll draw adults to this book, much like Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."
It's the adventure that'll make "Moon over Alabama" a children's classic.
