In If I Had Two Wings, Randall Kenan (who died last month) revisits Tims Creek, N.C.--the setting for A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead--with bighearted stories about people of different races, sexualities and beliefs coexisting in this rural area. In "Ain't No Sunshine," Pastor Barden confesses to beating his wife's lover. Barden realizes just before the beating that "something vital left him as he exhaled and something terrible entered him as he inhaled. It was a transmogrification, a possession, a quicksilver change." The sheriff says, on hearing the story, "I reckon I won't get voted out of office for letting the matter lay where Jesus flung it."
The time frame shifts in the haunting, mystical "Mamiwata." Mandy, an enslaved girl escaping plantation owners, meets a mysterious, even darker, man standing in the river and "not exactly singing, more like humming, but in tune and to a rhythm foreign to her ears, yet familiar." "I am one of you," he tells her, and Mandy ultimately abandons her group and follows him, baptism-like, into the river and away.
Religion is part of life in Tims Creek, although many residents adhere to church teachings only when it's convenient to do so. Whether it's Presbyterian deacon Terrell wrestling with a phantom hog, or Ed Phelps taking a trip to New York City with the Baptists, where he ends up in Billy Idol's stage entourage, people in these stories are always surprising, forcing those around them to "recalibrate, rejigger, rethink the blueprints of the universe we each haul around in our heads." --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.