By Dean Poling
Some readers have already told Morris Smith they don’t really care for the main character of her new book, “Better Than Jail.”
That’s all right with her.
“I’m not big on writing likable characters,” Smith says. “I would rather write a flawed character than a likable character.”
Luckily, Oris’ flaws make him interesting, and he isn’t completely dislikeable. In his own peculiar way, the protagonist of “Better Than Jail” is likeable enough.
Oris Benton is a 70-year-old printer, once very successful but now facing the loss of his business in a changing world. Oris’ world is New Orleans. A veneer of arrogance has kept Oris from fully knowing his city. He’s been more comfortable putting on patrician airs seated atop his horse than getting to know the family and employees around him. He’s more comfortable believing his white beard makes him something of a re-incarnated Robert E. Lee rather than a member of a community.
Life had already given Oris some hard knocks: The loss of a close friend, the devastating loss of a favored grandson. On turning 70, Oris faces a series of trials which change his self comparisons from the grand Confederate general to the biblical Job.
Rather than face this series of calamities with the dignity of Lee at Appomattox or Job’s undying devotion to God, Oris descends into self-pity and depression.
That’s the essential story behind Morris Smith’s “Better Than Jail.” It may not sound like a comedy, but Smith’s first novel teems with comic elements. Though she didn’t create Oris to be likeable, even Smith admits the character has wit. He says funny things. But Smith also places Oris into funny situations, such as this once arrogant man wheedling his way into a Mardi Gras parade by bribing a child.
“You get the feeling that he’s lived the type of life that he’s due a big come-uppance,” Smith says, and that come-uppance is the hand she deals Oris.
Some readers have already asked her why she lets Oris go crazy, but he doesn’t really lose his mind. Oris loses his bearings. His world has changed. He not only doesn’t know where to stand in it, but how to stand in it.
“He’s not really crazy,” Smith says. “I see him as very upset and obsessive. But not crazy.”
She loosely based Oris on an acquaintance she knew living in New Orleans. Smith spent 14 years living in New Orleans, long enough to make the city come alive in “Better Than Jail” but not as long as it took to write this novel.
Morris Smith grew up in Valdosta, attending Valdosta High School. Teaching English and physical education, she taught in American public schools but also in U.S. Department of Defense schools in Italy, the Philippines, and Germany.
By middle age, she wanted something new in her life, a new field. She chose social work. She studied at Tulane and lived several years in New Orleans, before finding her way back home to Valdosta in 1990.
Moving from the uniform culture of Germany to the loose-knit society of New Orleans was not an easy transition, Smith says.
“Coming from Germany, New Orleans seemed like a mess and it was,” Smith says. “I didn’t like it at first.”
But the city grew on her. Smith stayed past her graduate studies at Tulane. She had never planned on staying in New Orleans. Smith admits she could have stayed longer than she did but felt a call to return to her South Georgia roots.
The book that would become “Better Than Jail” began in New Orleans.
Smith researched the behind-the-scene moments of Mardi Gras. She interviewed people and toured facilities to better understand the jails and homeless shelters which are key sites in the novel. And she wrote and wrote and wrote.
In more than 20 years, she wrote an innumerable number of drafts for “Better Than Jail.” She recalls a synopsis of an early draft of the novel attracting a New York agent.
The agent asked Smith to send the first few chapters. The agent returned these chapters with a note stating they weren’t written well enough for publication.
“He was right,” Smith says. She kept working on the novel and her writing.
During the past 20 years, “Better Than Jail” wasn’t Morris Smith’s only project.
She wrote numerous short stories, and published two short-story collections. Morris Smith’s “Spencer Road” is more than a dozen short stories capturing the lives of a Southern family from the 1930s to 1950s. The fictional Spencer family of a father, mother, son and two daughters live in an unnamed South Georgia town which could well be Valdosta of that same time period. Readers witness the Spencer children come of age as they deal with a large cast of the family’s help, friends, neighbors and extended family.
Through these short stories, Smith touches upon hunting, race relations, family relationships, the German POWs who could be found in South Georgia during World War II, love, loss, and more.
Though “Spencer Road” was published a decade ago, it is similar in format to Smith’s “Zambian Text: Stories from Ngambe Mission” released a few years ago. Both books are short-story collection with each story in each volume being strong enough on its own merits to stand alone. In both books, a reader could freely read a story here or there, like with most short-story collection, and still come away with some nugget of insight or a laugh. But it is advisable to read Morris Smith’s short-story collections from cover to cover, straight through, as one would read a novel.
Smith arranges her short stories in something akin to chronological order and, though a reader could pick and choose among these short stories, you will deny yourself the full impact of Smith’s story collections if you do. The stories are arranged like individual episodes of a series, but you need to experience each episode for the series to resonate.
Like “Better Than Jail’s” New Orleans, “Zambian Text” draws upon Smith’s experiences as a missionary in Africa in the 1990s. Many missionaries return from trips with tales of lives and souls saved. Smith’s stories are those of lives and cultures encountered. There are noble purposes behind both the missionaries and the Zambians here, but they are also motivated by human foibles.
She’s also been working on other books.
Valdosta-based publisher Snake Nation Press tentatively plans releasing Smith’s third short-story collection, “Above Ground: Cemetery Stories,” this fall. She has also been writing another novel based on the adventures of an overweight, lying 40-year-old woman.
“She’s not likeable, not likeable at all,” Morris Smith says of this new character, “but I think she is interesting.”
