BY DEAN POLING • PHOTOS BY PAUL LEAVY
Knot sees a running man. Alarms sound. A bank robbed.
All of 12 years old, Knot’s a black youngster growing up in the segregated South of the 1960s. He’d been tossed away as a baby into a dumpster. He’s raised by a woman who might drink her meager earnings rather than buy food for their table. He’s given the name Knot denoting his physical appearance, a small kid in a big, rough world.
He sees the bag dropped by the running man. Knot opens the bag discovering stacks of hundred dollar bills. Thousands of dollars that could change Knot’s life ...
Janice Daugharty sets the scene early in her latest book, “The Little Known.” Knot’s not just a small kid in a big world, but a good kid in a hard world. Yes, Knot takes that money. He hopes to make a better life for himself than the one he finds in a Statenville shanty town.
Yet, he finds no way to help himself with the money. The hundred-dollar bills are too large; his caretaker too predictable in drinking the money away. Anonymously, Knot gives money to people in his neighborhood so they can change their lives. Instead, no one does what Knot thinks they should with the money. Their lives remain unimproved.
Knot must carry these burdens alone.
Janice Daugharty has carried this story with her for more than a dozen years. She read a newspaper story about a boy finding thousands of dollars. The storyteller in Daugharty let her imagination do the walking, wondering what would happen if a boy found so much money and no one knew he had it.
This is how the plots of novels are born, though the themes and moods of her idea changed as she worked on the story through the years.
Originally, Daugharty saw this story as a comedy, a humorous Southern tale told in the same manner as some of her earlier novels. She gave the story the tentative title “Sudden Money.” She would write and rewrite many changes as the tale evolved from a comedy into a spiritual study and the more serious plot revealed in “The Little Known.”
“This story is not as ironic as my other books,” Daugharty says. “I’m not trying anything funny underneath this book. ... But it is also typical me and what I write.”
The book isn’t preachy but does reflect the spiritualism of Daugharty’s deepening Christianity.
“The Little Known” is a book about change, about how it takes something more than money to transform lives.
•••
Writing transformed Janice Daugharty’s life.
Born Janice Staten to G.F. and Frances Staten, she grew up the second child of seven in Echols County. She began dating her future husband, Seward Daugharty, while both were in high school. She attended Valdosta State for a couple of years before dedicating herself to raising the Daugharty children.
Nearing 40, children grown, Janice Daugharty began writing, writing and more writing. She wrote short stories. She wrote novels. Even away from pencil and paper, typewriter then computer, she wrote sentences and stories in her head as she drove to the store or she and Seward traveled to a social function.
The writing bug had a hard hold on Daugharty, so she wrote and kept writing.
The story goes that author Joyce Carol Oates purchased one of Daugharty’s short stories. Oates then helped publish Daugharty’s short story collection, “Going Through the Change,” in 1994. Daugharty’s novel, “Dark of the Moon,” followed, leading to HarperCollins publishing the paperback edition then both hard cover and paperback editions of subsequent novels.
Daugharty dealt with poor folks, working people, set mostly in the small, fictional South Georgia town of Cornerville, a literary creation based on her native Statenville.
“Some people have told me, ‘Quit writing about poor people,’” Daugharty says. “I love to write about poor people and their trials. They are real to me.”
Throughout the 1990s, a national audience of readers were introduced to a wide range of poor, hard-working, often quirky, Southern characters from Daugharty’s pen in novels such as “Necessary Lies,” “Paw Paw Patch,” “Earl in the Yellow Shirt,” “Whistle” and “Like a Sister.”
Her next project departed from her stories of folks eking out a life in a contemporary South. She focused her attentions on an epic trilogy of historical novels based on South Georgia stories and her ancestors. The “Staten Bay” trilogy was a mammoth, and beautifully written, series of books. But publishers were not interested. They wanted more novels like “Paw Paw Patch” and the Pulitzer-nominated “Earl in the Yellow Shirt.”
Daugharty has admitted neither publishers nor literary agents knew what to make of “Staten Bay.” The first “Staten Bay” novel, “Just Doll,” was published. The last two books were never traditionally published, though Daugharty made them available on her Web site.
While she has been out of the national light for the past 10 years, Daugharty has continued to write and work in the Echols County residence she has shared with Seward for so many years. She served several years as writer-in-residence at Valdosta State University. She has made several new novels available through her Web site and through digital publishers. She had a series of short stories published through the South Georgia-based Snake Nation Press.
And she has been writing “The Little Known,” her first novel in a decade set for a Feb. 1 national release by Bell Bridge Books.
•••
“The Little Known” is a descriptive narrative. Daugharty still paints pictures with words, bringing characters, places, and cultures alive through strings of words describing colors, smells, sounds.
If she cannot find a word that evokes the given mood, she creates one that conveys just the right tone. If a full sentence clogs a scene’s pacing, Daugharty deconstructs the sentence into phrases to keep the rhythm snapping.
For “The Little Known,” she removes her characters from the fictionalized Statenville of Cornerville and places them in Statenville just along the highway from nearby Valdosta.
She also has no compunctions about being a white writer centering on a cast of predominantly African-American characters. In the past, she faced some criticism and controversy for writing “Whistle” in the voice of a black man. Daugharty contends that a novelist assumes to be every character in a book, white or black, young or old, male or female. A novelist should be able to assume the voice of any character as long as the writer is true to that voice.
In “The Little Known,” Daugharty stays true to her Southern voice, and she’s ready again for a national audience of readers.
