 
Hank Williams having an affair that results in the birth of an illegitimate child. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, then you know this is not completely out of the realm of possibility. O’Connor and Williams were born within a year and a half of each other. They both grew up in the Deep South. And they both got around: Hank’s touring took him to juke joints all over Georgia — to Columbus, Macon, and possibly even to Milledgeville. So it could have happened. In fact, I would swear on a stack of Bibles that it did. I have seen Minton Sparks. And if she’s not the ghost child of the woman who wrote Wise Blood and the man who sang “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” then cotton doesn’t grow in a cotton field. I have a theory that the music we hear as we come of age imprints itself on our souls like no other. As a child in South Carolina, I saw Elvis at the Carolina Theater in downtown Spartanburg. At thirteen, I saw Little Stevie Wonder and Jackie Wilson at Spartanburg’s Memorial Auditorium. Two years later, I saw the Shirelles at the National Guard Armory in Sumter, and Loretta Lynn at Greenville’s Memorial Auditorium. James Brown and his Famous Flames, Ray Charles, Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs…I saw them all. These days, whenever anyone asks me to go out, I usually decline. If it’s not going to be a life-changing experience, I’d just as soon stay home. Maybe I’m jaded, I don’t know. Minton Sparks cuts through jaded like a stiletto. For the uninitiated, her weapon of choice is words. Her fans include singer John Prine and novelist Dorothy Allison, a South Carolina native, who writes, “Minton Sparks sounds like my momma, my Aunt Dot, my Aunt Grace, and even a bit like my Uncle Jack only better and wilder and heartbreakingly more powerful. If I could have heard poetry like this as a girl, I wouldn’t have had to waste all those years thinking we were dumb as dirt.” Sparks walks out on stage looking like some woman who took a wrong turn from a Ladies Auxiliary meeting in rural Tennessee circa 1950, clutching a bone pocketbook containing god-only-knows what. Mints? A change purse? A pearl-handled pistol? An empty tube of lipstick? A prescription for Valium? Who knows? Her only prop besides the pocketbook is versatile guitarist John Jackson (who played with Bob Dylan). It’s a nice touch, but you get the feeling she could carry it alone. The only thing she really needs are all those gut-wrenching Southern Gothic stories based on members of her family that swirl around inside her head. Seeing Minton Sparks perform live is like being in a room with a snake. It may or may not be poisonous, but it doesn’t matter. You’re not taking your eyes off the snake. She stands at the microphone with a faraway look, then squints out beyond the spotlight, drawing you into her world before she ever speaks a line: “Anybody here ever been in love with a Peeping Tom?” Her words come at you like a yin version of Big Daddy bellowing “I smell mendacity!” in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “They say lightning never strikes twice. At our house, White Lightning struck every night. A painful past will make you a walking target, like a lonely pine in an open field.” When Minton Sparks first wrote those words, I imagine ol’ Hank was smiling up there in Hillbilly Heaven. After all, only he — the man who created “The silence of a fallen star lights up a purple sky / And as I wonder where you are I’m so lonesome I could cry” — only he would truly understand where his darling illegitimate ghost child daughter was coming from. I ask Sparks what inspires her to write and perform her poems. “Well…” she says, “the answer to that changes a little each time I think about it. The stories I heard as a child often portrayed the women in my family as ‘utterly convincing domestic actresses’ — a description I love, but one I learned is not the case at all. “The breadth and depth of their will and spirit were quite different from what I was led to believe. So I gave myself the exercise to find the redemptive under-song in the events of their lives — imagining what these characters would tell somebody who would really listen, if they were standing in a space of freedom from real or imagined constrictions. “I also wanted my children to know who the hell they came from on my side of the family,” Sparks says, not joking. “That may seem odd, because the stories often tell a darkish side, but I think that’s the juicy side — the alive side.” “Like the old adage: ‘The Devil writes better songs,’” I say. “Exactly,” she says, laughing. Her DVD Open Casket features sixteen of Sparks’ best-known pieces, including “Aunt Shine’s Facelift” (“Ever since she was a child, Aunt Shine took real pains with her looks”); “Vickie Pickle’s Momma” (“If the heart won’t break, the mind will shatter it into a million pieces”); “Ambulance Chaser” (“Highway 50 fights us like a wet cat locked in a dollhouse”); and “Ghosted” (“You kind of lose something when your name ain’t called, when your face ain’t seen, your beauty gets buried… He’d made a ghost of her, staring straight through her at the TV, nursing Buds, acting in public like he didn’t know who on earth she was”). When Sparks speaks these lines, her voice is like music, like a river that carries you along. Along the way, Sparks has recorded several CDs — Middlin’ Sisters (2001), This Dress (2003), and Sin Sick (2005). She’s recorded with everybody from Maura O’Connell and Keb’ Mo’ to Waylon Jennings and Chris Thile (Nickel Creek). Her second book, a novella called White Lightning, is due out in May. Her first, Desperate Ransom: Setting Her Family Free, opens with “I sassed her, and in some ways, I’m still paying for it.” This is all great stuff, but seeing her live is the ticket. You can look at a picture of a snake, or see a video of one, but unless you’re in the same room with it, the hairs don’t stand up on the back of your neck. Like Elvis in ’56 or Jackie Wilson in ’62 or Loretta Lynn in ’64, seeing Minton Sparks in the flesh can be a mind-altering experience. So how does one explain talent like this? Where did Minton Sparks come from? The record books show she was born on February 27, 1962, at the Rutherford County Hospital in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. But if you look real closely at the birth certificate, you’ll see “Mother: Mary Flannery O’Connor.” And next to that, in faded, barely legible letters: “Father: Hiram King Williams.” |
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