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Why Beulah Shot Her Pistol Inside the Baptist Church

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Why Beulah Shot her Pistol in the Baptist Church is a smartly written tale of a young Mississippi girl, Beulah Buchanan, raised in the Primitive Baptist Church. When she was only sixteen, she marries Ralph Rainey, a much older man who is a deacon in the church. Beulah has no feelings for Rainey, she hardly even knows him, but he talks sweet to her and tells her she is pretty and so she imagines that life with him would be far better than the one she knew with her oppressive parents. Beulah was mistaken. Ralph Rainey's idea of a wife turns out to be nothing short of slavery and for the next six years, Beulah works in her domineering husband's cafe all day and cooks him dinner at home every night. He doesn't touch her lovingly, but climbs on top of her once in a while for sex. Beulah longs for a gentle touch, and her loneliness leads her to an affair with the preacher. With this affair, everything begins to unravel.

Sullivan writes this story through Beulah's voice and he does an excellent job of showing us Beulah's good heart and potential without compromising the story's integrity. This novel has humor, some dark, which makes Beulah's life with Ralph Rainey that much more convincing. A poignant moment for Beulah is when her husband sets his old tired working mule on fire. The scene is disturbing, terrifying and yet, humorous too.

If you grew up in the rural south, you will appreciate the novel for its authenticity, sad as it may be. If you did not, it's as good as taking a trip into the life of a poor Mississippi girl.

The last chapters are unpredictable. The decisions Beulah makes in the last chapters are a bit puzzling perhaps to ensure an unpredictable final chapter, but in no way to did her decisions lessen her authenticity as a rural Mississippi girl in, as the author says, "a rural rut."

In digging around (www.claytonsullivan.com) I discovered that this is not Sullivan's first foray into fiction - see the Doubleday published Sweet Pilgrim. I read the interview of him in Southern Literary Review and was curious so bought a copy of Beulah and enjoyed it immensely. Be warned however, this is not a morality tale like Sweet Pilgrim...its pretty gritty stuff yet funny and sad all rolled into one.

Sullivan has a unique gift for capturing the essence of southern life in all its irony and with a healthy dose of cultural self-deprication that is obvious and intended.

This is not a "novelist novel"...its a story for folks who enjoy a good plain story without the complication or pretense of 'modernist fiction' and all its preconceived genre and construct...the best thing about this book is that it doesnt follow rules or a formula...it breaks them. Take a look at the Doubleday published Sweet Pilgrim to get a sense for the bright side to this author's work if you find this book a bit gritty for your taste - you wont be sorry.

The film rights to Beulah have apparently been optioned by a Hollywood movie studio and its being adapted into a screenplay now. Should be a great movie! They should get Charlize Theron to play Beulah....

Beulah was just 16 years old when a deacon in the Primitive Baptist Church stepped up behind her as she practiced Onward Christian Soldiers and whispered, "You sure can play the piano good." Too young to realize she was being conned, she up and married the old coot. But Beulah should have listened to her mother's advice. Her life with Ralph Rainey is nothing but misery and heartache. For six years Beulah suffers in silence, cooking perfect dinners, working without pay at Ralph's Place café, and never complaining. The story takes an unexpected turn when every morning after Ralph leaves, the preacher comes calling. As it turns out, Beulah knows a sinner when she sees one, even if she does enjoy the sinning. The gravy on the rice, so to speak, comes when Beulah cooks her heart out for the visiting revival preachers, only to be chastised by Ralph for running out of fried chicken. Beulah's had enough, and the rest is not hard to figure out. Read this first novel by retired University of Southern Mississippi philosophy and religion professor Clayton Sullivan for the southern Gothic humor and his depiction of the good folks of New Jerusalem, Mississippi. Just don't expect a surprise ending and watch out for Beulah's mouth. Although the voice of this young woman rings clear and occasionally very funny, you do wonder where a girl who's never been allowed to cut her hair, wear makeup, or even date learned to talk like a heathen. Beulah obviously wasn't listening in church.

Told in first-person by the Beulah of the title, this is a short novel that might have fared better as a long short story and from another point of view. The author is often unconvincing in writing as a woman, and Beulah's speech pattern, an exaggeration of the storytelling style typical of her rural Mississippi upbringing, relies on mind-numbing repetition of everything said and done.
The story: Beulah Buchanan is a backward, not particularly bright teenager who marries a man much older than she to get away from home. The loveless marriage lasts six long years during which Beulah is used and abused, exploited by both her tyrannical husband Ralph and their venal minister, Brother Ledbetter, a Primitive Baptist preacher fond of making house calls on church members whose husbands are away from home. Eventually the worm turns, and turns with a vengeance, but, owing mainly to the repetition, it seems a long time coming, and when it does the reader finds that Beulah, till now a sympathetic character, is even worse than her antagonists. She kills her husband, gets away with it, inherits his prosperous business, and lives happily ever after.
Though billed in dust-jacket notes as "a new take on the Southern Gothic tragedy" told in a "hilarious voice" evoking the comic novels of Clyde Edgerton and Mark Childress, the novel seems unsure whether to play for laughter or sympathy. No matter. Ultimately it forfeits both in invoking the reader's complicity in murder.
The novel also encourages us to think of this as a story of women's liberation, of "a young woman breaking free." And indeed the reader would like to rejoice when, in the novel's denouement, Beulah spills the beans in church on Brother Ledbetter, shoots out the lights at Ralph's funeral, tells the preacher and his congregation to put it where the sun don't shine, gets her hair cut for the very first time, buys a new outfit, starts wearing lipstick, buys herself a Cadillac, and adopts an up-yours attitude befitting the new woman she has become-except that now the reader's moral sense rebels. Murder doesn't sound like the road to freedom or liberation of any kind, and it definitely isn't funny.
The author, a professor emeritus of philosophy and comparative religion at the University of Southern Mississippi, has published other books, but this is his first novel. Thus he may be forgiven for not knowing, apparently, that novels are about the struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, and that the reader's sympathies should not be enlisted in championing the wrong side of that moral equation.