Each month, Georgia Writers Museum submits a book review to the Eatonton Messenger. These books are written by our monthly featured authors who participate in our legacy “Meet the Author” series. This series hosts different Georgia writers to speak about their book(s), and with many thanks to the tireless efforts of our volunteers, is a “Wow!” experience, as well. For example, in June, we are not simply reading “Crooked Truth,” we are experiencing the threat heard by many of Georgia’s mid-century rambunctious children: Central State Hospital, a.k.a. the Lunatic Asylum.
GWM volunteer and book reviewer Mary Ann Singleton received her psychiatric nursing training by living and working at Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, originally established in 1883 as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum. Mary Ann is a nurse who trained at Georgia Baptist College of Nursing in the late 1960s. While training, the nursing students lived in rooms in the Brantley Building of Central State Hospital, which also housed patients. The psychiatric patient care often included straitjackets, lobotomies, and electroshock therapy.
“I began reading Crooked Truth, by Kristine Anderson, because I thought it was a book abut Georgia’s Central State Hospital,” said Mary Ann. “In actuality, the book has more to do with the quite common threat used to intimidate misbehaving children during the 1940s and ’50s – ‘If you don’t behave, I’m going to send you to Milledgeville.’”
The story is about Lucas Webster, a young teenage boy, growing up in a small South Georgia cotton farming town called Crisscross in the late ’40s. Lucas’s mother and father were killed in an auto accident when he was three years old, and he is living with his Granny Lettie and PawPaw and their son, Robert. Uncle Robert has Down Syndrome, so even though he is ten years older than Lucas, he has become his constant and often unwanted companion.
PawPaw has an older son, Alvin Earl, by a prior marriage. Alvin Earl lives in town, not on the cotton farm, and when visiting the farm, torments Robert and Lucas. His favorite remark is threatening to send Robert to Maysville, or as he described it, the “loony bin,” and make Lucas leave school to work full-time in the cotton fields.
After an important portrayal of the many difficulties of daily experiences endured by the two boys in their clashes with Alvin Earl and his actions, there follows a not-unexpected ending which brings about the need for 15-year-old Lucas to feel it is necessary to “twist the truth.”
The “Meet the Author” event will be held at the Grove Event Center, 252 Swint Avenue, SE, in Milledgeville on June 11, 2022, at 10 a.m. Following the book talk, Visit Milledgeville arranged a Trolley tour of the Central State Hospital campus at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Tickets for the Crooked Truth book talk are $8 per person; $25 for the book talk and trolley tour. Space is limited, register online with Georgia Writers Museum or www. georgiawritersmsuem.org.
- Contributed