Louise Shivers, Conjurer of Rural South, Dies at 84

By MARGALIT FOX

Louise Shivers, author of “Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail,” a 1983 novella about the young and restless wife of a farmer. 

CreditMichael Holahan/The Augusta Chronicle

Louise Shivers, whose debut novella, “Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail” — a story of adultery and murder in the Depression-era South — surprised no one more than herself when it was published to wide critical acclaim when she was 53, died on Saturday in Evans, Ga. She was 84.

The cause was congestive heart failure, her daughter Beth Siciliano said.

Issued by Random House in 1983, Ms. Shivers’s book is set amid the tobacco fields of North Carolina in 1937. Its first-person narrator is Roxy Walston, the 20-year-old wife of a tobacco farmer and the mother of their 2-year-old child. Restless and unfulfilled, Roxy is, in her own words, “unstrung, unquieted, my heart like a grape stain with no wine made.”

When the hired hand Jack Ruffin arrives on the farm “as wiry and tight as a coiled bedspring,” he and Roxy begin a fevered affair; their liaison sets in motion a chain of events that culminates in a horrific act of violence. At story’s end, however, Roxy has attained the self-possession to begin to reclaim her life.

The novella’s publication precipitated what The Washington Post, in a 1983 profile of Ms. Shivers, called “one of the strangest success stories in American letters.”

Reviewing the book in The Post, Jonathan Yardley wrote, “It certainly is difficult to escape the conclusion that we have here the makings of a late-blooming Flannery O’Connor.” He added, “ ‘Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail’ is a breathtakingly accomplished piece of work that in no way betrays its author’s inexperience.”

Critics marveled at the economy with which Ms. Shivers was able to conjure a time, place and social milieu: The entire book spanned 136 pages.

The novella also drew rapturous reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and elsewhere; USA Today named it the best first novel of 1983.

“Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail” was adapted as the 1987 feature film “Summer Heat,” starring Lori Singer, Anthony Edwards and Kathy Bates.

Ms. Shivers’s only other novella, “A Whistling Woman,” published in 1993, also drew critical praise. Set in post-Civil War North Carolina and suffused with the folkloric timbre of ghost stories, it centers on a woman who yearns to forsake her staid husband for the dashing man who raped her years earlier.

The success of Ms. Shivers’s books, and her long career as a teacher of writing — she was for many years a writer in residence at what is now Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Ga. — is all the more noteworthy in that she did not begin writing in earnest until she was in her 40s. Even after that, she said, she did not conceive of herself as an author.

“I’m still just stunned,” Ms. Shivers told The Washington Post in 1983, several months after “Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail” was published. “Almost nobody believes me, but I didn’t write the book thinking I was gonna get it published.”

One of 10 children of a funeral director, Julia Louise Shingleton was born on Aug. 15, 1929, in Stantonsburg, a tobacco-farming town in eastern North Carolina, and reared nearby in Wilson. She studied briefly at Atlantic Christian College in Wilson and at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., but left before graduating to marry Quentin Shivers.

Before long, Ms. Shivers was living in Augusta with her husband and their three young children; during those years she worked in the record department of the local Sears. In the late 1960s, at her children’s urging, she enrolled in a local creative writing class.

In the early ’70s, Ms. Shivers began work on what would become “Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail.” In 1979 she entered the manuscript — then written in the third person — in a literary competition in Augusta. Her only ambition, she later said, was to snare the $50 first prize.

The competition was judged by the novelist Mary Gordon, and Ms. Gordon found much to admire in Ms. Shivers’s manuscript. She sent it to her own literary agent, who submitted to an editor at Random house. If Ms. Shivers would consider rewriting the novel in the first person, the editor said, Random House would give it serious consideration.

“That was back when Jimmy Carter was president,” Ms. Shivers told The Post in 1983. “And I kept thinking, ‘Ooh, it’s gonna sound like just Amy Carter asking her daddy about something,’ ” But she complied.

Besides her daughter Ms. Siciliano, Ms. Shivers is survived by her husband, whom she married in 1949; another daughter, Sherrill Cook; a son, Mark; three brothers, Hugh, Roddy and Foy Shingleton; and two grandchildren.

A resident of Augusta, Ms. Shivers also wrote “My Shining Hour,” a memoir of growing up in the South during World War II. It was issued last year by Dash Press, a small independent publisher in Georgia.

During the years she worked on “Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail,” Ms. Shivers had to contend with the incredulity of friends who were even more hard-pressed to imagine her as a novelist than she was herself.

“I’d tell them, ‘I really am a writer,’ ” Ms. Shivers said in the profile in The Post. “Still, most of the people I was around said, ‘Well, it must be a cookbook or a romance.’ ”

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