'Minnow' review: Boy's quest a chilling, suspenseful tale

If memory serves, it was during the mid-1980s when Fran Smith, senior reporter for The Island Packet and my right hand, obtained a long-sought interview with J.E. "Ed" McTeer, who years earlier had retired as sheriff of Beaufort County after nearly 40 years.

McTeer, author of a memoir, "High Sheriff of the Lowcountry," was quite a character. He claimed to be skilled in witchcraft, which he said he took up to counter the influence of root (hoodoo) doctors among his constituents.

During the interview, McTeer gave Fran a small doll, fashioned from a wooden clothespin and wrapped in a yellowed, wrinkled paper on which had been scribbled a barely legible note.

He shared the curse, which he had found hanging near a cemetery, on one condition: That she never disclose the identity of the spell's intended victim, a woman. Among other misfortunes, the note asked that she be unlucky in love, contract a sexually transmitted disease and be assigned to the state's high-risk auto insurance pool.

A few days after the article appeared, a well-dressed woman came to newspaper. When Fran told her she wasn't at liberty to disclose the intended victim of the curse, the visitor asked, "Could you at least say whether it's me? All those things happened to me."

If root medicine, which arrived in South Carolina along with the slaves imported from West Africa, still affected people in recent times, one can only imagine the power witchdoctors wielded in the Gullah culture a century earlier.

How fitting that James E. McTeer II, grandson of the legendary lawman, should set his first novel in a time and place (called Newfort, S.C.) when cash-poor whites and even poorer blacks eked out a living in proximity to a sea that could be alternatively bountiful and foreboding.

Minnow, a young boy, sets out on a seemingly straightforward mission to fill a prescription for his dying father. A pharmacist tells Minnow that he doesn't have the required medicine but instead directs him to Dr. Crow, a local root doctor. Minnow finds Dr. Crow, but the old man will give him the medicine only if he can obtain dust from the grave of Sorry George, a notorious evil witchdoctor with great powers.

The boy's quest leads to a series of dangerous encounters, from gun-toting criminals to feral hogs and a plat-eye, a creature that lurks in swamps and is fearsome beyond description. Armed only with his wits and with a stray dog his only companion, Minnow must survive a series of life-threatening challenges on his heroic quest.

What makes McTeer's novel such an enjoyable read is that, in addition to non-stop suspense, he writes with vivid detail about an environment as ominous as it is beautiful, where each turn in the road or bend in the creek can lead to a breathtaking sunset over a marsh or water moccasins dropping from an oak tree.

Here's a passage about the devastation Minnow sees after he spends a harrowing night lashed to a tree during a hurricane, which likely was inspired by the 1893 storm in which more than 2,000 people drowned and thousands were left homeless along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia:

"He saw the leg and the arm first, just one leg and one arm protruding from the mud. They were shaking in sharp lightning movements, jerking up and down. Farther on another person was buried waist deep, clawing at the mud with one arm while the other hung limp, broken backward at the shoulder. That person was coughing up blood, too. Cries filled the air, weeping, moaning, gagging ..."

As the title suggests, "Minnow" is a small novel, featuring a hero slight in stature and young to boot, but make no mistake: This book isn't meant for children's story hour. It's a finely crafted, gripping tale that delights and haunts in equal measure.

Plumb, retired editor of The Herald in Rock Hill, S.C., was editor of The Island Packet from 1978-87.

This story was originally published April 26, 2015 at 8:22 PM with the headline "'Minnow' review: Boy's quest a chilling, suspenseful tale."