When author Jarvis King set out to write about his 1970s childhood home of Petal, his original intention was to put together a short story documenting the Dixie Youth baseball championship game between his Southern National Bank team and their opponent Coca-Cola, which ended up seeing SNB taking down the Coca-Cola dynasty that had won three titles in a row.
But shortly after beginning that endeavor, King and his wife realized there was much more to the story than that – including Petal’s history and characters – and the project soon stretched out into a full-length novel, titled Petal: Revenge is Never Free, which hit shelves in June.
“The story grew, and the characters, and I thought, ‘well, this ain’t a short story any more,’” said King, who now lives in Bogue Chitto. “My wife said, ‘you ought to just make it a novel,’ and I thought that was pretty cool, so that’s what I did.
“The premise of the story – the plot line – has got true events in it, and most of the names in the book are real names.”
The story of Petal: Revenge is Never Free is set in 1975 and centers around 12-year-old Joe Ellis Keene and his friends – and others that are not so friendly at times. It opens with the boys discussing the story of a local police officer who claims to have seen – and chased – a UFO from Forrest County into neighboring Jones County.
The early stages of the book focus on Keene and his friends trying to get more information about that incident from the gossiping “old farts” who hang out at the Country Kitchen on Central Avenue; the story quickly enters into several other adventures in the summer of ’75. The main plot of the novel concerns Keene’s friend Petal – who is named after the city – and her abusive, alcoholic father Rand Watson.
When Keene finds out more about the treatment Petal endures at the hands of her father, he becomes determined to find a way to hold Rand accountable for that – hence the title of the book.
Along the way, Keene and his buddies come across several other adventures, including an overnight camping stay with a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine near a local cemetery, a snake-bitten dog, rumbles at Southern Lanes – otherwise known as Burkett’s bowling alley – and other coming-of-age events. Petal natives will likely recognize several of the locales highlighted in the novel, included the aforementioned bowling alley, Chappell Hill, the Crestview Hills neighborhood and the long-gone Country Kitchen.
While some of the characters, including Petal, are fictional, several are in fact real. Because of that, writing the story did strike some nerves for King.
“It was fun – it was a challenge, and it brought back some pretty rough memories for me while I was writing the book,” he said. “I stopped for quite a while and I wasn’t going to do it, and after the memories had kind of washed over me, I picked it back up and wrote it.”
King said he’d like readers of the book to come away with a sense of nostalgia, joy, and maybe even a couple of tears along the way.
“The title says it – revenge is never free, so it’s about forgiveness,” he said. “And humor – I want people to laugh and cry, and just relate to the characters and remember how things used to be for our generation.
“It’s not just Petal – any small town, especially in the Deep South, that was the way we grew up as kids. For people that aren’t that old, I’d like them to get a sense out of it that retribution and revenge isn’t worth it. Revenge is never free – it’s better to forgive than to hold grudges. We all have things that we can hold against people, but it doesn’t do any good.”
King’s family moved to Petal from Dallas, Texas, when he was in the third grade. He worked his way up through the Petal School District before graduating from Petal High School, which at the time was located at the present site of Petal Middle School.
“Petal was just a neat, southern town,” King said. “That’s all I ever knew – it was a good place to grow up.
“It was a tight-knight community back then.”
Petal: Revenge is Never Free is King’s third book, following No Road for Cowards in 2012 and Y’all Ain’t Gonna Believe This in 2019.
No Road for Cowards is a novel that follows the story of Matt Fleming and his journey through addiction, recovery and redemption amongst the apparent death of a young woman on Fleming’s 21st birthday.
Y’all Ain’t Gonna Believe This is a collection of short stories regarding hunting and the outdoors in Mississippi. The sometimes humorous stories stretch from Magnolia State locales including Lafayette County, Lamar County, Vicksburg and Philadelphia.
“It was a lot of fun to do, interviewing guys (from around the state),” King said. “Some of these guys are hilarious, so I thought it’d be pretty cool to write some of those stories down; I bet those guys would like that.
“I’ve got stories in there from 1949 to 2019. The story from 1949 was an elderly gentleman … he was 10 years old, and his daddy took him on a squirrel hunt for his birthday that morning, and they nearly burnt the Homochitto National Forest down.”
Petal: Revenge is Never Free is currently available at Beyond Blessed Gifts, 1229 Mississippi 42, Suite 150 in Petal. Contact the shop on its Facebook page or via email at savvysisters22@gmail.com.
