Barry Hannah’s Late Love Song to Mississippi: “Get Some Young”

By William Caverlee.
In devising his strange fictions, Mississippi’s Barry Hannah was nearer to a poet and musician than a prose writer, and his language inventions reached a peak in a 1996 short story, “Get Some Young,” from the collection, High Lonesome.
Hannah was born in 1942 in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Clinton not far from the state capital, Jackson. All three of these are located in central Mississippi along Interstate 20.
Today, travelers crisscross Mississippi on I-20 (east-west) and I-55 (north-south) with hardly a flicker of the dread and uneasiness that strangers once f...